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The Broken Compass

The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way
Broken Compass cover .jpg
Author Peter Hitchens
Country United Kingdom
Subject British politics
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Publication date
11 May 2009
Pages 236
ISBN
OCLC 288986269
LC Class JN238 .H58 2009
Preceded by A Brief History of Crime

The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book by British traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, published in May 2009. Polemical and partly autobiographical, the book contends that the British political right and left no longer hold firm, adversarial beliefs, but vie for position in the centre, while at the same time overseeing a general decline in British society.

Hitchens depicts the right in particular as a confused and spent political force that has been subsumed by the centre-left, itself a product of Fabian social democracy. As a result of these factors, "there is no longer any debate between the political parties about issues that have divided thinkers down the ages, and divide the population even now". Hitchens concludes that, since the compass is broken, the time has come in British politics for the re-establishment of a proper adversarial system and for principles to be rediscovered.

In the media, The Broken Compass received mostly negative reviews from left-wing newspapers, and was largely ignored by the conservative press. It was reissued as The Cameron Delusion in March 2010, two months before David Cameron was sworn in as Britain's Prime Minister.

Hitchens sets out his stall in the preface "The Lost Frontier", stating: "conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. By the time it has become conventional, it has ceased to be wisdom and become cant. Its smug cousin, received opinion, is just as bad. The aim of this book is to defy these two enemies of thought and reason", and "conventional wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right". In a column written before the book's publication, Hitchens also explored themes contained in The Broken Compass, and wrote "The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, and their traditional voters taken for granted".


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