George Orwell may be known as a man of the Left, but he would have had a field day with Keir Starmer. As David McGrogan noted here recently, he would have undoubtedly identified sniffy Starmer as a “prig”. And he would have excoriated the man from the pebble-dash semi for his naked contempt for the proles. Not only his attempts to lock as many of them up as possible, but also his joyless crusade against fags and booze – their habitual consolations.
Perhaps most of all, though, he would have skewered our great leader for his political rhetoric. Many look at today’s society of surveillance and censorship and find Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four disturbingly prescient. But Orwell’s great essay, Politics and the English Language, is no less relevant. Some of the fashionable idioms may have changed, but the “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else” that he identified as one of the worst features of modern political prose remains quite the same. As do politicians’ unfailing attempts to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
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