The Broken Compass

In The Broken Compass Hitchens criticises the media's portrayal of Gordon Brown.

In Chapter 1, "Guy Fawkes Gets a Blackberry", Hitchens claims that opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion and not measuring it, and that political parties and newspapers are responsible for this manipulation, whose purpose is to "bring about the thing it claims is already happening".[3] The author cites contemporary examples of the media attacking Gordon Brown and the expected win of the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election.[4] Hitchens begins Chapter 2, "The Power of Lunch", by asserting, based on his time as a reporter at Westminster, that political journalists are uninterested in serious political debate; propagate received centre-left standpoints on issues; and consult with each other and politicians about media stories. Chapter 3, "Time for a Change", describes how a media reporting bias is attempting to facilitate a Tory general election win. Hitchens states one of his motivations in writing the book was to frustrate this exercise.[5] Hitchens claims in Chapter 4, "Fear of Finding Something Worse", that Labour has reached "the most significant moment in its history – the complete acceptance of its programme by the Conservatives".[6] The author invokes the closing image of George Orwell's Animal Farm to illustrate how close the two parties have become.[7] Chapter 5, "The Great Landslide", discusses how a number of left-leaning writers and newspapers have allegedly begun describing the Conservatives in favourable terms, and how this no longer constituted "a form of treason".[8]

Chapter 6, "Riding the Prague Tram", describes Hitchens's experience of travelling in Communist Bloc countries before the fall of the Soviet Union and how this, combined with the behaviour of certain left-wing organisations in the UK, led to his becoming disillusioned with the British Left. He also carries out a lengthy critique of the Western Left's apologist stance towards Soviet Communism, including views held by Fabian Society members Beatrice and Maurice Webb; the attempt to exonerate and romanticise Lenin and Trotsky;[9] and intellectual resistance to the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest. In Chapter 7, "A Fire Burning Under Water", Hitchens describes the final stage in his becoming disenchanted with the British Left – the British Trades Union Congress's (TUC) alleged failure to support the Gdańsk shipyard workers challenging the Soviet-aligned government.

Chapter 8, "Racism, Sexism and Homophobia", examines how the modern ideology of race and the term racist differ from the previous concept of "racialism", and how the sexual revolution represents "seeking the existing order's permission to pursue pleasure at all costs",[10] which undermines Christian principles of marriage, and has its roots in events in 1968.[11] In Chapter 9, "Sexism is Rational", Hitchens states that the Left's taking up feminist causes since the 1960s has led to the damage and exploitation of women,[12] as well as a decline in marriage. Hitchens says this process is part of revolutionaries' seeking to "destroy and expunge the restraints placed on human selfishness by the Christian religion. The permanent married family is the greatest single obstacle to this".[13] Hitchens concludes that in Britain there is an emerging citizenry "prepared for enslavement, ignorant of its origins, past, rights, traditions, and duties"[14] and that "only in a wholly broken political system could there be such a need for reform, and no reformers ready to address it".[14]

In Chapter 10, "Equality or Tolerance", Hitchens examines how the Left have since the 1960s taken up the cause of equal rights for homosexuals. Hitchens claims supporters of Leo Abse's 1967 law reform on homosexuality are now accused of intolerance if they do not support homosexual civil partnerships or discrimination on the grounds of homosexuality. Hitchens concludes by stating, "the atrophy of religion and patriotism in the Labour party, like the atrophy of the same things in the Tory Party, is the deep problem beneath all others".[15] Chapter 11, "The Fall of the Meritocracy", examines falling standards in British education. Hitchens cites the abolition of grammar schools as one of the main causes, which has also resulted in a decline in social mobility. Hitchens claims egalitarians deny these consequences and that comprehensive education has failed. Hitchens also quotes a 2000 study,[16] which asserted that "the general lowering of standards and rigour since the end of selection is one of the main reasons behind the current drive to devalue examinations".[17] Hitchens asks why, "the educated, conscious servants of the state should seek to pretend that educational standards are rising when the opposite is true. The answer is that they have put equality before education".[18] Chapter 12, "'The age of the train'", outlines how the Conservative and Labour parties facilitated the dismantling of much of Britain's rail network. Hitchens asserts this is evidence that the "Tory Party does not love Britain, any more than the Labour Party loves the poor".[19] The chapter also provides a conservative argument against mass car ownership, saying that "roads destroy and distort established ways of living", while "the traditional English town, with its defined centre, ancient street pattern and comfortable shape, was not destroyed by the coming of the railway. It was enhanced".[20] In Chapter 13, "A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus", Hitchens explores how since the 2001 September 11 attacks and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, certain commentators on the left realigned with an American neoconservative position, which, "delivers him [the leftist commentator] to another portion of the 'centre ground', one where foreign policy is the only thing worth discussing, and where former conservatives and former Leftists can mingle in happy communion",[21] and allows "political conservatism to soothe its tribal base by appearing strong overseas, while failing to be anything of the kind at home".[22]

Hitchens asserts that political mismanagement, facilitated by an abandonment of the adversarial system, has resulted in an overall decline in British society. He identifies the end of the Cold War (which "made many of the old political positions meaningless overnight"[23]) as one cause of this, as well as the implementation of the ideas of Fabian social democracy and the ideology of the 1960s.