People across politics quote George Orwell, often as though he would have been an obvious member of their own side. Read more of him and that becomes much harder to maintain.
His warnings about propaganda, censorship and dishonest language deserve the attention they receive. A euphemism can make cruelty sound administrative. A slogan can save someone the trouble of thinking. Governments can insist on a falsehood until challenging it becomes dangerous. Those concerns explain why people still reach for Orwell when they suspect power is being abused.
The difficulty is what they leave out.
A socialist and a patriot
Someone on the right can admire Orwell's opposition to totalitarianism while having little sympathy for his socialism. Someone on the left can admire his concern for working people while finding his criticism of left-wing intellectuals deeply uncomfortable.
In *The Lion and the Unicorn*, he combined patriotism with a demand for radical economic change. He also criticised intellectuals who seemed embarrassed by England and contemptuous of ordinary English attachments. Those views belonged to the same man. Neither was a qualification added by a later reader.
We don't have to accept every judgement he made to recognise the problem with recruiting him as an uncomplicated ally. If the version of Orwell we admire never disagrees with us, we may have been selective.
Criticising your own side
What interests me most is his willingness to challenge people whose broad aims he shared. Agreement about a cause didn't oblige him to excuse dishonesty on its behalf.
That is harder than criticising an opponent. Your friends may see it as disloyalty, and your opponents may use it to support conclusions you never intended. The temptation is to leave an inconvenient fact alone until the other side behaves better.
Orwell is useful because he didn't consistently accept that bargain. His writing asks whether something is true even when admitting it is politically awkward.
Quoting him doesn't establish that we have done the same. The more demanding test is whether we are willing to criticise our own side when it is wrong.