Peter Hitchens is Very Good on the Shutdown

Hitchens is really at his best here, in an interview with Brendan O’Neill from Spiked. 

He points out how all of our institutions simply shut down in the face of Coronavirus, rather than springing into action. Parliament is effectively suspended. Police act at the direction of Boris Johnson directly, instead of executing laws passed by the House of Commons. Academia went home. Civil society is shut down. A riverside pub near Hitchens’s home has its outdoor patio taped off by authorities. Citizens accept all this without complaint; in fact they cheer it.

Bobbies once did not not carry guns, an Englishman’s home was his castle, and Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park epitomized robust respect for speech. No more.

The Abolition of Britian indeed.

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4:21 pm on April 3, 2020