This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why does our new power elite hate lifelong marriage so much? Why does the legal arm of that elite, the Supreme Court, hand out what is left of the privileges of marriage to those who won’t get married, as it did with the widowed parents’ allowance on Thursday?

Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking.

They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.

Our modern upper crust hate marriage because it is a fortress of private life. They hate it above all because they can’t control it, because it is the place where the next generation learn how to be distinct, thinking individuals instead of conformist robots.

It is where they discover the truth about the past, the lore of the tribe, the traditions and beliefs that make us who we are. It is where they become capable of being free.

But our new rulers don’t want that. They don’t want fully formed people who know who they are and where they come from. They want obedient, placid consumers, slumped open-mouthed in front of screens, drugged into flaccid apathy (legally or illegally, the Government don’t care which), slaving all hours in the dreary low-wage, high-tax economy they are so busily creating.

Much better if they’ve never heard of the great golden drama of our national history and literature, so they don’t know what they’re missing and don’t care.

They would prefer the young to be brought up in a sort of moral car park, knowing nothing except what they are told by authority and the advertising industry. In this brave new world, sex is a spectacle and a sport, solemn oaths are worthless, and duty is a joke.

In this, they are much like the Soviet Communists, who deliberately made divorce as easy as crossing the road, and made absolutely sure that hardly any parents could afford to stay at home to raise their own children.

They have not yet gone quite as far as them – Soviet children were encouraged to worship, as a martyr, a semi-mythical figure called Pavlik Morozov, who was supposedly killed by his grandfather after informing on his own parents to the secret police. Russian friends of mine brought up in this vicious cult shuddered at the memory. But if you look carefully, you will see a ghostly shadow of this culture of denunciation growing up in our midst. And, as we forget all our long history of freedom and justice, it will become easier for such things to happen.

After all, we have long been used to the sight, on TV, of police officers smashing down front doors, or conducting dawn raids – and of being expected to approve of it.

An Englishman’s home is not his castle. And his life is not his own. That is what all this means, and will mean.

Amid the grunts and the creaking of bedsprings, and the pompous phrases of the judges, listen hard and you can hear them weaving Britain’s winding sheet.

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Kitty's dangerous sign of the times

I am sure Lady Kitty Spencer simply cannot have been aware that the necklace in which she poses is designed to resemble marijuana leaves, or why it matters.

The leaves are one of the favourite emblems of the huge, billionaire-backed covert campaign to make this dangerous hard drug acceptable. Quite possibly, she does not know of the alarming and ever-growing evidence that the use of marijuana is correlated with incurable mental illness and severe violence. Surely, nobody who grasps this can want to help in any way in any campaign to make this terrible, life-ruining drug even more available than it already is?

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The Concrete Party's desecration of beauty

A gloomy, grey shadow now falls across what has until now been an unspoiled part of our beautiful country.

I have often bicycled across the quiet counties that lie between Oxford and Cambridge, and found great peace there. It is the intensely English countryside through which John Bunyan tramped as he imagined his great book The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its Celestial City and its Delectable Mountains.

They soon won’t be delectable any more. Our Government, which seems to have sold its soul to the developers, is on the brink of ordering the building there of something called the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, another hideous stripe of concrete which will tear up trees and scar hills, and create a long, wide corridor of noise, stink and light pollution.

Everyone knows that such roads solve nothing, and simply attract more traffic. But they will make billions for the builders of box homes in ugly, bare estates alongside the new road.

Yet the decision already seems to have been taken. Did anyone who voted for this Government think they were voting for the desecration of English beauty? The ‘Conservative’ Party should be forced to change its name to the Concrete Party.

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I must just mention that David Katz, the most recent rampage killer in the USA, was taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’. I do so because nobody else is making this connection. Almost all such killers have been taking one of three types of mind-altering drugs – SSRIs, steroids and marijuana. Why don’t we care?

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I am always tickled by the cultural cringes broadcasters and others make towards certain countries. The worst is the grovelling way we call Peking ‘Beijing’, because it pleases the Chinese despots whom we fear so much.

Logically, if we had to call all foreign places by the names they use themselves, we’d need to call Dublin ‘Baile atha Cliath’ and refer to Moscow as ‘Moskva’. But we don’t. It’s oddly selective, and has something to do with political correctness. So when everyone thought Aung San Suu Kyi was a modern saint we started to call Burma ‘Myanmar’ and Rangoon ‘Yangon’. Now she turns out not to be so nice, can we please go back to ‘Burma’ and ‘Rangoon’?

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The scene of the worst and most shameless racial violence yet seen in modern Germany was the city now known as Chemnitz. Interesting to record that until very recently it was known as Karl Marx City. It’s in the former Marxist east that most of the worst trouble has happened. But 40 years of rigid communism doesn’t seem to have bred tolerance. The Left aren’t as anti-racist as they think they are.

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Where does the border lie between fiction and fact? The head of MI5, in the BBC’s new thriller Bodyguard, is called Stephen Hunter-Dunn. Can he be related to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, ‘burnished and furnished by Aldershot sun’, the heroine of John Betjeman’s poem about love and tennis? Well, no he can’t because Joan Hunter Dunn (who I thought was invented by the poet) was a real person, a doctor’s daughter who laughed when Betjeman showed her what he had written. Not MI5 material, I think.

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