'Hell was abolished around the same time that abortion was legalized and the death penalty was done away with. It would not be surprising to peer into an old Hansard from the middle 1960s and find that the House of Commons had quietly passed the Infernal Regions (Closure) Act one unseasonably hot Friday afternoon when the Scottish MPs were all away. A beaming Roy Jenkins would have found parliamentary time for it, as part of his efforts to make Britain a more "civilized" society. Like so many similar reforms, making Satan redundant was or appeared to be a change whose time had come. After all, nobody went to Hell any more, did they?'
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p.107.
