Rob Blackhurst

Global Thinking - the Foreign Policy Centre Newsletter

Summer 2001

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Since his early death from tuberculosis nearly fifty years ago, George Orwell has become an archetype, a universal symbol of the fight against totalitarianism and political cant. The new edition, Orwell and Politics, places him back where he belongs – in the murky politics of England in the thirties and forties. Those celebrated essays are buried between anxious letters to friends, book reviews for long-extinct left wing journals and snatches of personal diaries. The book is replete with period detail: constructing the Anderson Shelters and complaining about the National Loaf, digging for Britain and fitting the gas-mask.

A more cussed Orwell emerges from the one appropriated by the Left (as the master chronicler of urban poverty) and the Right (as a Cold War Warrior). He is ever alive to an awkward truth, a complex question or an unpalatable political choice. Even those who share his beliefs on the evils of Empire or the failures of capitalism are excoriated for failing to see the consequences of their radical solutions. Though he passionately wants Britain to shed its Empire, he acknowledges that a retreat would leave India "incapable of feeding itself", vulnerable to invasion from Japan and cost British jobs. Glib voices on the left who argue that an independent India would quickly become prosperous and create a vast-market for British shoe-makers are also slapped down – in Orwell's world there are no pain-free choices between money and morality.

His England is a "blimpocracy" in which the products of public schools dominate all positions of authority. Talent that could make a real difference is elbowed aside by placemen who are "quite incapable of leading us to victory". But if Conservatism makes him angry, the "Pansy Left" leaves him apoplectic. He sees most socialists as effete and self-indulgent: "frivolous people who have never been shoved up against much reality" – particularly after so many had denied the horrors of Stalinism.

But he also sees the Left's analysis as hopelessly simple-minded. The subtle and quirky gradations of the English class system mock their attempts to lump the world into "bourgeois" and "proletariat" categories. This was not only inaccurate, it was politically suicidal. Their constant baiting of the middle-classes prevented the creation of a powerful political movement. And the patriotism that ran "like a connecting thread" through Britain had no place in their worldview. When railing against imperialism he refused to ignore inconvenient facts. Though Indian Justice is a "huge machine to protect British interests" he acknowledges the "high traditions" and fair-mindedness of the Indian Civil Service. The Police may occasionally harass those selling the Daily Worker in Hyde Park, but those who argue that they are no different from the Gestapo are for him ridiculous. Temperamentally, Orwell was unsuited to the kind of philistinism that would denounce Eliot and Joyce as "bourgeois" whist celebrating the mind-numbing tracts from the Left Book Club.

Some of this volume feels like sifting through yellowing newspapers, too pre-occupied with old debates to be of interest to casual readers. Those essays which remain deservedly re-read show his journalist's eye for the memorable image that gives a cause moral force. In "A Hanging" he describes a condemned man stepping aside to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows. Nothing better describes the wrongness and incomprehensibility of cutting a life short in full tide

Orwell is at his weakest when he tries his hand as a soothsayer. During the late thirties he is suspicious of the Khaki wearing left who want a confrontation with the fascists. He is still looking for signs of a mass anti-war movement in 1938. During the early war years he predicts Britain is "bound to be defeated" without a socialist revolution. At times, he echoes the Communist line that a European war is an imperialist sham to "extend and maintain our possessions" at the expense of the working classes. Later, when he produces a list of grandees who cosied up to Mussolini, his excoriation can only seem sanctimonious.

It has become a kind of pointless literary parlour game to guess what Orwell would think of modern Britain. We can guess at a few answers. He would be relieved to find a more meritocratic, footloose society where birth counts for far less. But his belief in a kind of folk-wisdom, the decency and respectability of the majority might have taken a battering. He hated the fripperies of the rich, so how would he respond to our age of consumer abundance? Whatever his radical politics, his views on personal morality were orthodox. How would he react to a saltier, more hedonistic world of all day drinking and sexual liberation?

Doubtless he would still be taking on euphemism and evasion wherever he found it. Instead of the language of Marxism, it might be the language of Therapy that earned his scorn. The kind of platitudes that Sinn Fein spokesmen specialise in – a mixture of sociology, managerialism and menace – would be marked out for special attention. Similarly, South West Trains, who prefer to apologise for "any inconvenience the delayed service may have caused to you", rather than say sorry, would be a prime target. One thing is certain – no one would be safe – especially those most secure in their own righteousness.