page_title: The Broken Compass
section_title: Part I: The New Permanent Government of Britain
hierarchical_section_title: The Broken Compass / Synopsis / Part I: The New Permanent Government of Britain
caption_attribution_description: U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown at the Commonwealth Finance Ministers Press Conference
context_page_description: The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book by British writer Peter Hitchens, published in May 2009. Polemical and partly autobiographical, the book contends that the British political right and left no longer hold firm, adversarial beliefs, but vie for position in the centre, while at the same time overseeing a general decline in British society.
  Hitchens depicts the right in particular as a confused and spent political force that has supposedly been subsumed by the centre-left, particularly Fabian social democracy. As a result of these factors, he suggests that "there is no longer any debate between the political parties about issues that have divided thinkers down the ages, and divide the population even now". Hitchens concludes that, since the compass is broken, the time has come in British politics for the re-establishment of a proper adversarial system and for principles to be rediscovered.
  In the media, The Broken Compass received mostly negative reviews from left-leaning outlets and some other newspapers, and was largely ignored by the conservative press.
context_section_description: 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". The author cites contemporary examples of the media attacking Gordon Brown and the expected win of the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election. 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. 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". The author invokes the closing image of George Orwell's Animal Farm to illustrate how close the two parties have become. 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".
caption: In The Broken Compass Hitchens criticises the media's portrayal of Gordon Brown.
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