It is the presently resurgent patriotic, morally and
socially conservative, anti-Communist Left who are the true heirs of the best
of George Orwell.
Orwell is good. He is important. But he is still
overrated. Not least, his depiction of Wigan is still resented in the town to
this day. His famous remark about the goosestep was just plain wrong, like many
of his others. And everyone should read Scott Lucas's The Betrayal of
Dissent, London: Pluto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7453-2197-6.
However, Orwell's patriotism, his moral and
social conservatism, and his anti-Communism are vitally important in reminding
the British Left that those are indispensable, and indeed definitive, aspects
of our own tradition, and that the first two, at least, stand in very marked
contrast to everything for which the Conservative Party has stood since that
uncomprehending woman facilitated its takeover by the hired help of global
capitalism.
All three,
though perhaps especially the last, make him a particularly significant figure
when set alongside Christopher Hill and E P Thompson in rescuing demotic
culture from what Thompson called "the enormous condescension of
posterity", even though Orwell himself was not above condescension.
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