George Orwell, channa massala and socialism

By Paul Richards

In 1945 Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, Victor Gollancz and George Orwell attempted to establish a “League for the Dignity and Rights of Man”. They failed to make it fly, although some of the ideas surfaced 20 years later in Amnesty International. Orwell’s contribution, as befits the greatest writer of the 20th century, was to draft a manifesto.

I know all this because the other night I found myself alone in a curry house with my battered undergraduate copy of Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell. Like all the best visits to a curry house, this one revealed an essential truth. I came across 49 words written by George Orwell, but unpublished in his lifetime, which express perfectly what Labour should be all about.

Orwell always advised writers to keep it short and simple, but to distil centuries of debate about the meaning of socialism and the role of the state is some achievement. Orwell wrote that the main function of the state should be:

1) To guarantee the newborn citizen his equality of chance

2) To protect him against economic exploitation by individuals or groups

3) To protect him against the fettering or misappropriation of his creative faculties and achievements

4) To fulfil these tasks with maximum efficiency and a minimum of interference

Read it again.

You are struck by the economy of language and directness of meaning. By the 1940s, Orwell had succeeded in his life’s ambition to make political writing into an art. You should also be struck by the simple exposition of complex ideas. His first point “to guarantee the newborn citizen his equality of chance” anticipates endless debates about the nature of equality. It sounds to my ears like a more comprehensible version of what James Purnell and others have been calling “equality of capability.” (A phrase which Orwell would immediately have denounced as “barbarous”.)

If you read point one alongside point three, which demands that our ‘creative faculties’ be unfettered, you can see the socialist view of human nature: that human beings contain almost limitless amounts of creativity, imagination, decency, altruism and love, but inhuman social systems drive people into venal competition, soul-destroying work, ugly buildings and dangerous streets.

Orwell’s final demand “to fulfil these tasks with maximum efficiency and a minimum of interference” is as fresh as a daisy. “Maximum efficiency” is the current cri de coeur from the political class. “Minimum interference” places Orwell firmly in the camp of the libertarian socialists who warned about the danger of an over-mighty state and the stifling of the individual. In the era of Stalin, this was more than a theoretical concern. In these times, with the limitations of Labour’s central targets and lever-pulling ministers laid bare, it speaks too to our own needs.

I am going to make Orwell’s four points into a postcard, and send it to every current Labour minister, to serve as their guide to the final months of this Parliament. As we draft the manifesto for the fourth term, we could do worse than to test every policy against Orwell’s rubric.

A final, and melancholy thought: how we miss Bernard Crick. His book on Orwell is surely one of the best ever political biographies, and Crick’s writings on socialist values and politics must earn him a place on the pantheon of great and influential socialist writers, alongside his literary hero George Orwell.