Eton is a good school. Obviously, it has very significant advantages. But even so.
And by all accounts, whereas there seems to be plenty of Bullingdon-in-waiting but little or no organised right-wingery of any serious kind, the George Orwell Society flourishes like the bay tree.
Even if it does need to be put back in touch with the ILP tradition that was its (in general, somewhat overrated) hero at his best. Trotskyist literature, brought by visiting speakers, currently sells out at its packed meetings.
But at least it is there. In fact, it is going strong.
That's the problem with the public school Lefty, as you know. They have their uses, they have made a great contribution, they are part of the family. But they are not us.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Orwell was in reality the Old Etonian, Eric Arthur Blair.
ReplyDeleteIt is the presently resurgent patriotic, morally and socially conservative, anti-Stalinist, anti-Trotskyist Left who are the true heirs of the best of 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, even if it did rather amusingly cause the council in that inland town to erect a pier because visitors kept expecting to see one.
Orwell's 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. (Good heavens, is that book really now 10 years old?)
However, Orwell's patriotism, his moral and social conservatism, his anti-Stalinism and his anti-Trotskyism are vitally important in reminding the British Left that those are indispensable, and indeed definitive, aspects of our own tradition.
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 capital.
And all four, though perhaps especially the third, 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.