PETER HITCHENS: I am, for the first time, afraid for the future of freedom in my country

 

This is Peter Hitchens���s Mail on Sunday column

What if the days did not, after all, start to grow longer after Christmas? Well, yes, of course they will (won���t they?) but I feel a dark, oppressive foreboding which makes spring seem very far away. Why is this?

I sense that I and some others have now become the targets of a worrying wave of spite, censorship and intolerance, very like the McCarthyite frenzy in 1950s America which swept up all kinds of innocent people in what claimed to b...