Booking for Eric

THERE has been discussion in The Scotsman about the politics of “George Orwell”. Like many thoughtful people, Eric Blair changed his political mind during his lifetime.

Son of a Scottish father and French mother, he elected to become “English”, as his pen name made clear. However, he soon rejected imperialism and by the time he was fighting in Spain was 
attached to an anarchist group. He was anti-fascist and subsequently anti-communist. 

Towards the end of his life, writing in Jura, the book Nineteen Eighty-Four was strongly against the great power blocs, and specifically their oppression of the common man. It seems to me that if he had survived tuberculosis he might, in old age, have become a proponent of localism, 
and joined that other political gadfly, Hugh MacDiarmid, in the Scottish National Party.

Iain WD Forde

Main Street

Scotlandwell

Kinross-shire