Gerald Warner: Statue of George at the BBC would be truly Orwellian

‘OH NO, Joan, we can’t ­possibly. It’s far too left-wing an idea.” That, according to Joan Bakewell, is how Mark Thompson, ­director-general of the BBC, dismissed her suggestion that a statue of George Orwell, a former employee of the Corporation, should be erected outside the new Broadcasting House in Oxford Circus. If there is one thing the BBC will not countenance it is left-wing ideas.

Or, more specifically, it will not entertain a certain type of left-wing idea. It was disingenuous of Lady Bakewell to imagine the Corporation would welcome on its premises a statue of the man whose employment there inspired him to invent the Ministry of Truth and Room 101 (his office at the BBC). The contemporary BBC’s ­medium of communication is Newspeak, its preoccupation the elimination of Thoughtcrime; so it can hardly be expected to commemorate the man who so ­forensically satirised those attributes of the authoritarian Left. Orwell, or Eric Blair – to give him his real name – belonged to the non-authoritarian Left, an existence as lonely as a Coatbridge Protestant.

Among the BBC journalists who helped to raise more than £60,000 towards the proposed statue of Orwell were Andrew Marr and James Naughtie. It is amusing to speculate what Orwell would have thought of those two self-satisfied Jocks – nobody does sanctimony better than Naughtie, apart from the Dimbleby ­dynasts. It was Naughtie who famously asked, on the Today programme on 2 March, 2005: “If we [sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor?” The following year, during a navel-gazing seminar for BBC apparatchiks, Andrew Marr complacently observed that the Corporation “is not impartial or ­neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban ­organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

This analysis was noted with interest by those present, who returned to their desks at the Ministry of Truth, fortified by this exercise in self-awareness, to resume business as usual. The question is not whether Orwell deserves a statue at the BBC but whether it would be an affront to the memory of this inveterate teller of truths to have his image fronting one of the most mendacious and hypocritical organisations on Earth. As to Orwell being left-wing, it was an identity he embraced, despite the unattractive bedfellows it inflicted upon him. He was never immune to the delusions of socialism: his misplaced sympathy for the murderous POUM in Catalonia and the absurdities of anarchism were a reproach to his intellect; but his revulsion against communism and brave exposure of its crimes ­established his integrity beyond question.

As a writer, Orwell’s stock in trade was words. He therefore recognised earlier than most people the bastardisation of language that was a principal instrument of leftist subversion of objective reality. Marxists have always been obsessed with linguistics, for a very good reason: if the means of communication can be manipulated, if words can be made to take on a new meaning supportive of the programme of those in power, it will become impossible to articulate views hostile to the regime. In his essay Politics And The English Language, Orwell wrote: “The word ‘Fascism’ has now no meaning ­except in so far as it signifies ‘something not ­desirable.’ ” Today, in a variety of contexts, notably modern Spanish history, this political illiteracy is constantly exemplified. Orwell’s strictures on the perversion of words such as “democracy”, “freedom” and “justice” have an enduring resonance.

Newspeak is now common parlance, imposed from above. Orwell, who ­deplored the promotion of words with Latin or Greek origins, would have had some interesting observations to make on the synthetic neologism “homophobic”, meaningless in its Greek roots but devised to advance an ideological agenda. Yet, in a contradiction characteristic of the Left, the slang term “gay” is incorporated into statute law, for the same purpose. Thoughtcrime is termed “hate crime”, which in truly Orwellian fashion is ­punished more severely than worse ­offences perpetrated against non-privileged categories of victims.

If Orwell were alive today he might feel chagrined at having failed to invent some of the gems in today’s weasel vocabulary of political correctness. These include manufactured terms such as “sexist”, “homophobic”, “multicultural”; real words whose meaning has been distorted, including “misogynist”, “Caucasian” and “chair” (in a context other than furniture); activities or processes such as “anti-racist mathematics”, “passive smoking” or ­“anthropogenic global warming”; and the catch-all “inappropriate”. Against that ­cacophony of totalitarian gobbledegook Orwell sounds less prescient; but he still deserves a statue in some more salubrious venue than the purlieus of Britain’s ­squalid Ministry of Truth.