On Orwellian nightmares.

This week, I have mostly been re-reading George Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while, 1984 was one of the formative books of my childhood and adolescence. I read it on a yearly basis until I was 17. Between the ages of 15 and 17 I edited a clunkily subversive student rag that was called, not entirely without irony, Newspeak. I haven’t revisited the book since 2004. I’d been planning to do so for a while, and this weekend I saw that Penguin have just brought out a super-sexy new red and black edition done up to look like a Stalin-era circus poster, and I was persuaded to part with seven of my hard-earned pounds.

It's been too long. Somehow, sixty years after it was published, this book is once more at the linguistic core of the zeitgeist. Words like doublethink, Big Brother, Thought Police are used by all political factions, indiscriminately and with tongues only half in cheeks. I was struck by the way that terms like ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ were flung around at Saturday’s Internet For Activists conference, at which I was speaking- flung around with a quiet, numinous resentment that I found deeply frightening.

1984 is claimed by both the left and the right, but by far the most urgent message of the book for the modern age is one of paranoia. 1984 is the definitive paranoid novel. Not only is the shadowy state watching our flawed protagonist, all the time, every single second, but nobody really has a clear idea of what the state is watching for, or how far their remit extends – only that the mere act of thinking against the party line, whatever that party line happens to be, is enough to ensure inevitable extermination. The creeping horror of being watched, the loathesomeness of life in a paranoid state, was never more viscerally expressed.

British democracy, as Orwell himself noted in his essay ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’, functions best when it respects the deeply private nature of the British national character. Nobody does curtain-twitching like the British, and accordingly, noone resents intrusion into their private lives more than we do. It may come as a surprise that most nations, including the majority of the developed world, have had comprehensive ID-card systems of the type that groups like NO2ID so vocally exist in place. They’ve had them for years. Their governments are used to the idea that their people’s loyalty is not to be taken for granted, and their people are used to their governments not quite trusting them.

Not so on these weird little islands. In Britain, more so than anywhere else, a paranoid state is a dysfunctional state. British society breaks down when the government does not trust its people: when it suspects that the way to maintain social order is to track our movements, file us on databases, install cameras at every street corner and deny us the right to public protest. In many other countries, the first sign of social breakdown is a population that doesn’t trust its government ; even in the United States, civil war was a real possibility as little as thirty-five years ago. Not so here. We have had a stable, gradually evolving system of government in place for three hundred and fifty years. The last time we fucked up badly was the last time we had a really carpet-chewingly paranoid leader, of the regressive-tax-raising, ignoring-parliament kind.

We built a wooden stage in the capital, we called the people in as witnesses, and we cut off his head on a cold January morning in 1649.

It is no accident that, as recent studies have shown, paranoia has become the national disorder of 21st-century Britain. It’s not an accident, not when we have been let down too many times by governments that just didn’t listen, governments that justified their indifference claiming that they had our best interests at heart, governments that then screwed us all over just as the previous regime had, only worse this time. Now, when a high-profile columnist writes they do what they want, these people, that call is repeated – not because it is astute, and certainly not because it’s responsible, but because it expresses something we feel in the meat gristle of our political hindbrain. Big Brother is watching us. Down with Big Brother.

And this is why the leaders of this country need to listen very carefully when the public starts adopting the language of 1984, however ironically. Because quite frankly, the British will put up with a lot. Frantic hardships. National indignities. Terrible dentistry. Rubbish weather. Jeremy Clarkson. In fact, we’ll put up with pretty much anything if we are asked to do so with honesty and respect. But the moment you start really consistently lying to us, the moment you start going back on all your promises and treating us like delinquent children, that’s when you have to remember that we don’t take this crap forever. We are more than the queue-forming, forelock-tugging, tea-sipping, biscuit-eating, pet-shop-boy-listening people of popular mythology. We are, at the root and bone, a nation of king-killers. I think they’d better watch out.


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If you made it through all of that self-conscious literary bean-flicking, please be rewarded with Jon Stewart eviscerating Jim Cramer on The Daily Show, one of the finest pieces of monstering I have ever seen. If I grow up to have even a tenth of the style, journalistic integrity and sheer nailbiting sense of justice that Stewart has in his index finger, I may die happy. No, I probably won't die happy, but I'll definitely die smug, and as anyone who went to private school knows, that's the important thing in the end.