Hello members all and welcome to my George Orwell trilogy in two parts, part the second, 1938-1950. Last time we went from birth in 1903 in India, his return to England and Henley on Thames, through George’s school days, his sense of being an outsider as a scholarship boy at Eton, and his years of direct experience of Poverty, Imperialism and communism. We’ve seen his steady accumulation of ideas through experience, and his hatred of exploitation of any kind. This led to him discovering a cause, a belief in the freedom of individuals, and that a better future lay in the hands of a working class from a sense of justice, but also because of their strong sense of place, patriotism and community. He’s developed his style, and shown his passion for writing and grim determination to succeed – because he wasn’t a natural; ‘cow with musket’ was the early judgement of his peers. But he worked at it, and found and his voice, based on a firm belief that simple and direct language is paramount. Not only for practical reasons of communication, but from a belief that complex language is used to confuse, and obscure the truth, to coerce and control other people. And we have arrived at 1938, and the eve of the Second world war. How would an anti capitalist and anti-imperialist respond?
Orwell’s initial attitude as the threat of war approached was that of the small radical organisation, the Independent Labour Party, the ILP, not to be confused with the Parliamentary Labour party
To fight Fascism on behalf of democracy is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second, which is likely to turn into the first at any moment.
OK, so not in favour of his country’s cause then I think it’s fair to say.
In 1939, he published Coming Up for Air, a novel about a semi autobiographical hero, an anti fascist who rejects war. But Orwell’s wife Eileen looked at this with some scepticism, and her view was sharper and more acute
Eric, who retains an extraordinary political simplicity in spite of everything, wants to hear what he calls the voice of the people. He thinks this might stop a war, but I’m sure that the voice would also say that it didn’t want a war, but of course would have to fight if the government declared war
Up to the last minute Orwell was still declaring that
Every increase in the strength of the military machine means more power for the forces of reaction
In April 1940 he warned that
A victory in the present war would bring nothing beyond a new lease of life for British imperialism
And that he might therefore be inclined
To side with Russia and Germany
He had another radical idea, that in order to fight Fascism and win, there must first be a revolution in England. As it turns out, he knew himself less well than his wife, because in the end he did exactly as Eileen had predicted though, as it would turn out, for more complex reasons than necessity. As soon as the government declared war, the anti imperialist tried to do his bit for the people; he tried to sign up. He tried to sign up quite hard actually; he applied to the security forces first, then for the army and then for the RAF. He was rejected by all of them – on health grounds because they saw the damaged condition of his lungs.
Nonetheless he stuck at it, and kept trying to do something for his country; so he joined up for the Home Defence Force, and was scrupulous in carrying out his responsibilities, and was popular with his colleagues by all accounts. Though, delightfully, at one point he wonders if the Home Guard would form a sort of revolutionary militia to bring out the transformation of society he desired. In the context of the delicious comedy Dad’s Army – which I assume btw you have all seen, but if not stop listening to me blathering on, and go and find it this instant – in the context of Dad’s Army, the idea of the Home Guard forming a revolutionary militia is very funny indeed. I am imagining Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson storming Westminster Hall, bare-breasted like Marriane and waving the red flag.
So – Orwell joined up. Inconsistency is very, very strong in Orwell. When Milo and I chewed the cud over Orwell in a pub, this was one criticism; there’s always a ‘yes but what about that time when…’ with Orwell. There are many changes when he comes to disagree with a previously firmly held opinion – a life with many radical changes of direction. Sand yet some core principle remain the same always – an abhorrence for exploitation and a suspicion of power and authority being paramount.
However, he had one view which he had predicted and would turn out to be true, and eventually help him abandon his initial anti war stand. He realised that in a time of war, the whole political window would shift leftwards. That the kind of community action and state planning so central to socialism would be needed and become acceptable to the mainstream. He also predicted that this burst of socialism would be carried along in an enthusiastic and unwavering way in which the Voice of the People would shout for Churchill, in complete confidence that they would face Hitler down together, in a cascade of patriotic and community fervour.
Over the next year and a bit, he slowly turned away from his anti war view by degrees with an iron willed determination not to look back at his previous pronouncements. He condemned the ILP, his own party, when they called for workers to sabotage arms manufacturing; he next overturned his earlier comment about fascism and bourgeois democracy being essentially the same thing. Instead by June 1942 he was completing his travels towards a new point of view, declaring that those saying this was nothing but an Imperialist war
Have got their heads screwed on backwards
And so his conversion was complete, and his sense of English patriotism was a major reason, not just his enthusiasm for way he thought the war would advance the socialist agenda.
Having said that, his attitude towards the quality of democracy in Britain, was complicated. He had deep reservations of any sense that it represented true equality or social justice but he recognised that nonetheless it had value and allowed the individual their voice. These are his words in 1944:
It is absurd to call Britain democratic…but if democracy means a society in which you can safely go to the nearest pub and utter your true opinion of the government, then Britain is democratic
He and Eileen moved to London, which Eileen hated. Her health was poor – while his was appalling; they were both heavy smokers. Eileen got a job at the Ministry of Information and then at the Ministry of Food. For 18 months George had no job at all, until he landed a post at the BBC. He worked in the Empire service Indian Section, which despite being an anti imperialist he rather enjoyed because they didn’t tell him what to do, they just let him get on with it and develop his journalistic idea. He was again rather popular both with staff and managers. But in November 1943 he moved to the left wing weekly ‘The Tribune’ as part Time Literary Editor, working with the Editor who was the now super famous Nye Bevan. They got on like a house on fire – Orwell stated warmly that he and Bevan could “sort out this country”, which is indeed just the sort of thing you’d say in the pub. While at the Tribune, he created the model for a journalistic technique called the Mixed Column, of multiple short pieces of related pieces, personal, and locally oriented. It was a lively, successful piece of work every week called As I Please, and was format soon to be widely copied.
Finally, he moved to the Observer in February 1945 as the War Correspondent. He was moving in pretty exalted literary circles by this time; Evelyn Waugh, E M Forster, H G Wells, a whole load. He was well known, without being a household name. One cute anecdote I rather like came when he was asked to present to the Oxford University English club. A young poet, called Philip Larkin would you believe, the poet, was the Treasurer of the society and had to decide on the most appropriate living arrangement for a pair of speakers – Dylan Thomas and George Orwell. After some thought, he decided
We took Dylan Thomas to the Randolph (Hotel) and George Orwell to the not-so-good hotel. I suppose it was my first essay in practical criticism
Through the war years, Orwell wrote some of the works and developed a philosophy which I personally find the most inspiring of all, for reasons I’ll explain, though I wouldn’t expect you to agree they compete with the global impact of Animal Farm and 1984. He writes about the English people. And he writes without restraint or apology, which is an unusual thing in itself according to his biographer Bernard Crick. He began to root all his views, and his passion for democratic socialism, in a sense of Patriotism, and belief in an English genius.
As a side comment, it’s not clear why Orwell wrote always of the English rather than British, given that many of the characteristics he talked about were shared across all the home nations. Possibly because England’s relationship with the Celtic nations would have complicated arguments, who knows. In his essay on why he detested Nationalism, Orwell certainly identified Celtic Nationalism as one of his examples. It could also be, I’d have thought, that this is the England in the sense that Nelson used it – as a synonym for Britain. A mistake which is something that demands an instant apology if committed today, of course.
This basis and genius of his thinking didn’t come out of nowhere or simply a blaze of patriotism caused by an existential national crisis. Since the 1930s there had been a general English renaissance from many artists – W H Auden, Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville West, Vaughan Williams amongst others – who reacted against Modernism and an International style, while remaining ‘Moderns’ as it were. So there is form and a movement. But more important to Orwell was the reaction of the English working class to the war. England had to fight or die; the common people he found were patriotic.
I am interested also in the work of Humphrey Jennings in this context, and again owe this insight to Milo who brought me a DVD for my birthday of the document, Humphrey Jennings was the creator of an approach called Mass Observation. Like Orwell, Jennings was a socialist but probably more influenced by the like of William Morris, and detested the impact of industrialisation on English society. Like Orwell, he was a virulent opponent of fascism. When the war started he was asked to produce a series of propaganda films, which gave him a challenge; how to do this in a way which accorded with his political views.
His approach was mass observation – a series of films like ‘Fires were Started’, and ‘London can Take it’ which rather than bombastic glorification of the war effort and grand speeches by Churchill and so on, focussed on the ordinary, the quotidian, on quiet and practical strength, effort and determination of ordinary people, and the tragedy of the sacrifices the war effort demanded. He found an answer to the conflict between his politics and his responsibility in a sense of patriotism and ordinary lives.
Orwell meanwhile now made another rather dramatic about turn. You may remember from Part I that he had held the firm belief that
Bourgeois democracy is only another word for capitalism – and so is fascism
Forged in the fires of experience and national effort, he now declared that
Only apologists of totalitarianism argued that bourgeois Democracy was a fraud
The central work that brings all this together was the Lion and the Unicorn – it was described as a book, but at 7-8,000 words its more of an extended essay I guess. A very interesting bit of context, is that one of his stated aims was to take Englishness out of the hands of the Aristocracy and Elite into the hands of ordinary people. His object was to make the state synonymous with them, rather than the property of the ruling, privileged few. That’s an extraordinary thought in a modern context, and illustrates how much Britain since the war has changed; because few people would think anything else nowadays would they? Am, I wrong?
The historian Robert Colls, describes the opening of the Lion and the Unicorn as
The best few hundred words on English national identity ever written
This is where the time he spent in Wigan and Barnsley comes to flower, coupled with the experience of the war. The only real Englishness, he claims, is to be found among ordinary lives. He argues they are not flag wavers or jingoists but gentle by nature; the violence and Imperialism he hates, he sees as a perversion of leadership
The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant major
The English might be gamblers, drunkards and foul mouthed, but were gentle minded he argues, a highly moral bunch who prize domestic virtues and tradition; their greatest and most important trait was their
Respect for constitutionalism and legality
It has to be said that some of the prose is reasonably regularly raided by others for inspiration; here’s a flavour
“We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”
Eileen caught the it all beautifully and succinctly, as she often does, describing the Lion and the Unicorn as
a little book explaining how to be a socialist, though Tory
I love that quote for its simplicity and immediacy. The Tory side of Orwell is very real; by Tory here I mean that traditional interpretation of Tory about an abiding love of custom and the land, rather than radical right wing monetary and unbridled market forces which calls itself conservatism too often these days. His love of custom and tradition comes out in the Lion and the Unicorn; Orwell expresses great belief in the English genius, tradition, unconscious love of their customs and shared language. He felt strongly that sense of solidarity and community was better expressed in ordinary things like music hall songs and naughty seaside postcards, than the sort of work produced by the cultural elite and intellectual left. But it should not be confused with conservatism, he remains radical, socialist; and in fact in part three of the essay he urges revolution
It is only by revolution that the English genius can be set free
He writes; though it is a revolution without violence and by degrees – a very English Revolution, in fact, accompanied by a nice cup of tea. He argues that nations can change and yet stay the same – by maintaining a connection always to their history as the evolve. Interestingly, keeping connected with a view of a nation’s past was more important than getting your history wrong. He makes the point that the intellectual class had become alienated from their history, they no longer know their own country.
He then has practical advice and even a political program, which is actually most un-Orwellian – he almost never does that, laying out a set of policies. The practical advice is that the Working class and Middle classes need to work together; and that this is already beginning to happen anyway. And then he has a six point plan; alliance with countries attacked by fascists, a democratic education system; nationalisation of the major industries, progressive income tax, independence for India, and an imperial general council. Some of these were achieved under Churchill, and almost all under the transformational Labour government of Atlee.
One final point, was that as I mentioned, Orwell made a very clear distinction between Patriotism and Nationalism. He mocks the very idea of nationalism as putting millions of people into one homogenous lump, and condemns the very idea of ‘my country right or wrong’. He goes on to write
By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.
Orwell from now on supports the principal parliamentary labour party, and dumped the ILP. In terms of practical politics, the Labour party might not be the revolutionary party he is looking for; but it is the closest he is likely to get in the short term. And he reconciles this with his conscience, because through the Trades Union movement, Labour retains a direct connection with the working classes.
Partly this reflects his conversion to democratic socialism rather than pure socialism. One difference being that he accepts the need and benefit of some element of capitalism. Because people need to be free, they need to be individuals; pure socialism, communism or fascism demand adherence to one system, one set of beliefs, adherence to a central plan – it requires totalitarianism. For individuals to thrive, they need to follow their own path, while remaining connected to their history. Democratic socialism allows individuals their own path, but encourages collective action in the form, of close regulation of Capitalism, including nationalisation of key industries.
I think it’s very unlikely indeed that you can describe this as an end point for George Orwell; given the way his thinking has changed over the years, it’s almost inevitable there would have been many twists and turns to come, but we are nearing the end, and he is running out of time to make any dramatic about turns.
By February 1944, Orwell had written Animal Farm. I am reasonably sure you will know it. Probably have read it, may well have studied it at school as I am sure I did. It has been described as the greatest Swiftian satire since Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, the story of an English farm, where the animals try to be free of their human masters. The Pigs take over, power corrupts, and they become oppressors as bad as the capitalist farmers. It is a simple message – that Revolutions can produce outcomes even worse than the original, that power corrupts, that totalitarianism can only succeed by controlling all aspect of language. The book draws on Orwell’s growing distrust of the Russian state from the Spanish civil war, and his clear-eyed realism about what he saw emerging from Stalinism. For some, the theme of the English genius runs through the book; the strong simple carthorses Boxer and Clover of course represent the loyal and exploited working class, but are also closest to Orwell’s idea of what he saw as the basic decency of the English. Animal Farm, has some classic images lines and phrases that communicate so powerfully as I am sure you know better than I, just as there will be in 1984. In particular the most widely quoted
All animals are created Equal, but some animals are more equal than others
Genius, isn’t it?.
It took a while to get it published, because in both Britain and the US publishers kept turning it down; including T S Eliot, who explained that its message was not acceptable at this time. Elliot was referring to the painful awareness of Russian suffering on the eastern Front, and Stalin was a critical ally in the war; but great intellects and communist sympathisers like EP Thompson were dissing any idea that Uncle Joe was doing anything unjustifiable – and they would continue to do so, as the evidence mounted. But eventually it did hit the world in August 1945. It sold 250,000 copies in its first year. George Orwell was well on the way to becoming a household name.
One of Orwell’s talents was not talking up Eileen’s influence on his work; but it is thought that her influence on Animal Farm was fundamental. It was she that suggested he write it as a fable rather than an essay and this is a complete change in direction for Orwell. Also, there is an unusual lightness and humour to it, which is very unusual for Orwell – though having said that, it absolutely fits in with his conviction that there was nothing worthwhile that could not be explained in simple direct terms.
George would write
It’s a terrible shame that Eileen didn’t live to see the publication of Animal Farm, which she was particularly fond of and even helped in the planning of
Eileen had been ill for some time, and in March 1945 while George was in Paris for the Observor she went into hospital for an emergency hysterectomy to remove some tumours. She was a bit outraged at the cost
I really don’t think I’m worth the money
She wrote to George. She died under the anaesthetic at the age of 39. George came rushing home, writing that it was ‘a terribly cruel and stupid thing to happen’. He dealt with all the funeral arrangements, arranged for their adopted son Richard to be looked after until he came home and went straight back to Paris. By and large he was undemonstrative about Eileen’s death, but the sense of loss is pretty clear. He and Elieen had shared a similar outlook, but he never acknowledged her contribution to his work, and until recently nor has history. That has been put increasingly right. Their son Richard pointed out that she was at least George’s intellectual equal, they debated his work and writing constantly. She seems to have brought more logic, structure and consistency to his writing, a more humane style, and she had a sense of irony and whimsy which appears in Animal farm.
Orwell’s relationship with Eileen, and his attitude to women generally has also come under scrutiny. It is not entirely clear, but it seems reasonably certain that he had affairs with other women, and that Eileen knew about it and was hurt by it. He was remarkably obtuse about how ill she was towards the end, to the point where one writer has accused him of outright cruelty. Critics broadly agree that Orwell doesn’t deal positively with women’s characters, and only writes from a woman’s perspective in one of his novels, The Clergyman’s Daughter and its widely agreed, that not very well. Though some have argued that there is a strongly positive theme towards woman, in that it is Julia who is his chosen vehicle as the hope of the future in his last book – which we will get to soon.
Orwell was himself now pretty consistently ill, and his health had never been good. In May 1946 he went to the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides with a little party; his two year old son Richard and nanny Susan Watson; and his sister Avril and her husband joined them. He loved it, and had always loved gardening and nature – I think we talked about his line
the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing
and he and Eillen had a plot they cultivated and grew vegetables when they had the cottage at Wallington in Hertfordshire. So in Jura, he loved the natural world around him, went fishing, and set about restoring and cultivating the garden. He was supposed to have been sent there for his health, the persistent energy-sapping TB which had periodically plagued him since 1933. It sems a slightly odd place to go for that, since he spent much of his time writing in a tiny upstairs room with a paraffin heater on to keep warm. It was there that he wrote his last novel, published in June 1949; you might have heard of it also, it is quite famous or so I am told by those that know – it’s called 1984.
Orwell himself described the book as a warning of the mad perversions of intellectuals
‘as partly realised in Communism and fascism’
It takes place in an England where everything has been systematically destroyed – and where people are definitively separated from their history. Language has been rigorous policed and controlled. Everything take place in the head, where there is nothing the main protagonists., Winston and Julia, can rely on. The historian Robert Colls thinks that any hope there is from the book any lies with Julia as I mentioned – she’s a mechanic, smart, self aware, not snobbish, practical and instinctual. Unlike Winston, she is not an intellectual. And they recognise that hope lies with the ‘proles’ – the redemptive power of the unscrambled proles, just as Orwell found in Wigan and so on.
It was an immediate commercial and critical success – 250,000 in its first year, and over it’s life it has done even better than Animal Farm – that has sold 11 million, 1984 has sold over 30 million and been translated into 65 languages. It’s a compelling and horrifying story, it has an atmosphere all of its own, it’s fast paced – as I think I said somewhere, first time I read it just as straight Sci Fi. But the detail is so clever, the use of language is brilliant and well thought through, there’s a whole lexicon of words we use that come from it, Orwell really rams home how important language is in corralling people – Big Brother, Room 101, Newspeak, Thought Police, double think. It’s amazingly prescient and remains enduringly relevant, to totalitarianism in many forms – that power of language thing is masterly, and around us everyday, not just in totalitarian regimes. There are plenty of examples of its continuing relevance – in 2017 sales in the UIS grew by 9500%, no idea why, and Penguin had to do a rush publication of 75,000 copies. That is the sort of problem publishers like to have.
Orwell became an ‘ism’. It gave rise to the word Orwellian, which actually is an ironic perversion of ‘Orwell-like’ since Orwell devoted his life to describing the world as he saw it in very simple direct language
‘Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear
As he put it, and so it’s a bit unfortunate that his name has become used for the opposite, but there we go.
There are many and various ways in which 1984 has been farmed for inspiration about modern society. The use of technological surveillance, thought control, use of data for nefarious ends; the ‘willingness to hate’ idea in the book, whipped up by propaganda which flourishes online. The importance of the individual and individualism is central to the book.
That’s all in addition to its critique of totalitarianism and Stalinism, which has often been misused; in fact when close to his death bed, Orwell was in the middle of composing a letter refuting claims by American readers that it was against socialism, not just totalitarianism.
Orwell was now famous – though he didn’t live very long to enjoy it. By January 1949 he was in a sanatorium in Gloucester, before being transferred to a London hospital, where the doctors gave him some false hope. So he married again in his hospital room, to Sonia Brownell, who hoped she could help nurse him back to health. It was not to be of course, a year later Tuberculosis got him in the end, not helped by a life time smoking roll ups of strong shag tobacco, though a life time of remarkably strong tea might have preserved him for a while; so powerful was his passion for tea that he had it sent out to him on the Catalonia frontline.
George was an atheist; but he was buried, at his own request, according to the rites of the Church of England, just as he had got married under the rites of the church of England. That seems like just another example of inconsistency and maybe even hypocrisy. But it has an internal consistency, or at least he had a reason, and it wasn’t a religious conversion. It was because by 1950 he had fully accepted that however much of a socialist he might be, he was never more comfortable than in the ancient customs and traditions of the English. The graveyard is in Sutton Courtenay churchyard, because of his friend the editor of the observer, David Astor. It’s not far from my hood, and I went and visited it recently – it is a lovely, lovely village, and there are multiple offerings – and pennies left for luck. He shares the graveyard not only with David Astor, but also Herbert Henry Asquith, a man who seems to be generally remembered for his personal relationship with Helen Violet Bonham Carter, but who along with Campbell Bannerman and Lloyd George introduced the foundations of the British state and at last started to break the power of the Landlords. But I digress.
Well then, we have got to the end. What do we think? I often think I am guilty of liking people in the past far, far more than I would if they were contemporaries, and I think that’s the case here; I suspect that, as an often rather brutal contrarian, he would have got right up my nose and wriggled about. Having done this episode, he is no longer quite the delphic oracle type he’d sort of become in my imagination; I don’t suppose anyone really survives with a reputation like that once they become a living, breathing person in your imagination. He’s far too inconsistent and personal and in-the-moment for that, and less of a philosopher type than I had imagined. Robert Colls tells an anecdote about Orwell, when being interviewed and discussing a particular philosopher on the BCC; and that Orwell remarked that he did try to read his book…but gave up when he realised the bloke was talking about whether people exist or not. That was is not the ‘belly to earth’ approach George wrote about as his aimed!
That’s an aspect I have really enjoyed finding out about Orwell – the clarity and straightforwardness of his essay writing, because it was only his novels we did at school or that I read for myself.
‘What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art’
He says in his essay ‘Why I write’, – and I think he achieves that, and it is as an essayist many people write about him.
There is a debate about who the real Orwell is, particularly when it comes to his politics. No one doubts his anti fascist credentials, but outside of that he’s claimed by both right and left, socialist, tory, anti-communist. He himself never wavered in his belief that he was a socialist, some on the left would never forgive him, because is deep belief in the right of every one of us to be themselves, took him away from many on the left during his time. It led him to the hybrid position of democratic socialism; the absolute requirement for the rights of individuals to choose, meant a completely monolithic communist state was impossible.
I like that about him, I must say, the fact that he is so difficult to pop in a neat box. It has been proposed that one other group to put him is as a kind of Radical Tory, relating to figures like William Cobbett or John Bright. Because Orwell’s socialism needed to be built on something that already existed. By the end he wasn’t into the revolutionary cleaning of the slate, the tearing down of all the old structures and traditions to build a new world from scratch. He valued the accumulated tradition of generations and the spirit of the people, more like an Edmund Burke and his response to the French Revolution.
Although it opens him to the charge of inconsistency or even hypocrisy, I also like the way his views change and evolve – after all, doesn’t that happen to all of us? I mean he wasn’t inclined to apologise or acknowledge that, it has to be said, but the way his thinking evolved has a logic to it, which I have tried to represent. I remember a historian called Abott once said about Cromwell that accusations against him of hypocrisy are normally a misunderstanding of chronology, what he said and did at what stage of his life and experience; the same might apply to Orwell; the way his views change do seem to make sense. Plus, Orwell was clearly very, very honest about himself, how his upbringing affected his outlook, the quality of his writing, and for most people that seems to be enough to absolve him of the charge of hypocrisy – at least in his political views. In terms of how he evolves, someone commented that in the first half of his life he wrote about what he was against; in the second, he wrote about what he was for, and that makes sense.
One thing that occurred to Milo and I, is that the context of the time is really really important; it’s all very well to have a sense of perspective, but Orwell did not know if the world would defeat Hitler and Mussolini, there seemed a better than evens chance that Fascism would win – and Orwell’s reaction to the coming of war must be seen in that light.
Having said that, does the great change of context since the time he wrote, in society as much as anything, does that mean that Orwell is still relevant today? Although, by the by, I should stress that he doesn’t need to be currently relevant to be interesting – nor does any period of history, totally irrelevant is fine for me.
But so much about England and Britain has changed since Orwell built his creed. The miners are gone, heavy industry is largely gone, the Empire is over, we have a fully functioning welfare state, the politics of identity seem to have replaced the politics of class.
But there is so much that still seems relevant. Obviously, there is all the stuff we have talked about in Animal Farm and 1984 which is almost prescient, timeless and universal.
But one of the other things that remains relevant for me personally, is the way he talks without reserve about Englishness while being a political radical. This view is now deeply unfashionable for many; progressives like to talk about Britain not England, for fear of offending the other home nations, and encouraging Celtic Nationalism. There are an awful lot of people I know who look a bit shifty when someone talks about England in a political context, or indeed they assume such a person will turn out to have some nasty views. And in that context, Orwell is compellingly relevant for me. He expresses his anger at left wing intellectuals who reject their own country and traditions, while enjoying all the benefits without responsibility or gratitude. As he put it, like
A young man living on an allowance from a father whom he hates
To someone like me who figures himself at least basically a progressive politically, however mildly, the abject failure of progressive parties to identify themselves as English as well as British patriots infuriates me, and leaves a sense of England to the loony right. Like Orwell, many post war progressives like John Braine and Alan Silllitoe found a way to be progressive and English at the same time – we need to rediscover that. To be fair, the likes of Billy Bragg, Caroline Lucas also recognise that’s an issue, and their Very English Chat project is part of trying to make sure Englishness is for everyone, not just one political faction.
Right that is me breaking a normally golden rule and getting political, but surely I can be excused, given the subject…answers on a postcard.
Right that’s all I have to say on Orwell. I would love to hear your views – this isn’t a normal topic for me, so I accept and acknowledge I may be guilty of fundamental errors. You might be interested to know that Roifield and I talk about the issue of English identity in our revived series, The Things that Make England 2.0, which is also relaunched in video on You Tube – go there and search for @TheThingsThatMadeEngland, and see the episode in particular of the flag of St George.
