Seventy years ago, in December 1943, George Orwell first penned his ‘As I Please’ column for Tribune. He had been writing articles for some months, but now he had a regular slot. At that time, the magazine’s editor was Aneurin Bevan, though, busy with his parliamentary duties as member of parliament for Ebbw Vale, Jon Kimche handled the administrative side of his job.
Orwell understood the central importance of language in political debate. His own label, ‘Big Brother’, from his famous dystopian novel 1984 not only lent itself to a title for a reality TV show, but became the standard criticism for excessive surveillance of citizens by governments around the world. 1984’s torture room, ‘Room 101,’ again lent itself to the title of a popular TV show, and entered the national lexicon as shorthand for those things we fear most: ‘What would be in your ‘Room 101’? ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Thought-crime’ are familiar concepts to modern-day political commentators. With David Cameron’s pre-election promise not to introduce top-down reorganisation of the NHS before introducing the Health and Social Care Act, or George Osborne’s numerous U-turns, anyone could be forgiven for accusing the prime minister and the chancellor of ‘Double-think’: seemingly accepting two contradictory positions at the same time.
Orwell’s writings have had a lasting impact. His articles are regularly anthologised. Many of his novels deserve to be read and reread: Keep the Aphadistra Flying and its commentary on money-worship; Coming Up for Air’s pessimism on going back to experience the past; Down and Out in Paris and London’s evocative descriptions of poverty. The Road to Wigan Pier has its place among the socialist classics. Burmese Days remains a startling commentary on colonialism, and his brilliant Spanish civil war work Homage to Catalonia captures the harsh reality of the conflict. These works are all rightly famous. They are superb in themselves: well-written, insightful, in many ways, timeless.
Yet what makes Orwell great is his ability to be both critical and self-critical. In his 2002 book Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens observed that, ‘Once, the right and left in Britain used to argue about who “owned” Orwell’. This may have been because Orwell’s socialism never blinded him to the great problems in the Soviet Union. His writings are not one-sided, but wide-ranging, unafraid to make criticisms of any side if he felt they were justified. His political allegory, Animal Farm, first published just after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, critiqued the Russian Revolution of 1917. Orwell’s position was that the replacement of one ruling elite with another was no panacea. The character of the work-horse, Boxer, whose motto is ‘I must work harder’, was a message to people to sit up and take notice, to question and enquire.
With low turnouts becoming more and more a feature of modern-day elections, that message to become engaged in politics is of central relevance. In this season of choosing presents, we could do much worse than to pick some Orwell novels to give to our friends.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics published by IB Tauris (2010). He writes the Labour history column for Progress and tweets @NThomasSymonds
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