- Hitchens, Peter. The Abolition of Liberty. London:
Atlantic Books, [2003] 2004. ISBN 1-84354-149-1.
- This is a revised edition
of the hardcover published in 2003 as A Brief History of Crime. Unlike
the police of most other countries (including most of the U.S.),
since the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, police in
England and Wales focused primarily on the prevention of crime through
a regular, visible presence and constant contact with the community,
as opposed to responding after the commission of a crime to investigate
and apprehend those responsible. Certainly, detection was among the
missions of the police, but crime was viewed as a failure of policing,
not an inevitable circumstance to which one could only react. Hitchens
argues that it is this approach which, for more than a century, made
these lands among the safest, civil, and free on Earth, with police
integrated in the society as uniformed citizens, not a privileged
arm of the state set above the people. Starting in the 1960s, all of
this began to change, motivated by a mix of utopian visions and the
hope of cutting costs. The bobby on the beat was replaced by police
in squad cars with sirens and flashing lights, inevitably arriving
after a crime was committed and able to do little more than comfort
the victims and report yet another crime unlikely to be solved.
Predictably, crime in Britain exploded to the upside, with far more
police and police spending per capita than before the “reforms” unable
to even reduce its rate of growth. The response of the government
elite has not been to return to preventive policing, but rather to
progressively infringe the fundamental liberties of citizens, trending
toward the third world model of a police state with high crime.
None of this would have surprised Hayek, who foresaw it all The Road to Serfdom
(May 2002). Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom (September 2002) provides a view from the streets
surrendered to savagery, and the prisons and hospitals occupied by the
perpetrators and their victims. In this edition, Hitchens deleted two
chapters from the hardcover which questioned Britain's abolition of
capital punishment and fanatic program of victim disarmament (“gun
control”). He did so “with some sadness” because “the only way to
affect politics in this country is to influence the left”, and these
issues are “articles of faith with the modern left”. As “People do not
like to be made to think about their faith”, he felt the case better
put by their exclusion. I have cited these quotes from pp. xi–xii
of the Preface without ellipses but, I believe, fairly.
May 2004 