Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 354

I made a mistake

And wish to correct it as quickly as possible. I said during the radio debate with Adam Rutherford (linked here) that an abortion had never been shown on prime time terrestrial British TV. I was wrong. An abortion was shown on a Channel Four programme called 'My Foetus' in April 2004.

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On Bias in the Publishing Industry

Mr 'Un' (the contributor formerly known as 'Thinking') is among those who jeer at my contention that the publishing industry, bookshops etc are in general biased against conservative writers in this country. I think this is much less true in the USA, for reasons I'll go into.

As a change from some of the other topics that engage us, I thought I would explain why I think this is so. And I shall do so by describing what happened to me when I first became an author.

I was urged by a friend in...

The ADHD Fantasy - posted once more

Here is my original post on the ADHD fantasy, reproduced in its entirety:

From time to time I point out that the complaint known as 'Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder' does not actually exist. Invariably, I then receive a wave of letters and e-mails from parents of children who have been 'diagnosed' as suffering from 'ADHD'. These letters are all remarkably similar, and many of them are bitterly personally abusive.
In this entry, I shall take, piece by piece, such a letter, and seek to...

Scum: Yes, it's a nasty word but Britain's a nasty place

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

When is it all right to call anybody 'scum'? For those of us who still try not to swear, it is quite a strong word, but in an age when another much nastier s-word is allowed in Parliament, the expression 'scum' is hardly shocking.

So when Austin Malloy, a Blackburn magistrate, used 'scum' in court to describe two youths who had done disgusting things in a church, nobody can really have been upset.

The pair scribbled racialist and sexually...

Smelly Little Orthodoxies

I'll respond to general comments, and perhaps expand on my decision to forbid this site to Mike Barnes, later in the week.

In the meantime, I'd like to indulge myself and post a few mildly controversial thoughts on the Orwell Prize for Journalism, which I am proud to say I won last week. This was the one prize I had always wanted, as someone who has steeped himself in Orwell since the age of 15 and regards him as the pattern of honest writing. Because Orwell was of the Left (though a very...

Out of the Past

What is it about steam locomotives? Is it just my generation and the ones before, or does the curious magic of these things affect the young as well? Twice in the past few months I've been at railway stations when proper mainline steam specials have unexpectedly passed through, as opposed to those unsatisfactory, twiddly little branch lines where you can spend a bank-holiday afternoon watching some old shunter mocked up as Thomas the Tank Engine pottering along a few yards of track.

One was...