According to George Orwell in 1941:
England Your England
~ National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling.
~ Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’.
~ We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans.
~ Why is the goose-step not used in England? It is not used because the people in the
street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
~ There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.
~ Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.
~ England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis.
~ England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.
~ It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.
~ It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.
~ A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
~ Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale.
~ After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human
being in these islands could be ‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case.
~ This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.
Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough,
but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed.
~ The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.
~ The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal
stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
Shopkeepers at War
~ What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism – that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned
privately and operated solely for profit – does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point.
~ The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new men, newideas – in the true sense of the word, a revolution.
~ England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory.
The English Revolution
~ In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism. In particular it was interested in the maintenance of the British Empire, for the wealth of England was drawn largely from Asia and Africa.
~ To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been open.
One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before, which meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism.
Another was to set the subject peoples ‘free’, which meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in the British standard of living.
The third was to develop a positive imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics.
~ But the Labour Party’s history and background made this impossible. It was a party of the trade unions, hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in imperial affairs and no contacts among the men who actually held the Empire together.
~ The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of Fascism is enormously greater. In one country after another the Communists have been rooted out by their more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the English-
speaking countries they never had a serious footing.
~ I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:
1. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.
2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.
3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.
4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over.
5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented.
6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers.
~ The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy.
~ Education. There are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy
of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability.
~ At present, public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class in return for the right to enter certain professions. I
~ It is true that that state of affairs is altering. The
middle classes have begun to rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another year or two.
~ The evacuation is also producing certain minor
changes. But there is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to weather the financial storm longest, will survive in some form or another as festering centres of snobbery.
~ As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and in many cases
their educational level is actually lower than that of the elementary schools.
~ They merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself responsible for all education, even if at the start this were no more than a gesture.
~ We need gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education it deserves.
~ A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the war:
Come the four corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true.
~ By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a
compromise, salvaging ‘democracy’, standing still. Nothing ever stands still.
~ We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe
that we shall go forward.
