Orwell still relevant in politics of today
ABook Festival favourite, former home secretary Alan Johnson returned to Charlotte Square on Wednesday to talk about the relevance of George Orwell for our times. Johnson has written the introduction for a new anthology, Orwell on Truth, and described how, on re-reading Orwell, he became aware that “everything in there resonates for today”.
He added: “After Trump was elected, suddenly Orwell’s 1984 was top of the Amazon charts. This collection was put together in the early days of the Trump administration, and the more we see, the more relevant it becomes.”
Orwell, he said, would have loved to get his teeth into the subject of fake news. Faced with photographic evidence that fewer people attended Trump’s inauguration than had done Barack Obama’s, for example, Trump pundit Kellyanne Conway simply claimed this was “an alternative fact”. Johnson said: “Orwell was a defender of objective truth, and we need to defend it even more today.”
A winner of the Orwell Prize for his memoir, This Boy, in 2014, Johnson described how Orwell was an influence on him as a writer and as a politician, after an inspirational English teacher introduced him to Animal Farm at 14.
The Orwell-focused discussion soon shifted towards matters of contemporary politics. Johnson proved rather more willing than Jeremy Corbyn (at the Book Festival on Monday) to answer questions, describing how, as a leader of Labour’s Remain campaign, he had tried and failed to get his party leader to be enthusiastic about the European Union. “Jeremy doesn’t believe in the EU and never has. [If he could], he would be marching through the lobby with Jacob Rees-mogg.”
He described a split in the Labour Party as “inevitable”, but dashed the hopes of some in the audience for the formation of a break-away centrist party, and described the work of Momentum, the powerful pro-corbyn group within the party, as “malice dressed as virtue”: “Momentum works both within and outwith the party. Orwell would be having a field day.” The political insights continued as Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, introduced his new book of essays, Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval, describing the situation since the 2008 financial crash, as “a state of crisis… the kind of period Gramsci called interregunum: the old is dying, the new is waiting to be born.”
He also writes about his home town of Harlow, a postwar Essex new town with ambition to be a socialist utopia, which was the scene of the murder of a young Polish man in the wake of the Brexit referendum, wrongly hailed across the world as a post-brexit racially motivated crime. SUSAN MANSFIELD