In person, Peter Hitchens is witty, charismatic and great company; on the page he is so maddeningly, offensively, reactionary that he makes my muscles clench and my eyes ache. In person, although he knows I am gay, he is never less than warm. Yet on the page, he says homosexuality is "not a good idea" and argues that promiscuous gay people should be deprioritised in the queue for Aids treatment.
A Brief History of Crime doesn't quite do what it says on the tin. This is no Foucauldian analysis of the shifting nature of crime (and some of its flaws derive from that fact). It is, rather, a history of policing, gun law and punishment. On all of these topics, Hitchens offers a consistent critique of Thatcherite, market-loving conservatism from the feudal right. In the US, he would be considered a "palaeoconservative", a pre-market right-winger who sees maintenance of the class order, Christian morality and Burkean stability as the main goals of conservatism.
His application of this philosophy here is, unlike his last book, The Abolition of Britain, predictable. He would like to see an end to the weak liberal notion that being locked up is, in itself, a sufficient punishment and a return to "sewing mailbags" and "hard labour" - the prison order that nearly killed Oscar Wilde and did finish off thousands of others. Similarly, now that the police are "abandoning" law-abiding citizens, the "ancient liberty" held by Englishmen to carry guns should be restored so they can protect themselves from braying hordes of criminals.
And so on, with the odd, random prejudice tossed into the mix. He decries, among other trends, the prevalence of female police officers; the vegetarian option in prison meals; the adoption of police radios and computers; and the decision to stop forcing prisoners to wear "arrow-lined" uniforms.
The key flaw here is that we do not live in the liberal utopia he describes. Where is the "elite state" that he imagines is "imposing" wacky leftist solutions on Britain? In the Home Office of Widdecombe, Howard, Straw or Blunkett? He persistently blames Roy Jenkins as though the liberalising approach he favoured still held sway, or had indeed ever been the sustained view of British governments.
Hitchens damns liberal policies that simply do not exist. He says that the so-called harm reduction approach to drugs, which concentrates on rehabilitating users, has failed. "Drug treatment centres sprang up everywhere", and they didn't work. If only they had: Home Office figures show that in the whole country, there are merely 100 rehab places available for recovering heroin addicts. So we haven't tried real harm reduction in this country. He says that attempts to educate prisoners in order to achieve proper rehabilitation have been tried and failed; yet most prisoners glimpse a teacher once a week, if at all. The problems for which he persistently criticises liberals are most often, in reality, the product of precisely the "tough" stance he wants to see intensified. Drug addiction, drug-related crime and drug-related deaths have grown exponentially not during a period of "permissiveness", but during an era of exactly the strict prohibition that Hitchens lauds. Far from speaking controversial truths, as he imagines, Hitchens is in fact writing what, depressingly, it is all too easy to imagine David Blunkett nodding along to.
Nor is his vision of an ideal society - which alternates between the Victorian era, the 1930s and the 1950s - appealing. Hitchens repeatedly talks about the importance of unrecorded crime in Blair's Britain. Yet he refuses to acknowledge that, in his own idealised past, domestic violence, rape and child abuse went virtually unrecorded. The "peace" he imagines to have prevailed at those times was built on an awful lot of muffled suffering. A Brief History of Crime reveals that, despite its author's rhetorical skills, the case for "crackdowns" on crime is intellectually very weak.
Johann Hari is a columnist on the Independent
