THE OUTGOING DIRECTOR GENERAL (DG) of the BBC, Mark Thompson has been approached by Joan Bakewell to get George Orwell’s statue built from public subscription; and no lesser BBC luminaries than Andrew Marr, James Naughtie, and Liz Forgan, lent their support.
Ms Bakewell’s approach was however turned down by the DG, which is fair enough. But Thompson’s reason for doing so is bizarre in the extreme. Apparently Orwell was too Left-wing to be considered for a plinth at the BBC.
When I read Ms Bakewell’s piece in today’s Daily Telegraph, I at first thought she must have got it wrong, and Thompson would step forward with the usual get out on such occasion of having had his comments “taken out of context”; for what other reason could there be for such a display of ignorance on behave of a well educated and obviously intelligent man who, no doubt, had read Orwell’s volumes of essays and journalism, as well as his novels.
That Orwell was of the left, there is of course little doubt. But for someone to consider him too left-wing, needs to explain themselves further; and I hope Mark Thompson will do so.
George Orwell could never be pinned down. In Spain he fought with the Trotskyist POUM and in his book Homage to Catalonia, he clearly loathed and distrusted the Communists who were in thrall to Moscow and Stalin, and carried as great a loathing for the POUM as they did Franco.
During the war years he broadcast for the BBC (who never thought him too left-wing then). Orwell was the willing tool of anti-fascist propaganda. He broadcast from the now infamous Room 101 at the BBC, and some have suggested that his greatest novel 1984 was not only based on Stalin’s Russia, but also on the culture at the BBC at the time.
The creator of 1984 and Animal Farm was I believe a socialist patriot. He loved his country, and would today have been considered a nationalist, in the modern sense of the word. He would not, I believe, have supported those who wish to see his nation absorbed into a United States of Europe. Neither would he have been a believer in Multiculturalism. In India, like Enoch Powell, he experienced the phenomenon which Powell called communalism; that was to lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and ultimately the creation of Pakistan.
He would have believed in a multiracial society where different races could become British, but he would not tolerate sacrificing British culture on the altar of diversity – of putting British culture on an equal footing with the many dozens of other cultures. He would have insisted that Great Britain and its culture remain supreme over others, and if those others wished to become citizens, their cultures would have to obey British laws and customs, or return to the culture from which they came -does this sound like being too left-wing?
IF ANYTHING, today George Orwell would consider himself somewhat to the right of David Cameron and just, but only just, to the left of UKIP. But as I wrote earlier, Orwell could not be pinned down; which allowed many parts of the political compass to claim him as their own .
When I read Orwell back in the 1970s, I did so warily as a supporter and member of the British Communist Party (BCP). The BCP at the time never thought him too left-wing, and neither did the branch I belonged to.
One day, I took myself off to London. I went to Collets book shop in the Tottenham Court Road and I bought the whole Penguin paperback edition of Orwell’s essays and journalism, which I have still, sitting on my book shelves – his novels I picked up locally.
If anyone deserved the notoriety of being too left-wing , it was surely myself at the time. First of all I refused to read Homage to Catalonia, as I had also done with Hugh Thomas’s definitive study, The Spanish Civil War, both of which bared heavily down on Communist Party orthodoxy .
Of his novels I brought myself to trust at the time were Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. 1984 and Animal Farm were to come much later, when my own doubts began to overwhelm and supplant Moscow’s overtures.
Orwell was indeed the greatest journalist of his time. He also wrote the greatest dystopian novel of his time, which has transcended his time to become a warning beacon in our time. 1984 was indeed an anti-Stalinist novel, but his time at the BBC gave him much of the material for composing it.
SO MANY ON THE left have claimed Orwell as their own, including the Labour Party, who at times have used a quote or two to make a point.
I believe that George Orwell would today be considered a nationalist with a social conscience. But if he saw what had happened to his country in the years since his death, I think he would, for a start, having believed in the original Welfare State, would today have come to the conclusion that the 21st century welfare state had become a hindrance. Instead of a safety net, the welfare state had become a whole supermarket of different entitlements.
If anyone on the left today can claim (risibly) Orwell as their own, then they need to once more return to a study of the great man’s works and put them in a modern context. Like, I hope Orwell would; I believe that the great master of the revolutionary process, Karl Marx, would also transcend and eliminate his whole philosophy if he could return to witness the capitalism of the 21st century; instead of depending upon the 19th century and before, as his philosophical model.
George Orwell has lightened the load of many a modern journalist by proffering them an independent spirit that cannot be imprisoned by the corporate institution that pay their wages. It is up to them whether they agree the great man’s terms, or continue to cow-tow to their employers and continue to draw the manifold funds awarded to them by whatever news network they scribble for.
Orwell should have had a statue in his honour decades ago (I would have thought that the NUJ would have seen to this), and, as the BBC refuses to have such a statue on their property; may suggest upon its completion it sits somewhere in London that overlooks our modern journalists as go into and from work, to remind them that there were once standards within their profession.
No comments:
Post a Comment