This year’s Orwell Lecture will be delivered by the novelist Kamila Shamsie. She will be complaining, it is announced, about this government’s talk of citizenship being ‘a privilege and not a right’. (Actually, it is both.) No doubt she will have interesting points to make, but it is a pity that Orwell’s flame is always tended by the left.
There is a right-wing case for Orwell, or, to be more precise, an anti-left-wing case. Plenty of Orwell’s writing about England could make him a proto-Brexiteer, and it would be interesting to air this just now. His greatest satires were directed chiefly at communists, and he had a hearty dislike of the New Statesman. More than 50 years after his death, it was revealed that he had supplied the Attlee government with a secret list of people who should not work for its Information Research Department because they were Stalinists. One could describe the left’s monopoly of his memory as ‘Orwellian’.
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