As Australia undergoes a multilayered debate about the quality of its journalism, it is worth remembering that the best political writing not only analyses, but outlives the events it describes. George Orwell's work exemplifies this. Although he achieved acclaim for his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, he was also a brilliant essayist. He worked briefly for the BBC between 1941 and 1943 and is today honoured in the Orwell Prize for political writing.
Recently, BBC director general Mark Thompson turned down a proposal by the George Orwell Memorial Trust to erect a statue of the author on the broadcaster's premises. According to Labour peer Dame Joan Bakewell, the refusal was made on the grounds that Orwell 'would be perceived as too left-wing a figure for the BBC to honour'. The Trust awaits planning permission to erect a statue in the nearby Portland Place.
These events have renewed debate in Britain as to whether Orwell was indeed 'left-wing' or ought to be regarded as conservative. Political animals of all stripes have long sought to claim Orwell, along with his penetrating insights, luminous prose, and subtle wit.
Those towards the right of the spectrum value Orwell's clear-sighted critiques of communism and his contempt for 'orthodoxy sniffers' willing to diminish or deny the horrors of Stalinist Russia in the interests of ideological purity. Orwell was also dismissive of the 'cranks' he encountered in leftist circles and wrote disparagingly of 'left-wing intellectuals who are so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions'.
It is not difficult to see why conservatives wish to claim Orwell as one of their own, but such an endeavour faces obvious problems. One cannot have Orwell's acerbic observation that in the Soviet Union 'all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' without his equally astringent statement that 'whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time'.
Although critical of self-styled progressives and revolutionaries and aware of the dangers of utopian projects, Orwell set himself against both his country's rigidly class-bound nature and capitalism's manifold injustices. He noted in his 1946 essay 'Why I Write' that 'every line of serious work that I have written