 He cites warnings made by those who opposed the abolition of capital punishment, and claims that those warnings have largely proved to be correct.For Hitchens this is an example of the political elite working against the desires of the public.Hitchens's view is sustained, in the case of capital punishment, by the historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his history of what he calls the "White Heat" of the 1960s, using contemporaneous opinion poll data.