Last month, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, claimed to have been opening one of the ‘48 new hospitals’ the government has repeatedly said it will build. It later transpired that this was in reality a cancer unit within a hospital that had been in existence for over 20 years. And the unit itself had been announced in 2017, long before the current government came to power and therefore significantly before any ‘new’ hospitals had been announced.
Nonetheless, he persisted. “Looking forward to opening one of new 48 hospitals”, Javid tweeted on 19 August, alongside a picture of himself, covid-masked and pen in hand, as if signing off on the build.
This wasn’t the first time a health secretary had conflated past, present and future tenses in an attempt to deliver those promised new facilities. On 14 May 2021, the then (now disgraced) health secretary, Matt Hancock, tweeted “Today I was at West Suffolk Hospital, one of the 40 new hospitals we’re going to build”. Sorry, Matt, but what?
Government Orwellian newspeak?
By 26 August, things were becoming clearer. The Health Service Journal reported that a Department of Health and Social Care briefing had sent made to all NHS trusts, which demanded that they refer to any building programme, including refurbishments, as a ‘new hospital’.
This led to commentators including Labour’s Jon Trickett and actor and writer David Schneider to invoke George Orwell. Read through the comments below their tweets and you’ll see it more and more. “This is Orwellian!” people say. “Straight out of the Orwell playbook!” “Orwellian! Orwellian! Orwellian!” It has become quite the adjective du jour.
I’ve noticed Orwell being mentioned more and more in news reports lately. The BBC is accused of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ when reporting on Brexit-related issues, seemingly without actually mentioning Brexit itself. The lawyer and filmmaker Peter Stefanovic, whose film of Boris Johnson consistently breaking the ministerial code and lying to parliament has now been viewed 33 million times, often has the term ‘Orwellian!’ attached to it. A campaign for the protection of privacy in telecommunications denounced the proposed reform of data protection in similar terms.
And I’m not sure that this is helpful.
I saw a tweet by Picador Books, commenting on a post by its parent Pan MacMillan, which featured an Orwell ‘Big Brother is watching you’ graphic and said that authors such as George Orwell, were “…decades, or even centuries ahead of their contemporaries”. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the piece said, “foretold a dark future of surveillance that often resembles the modern day”.
And it feels like this notion of being able to wrap government lies and infringements on civil liberties in a neat little word somehow softens the blow, as if it’s all part of a futuristic drama and as such is detached from reality.
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950) used the pen name ‘George Orwell’, and his writing was very much of and about its time. He wrote The Road to Wigan Pier as a commentary on the economic hardships being faced by the north of England in the 1930s; among his essays, Books v. Cigarettes championed reading as a leisure activity, urging people to educate themselves, showing that reading was far from the elitist activity it might be perceived as. These days we might call it a rant against ‘dumbing down’.
At the end of 1936, he set out for Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists. He was injured by a sniper’s bullet, returned to England and declared unfit for service in the Second World War. He worked as a journalist and literary editor, and in 1944 was ready to publish Animal Farm, his ‘fairy tale’ about the Soviets.
However, his originally intended publisher, Jonathan Cape, declined the text, almost certainly on the advice of George Smollet, an official at the ministry of information, who was later identified as a Soviet agent.
And then, of course, there is Nineteen Eighty-Four. While set in a near future, the book explores nationalism, censorship, poverty and inequality, and surveillance, and was based partly on Orwell’s experiences during the Second World War and partly on an imagined Britain being run by the Soviets.
It was heavily influenced by his own dealings with special branch; between 1936 and 1948, he was under surveillance because of his work when researching The Road to Wigan Pier. This book was not the flight of fancy it is sometimes portrayed as. Rather, it was rooted in reality, 80 years ago.
Time to wise up
So what we are really saying in calling today’s politics Orwellian is that it is still going on. The public is still being duped, the politicians are still being duplicitous and corrupt, the truth is still being twisted.
Isn’t it about time we wised up?
