Everyone quotes Orwell, and almost everyone quotes the half that flatters them. Read the whole of him and you find a man who fits no current team - which is the most useful thing about him.
Crossbencher · 20 July 2026
The people who reach for Orwell aren't simply wrong to. He warned, with a clarity nobody has bettered, about what power does to language: the euphemism that hides the atrocity, the slogan that replaces the thought, the official lie repeated until it becomes the only sayable truth. Those warnings were real, and they were prophetic. A person who turns them against surveillance, or against the mangling of plain words into their opposites, has hold of something genuine. Orwell earned his place as the patron saint of honest speech, and the instinct to summon him when language is being corrupted is a sound one.
The trouble is that he is almost always summoned in halves. The right claims the scourge of totalitarian doublethink and the enemy of the overbearing state - and quietly drops the lifelong socialist who wanted the rich expropriated and thought patriotism and radical economics belonged together. The left claims the anti-fascist and the champion of the poor - and quietly drops the man who despised the English intelligentsia more than almost anyone he ever wrote about, who thought the progressive middle classes of his day were embarrassed by their own country, contemptuous of ordinary people, and drawn to authoritarianism whenever it wore the right colours. Each side takes the sword and leaves the shield. The Orwell that results is a puppet, nodding along to whoever picked him up.
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