The Vilified Peter Hitchens Once Again Speaks With Moral Clarity

Perhaps moral clarity is what makes him a target?


In any case, a good example from today's column:

To avoid false accusations of ‘racism’ from the Thought Police, I have to make the following statement of the blindingly obvious: I think Liam Stacey, who made nasty comments about the collapse of a footballer, is a callous, foul-mouthed, drink-sodden moron. Is that clear?
Can I now go on to say that I don’t think much of a criminal justice system that sends him to prison for expressing his ‘views’ on the internet. The same system repeatedly leaves at liberty violent thieves and louts.

For example, Kazeem Kolawole, one of the gang who ruined the life of Thusha Kamaleswaran – the six-year-old girl shot in a shop in London – was free to do this evil only because he had been spared prison after  beating up a schoolgirl, and was on bail (of course) for carrying a knife. Now, if only Kolawole had made a racist remark he would have been safely locked up.

How many different things are wrong with  a country in which a little girl’s happy life is transformed in an instant into misery by a bullet flying through a suburban shop? How many of them are we even allowed to discuss in public without being howled down? Thusha’s ordeal has only just begun. As long as we have the sort of Government we now have, there will be more of these horrors.

Hitchens refuses to act the partisan, this party or that, because he knows that the issue before the West is not some disagreement on approach regarding governance of free society, but the survival of the idea of free society. He correctly sees that many in positions of leadership in the culture are morally blind and historically ignorant. He knows what awaits us, should we continue this course.

The quote taken from his column today is found at the very end. The truly sobering words precede it, as he makes his observations about Peter Cruddas' charming practice of selling access to power for cold hard cash.