Opinion | What Orwells 1984 says about the derelict state of contemporary Britain

A new novel called Julia is coming out. I think I will order it online. It sounds intriguing. Apparently it’s a companion piece to George Orwell’s 1984, but told from the perspective of Winston Smith’s equally ill-fated girlfriend. It was approved by the Orwell estate. In any case, the copyright period for the classic novel recently expired. The estate probably just bowed to the inevitable.

I read 1984 in high school. It didn’t make much of a political impression, but I did remember being shocked by Smith when he couldn’t stand the prolonged torture and screamed, “Do it to Julia!”

That has been, in a sense, a grim lifelong lesson for me. Death is easy. It’s easy to die for someone you love dearly. It’s something else to face primal fear mixed with physical pain. Sooner or later, everyone breaks and betrays. It all depends on your pain and fear thresholds. Mine, I think, are extremely low because I am a coward. At least with Smith, Big Brother had to torture him for a long time before breaking him by threatening him with deranged hungry rats. For me, you probably just have to show the instruments.

Later, when I was older, I much preferred and admired Orwell’s essays; his novels, not so much. The essays are his real masterpieces. I especially love his detailed instructions on how to make the perfect English tea. (Yes, it works, but it’s not my cup of tea, so to speak. I don’t drink milk.) You learn the famed Orwellian, allegedly British, “common sense” – which is actually very rare – that cuts through political or ideological drivel from his essays, not his novels, which have been popular and are heavily promoted mostly because of their Cold War ideology.

Given the current “woke” culture in Britain, and across much of the Western world, that sort of “common” sense is extinct, if it ever existed. There are fashionable intellectuals such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Jordan Peterson who have claimed to be his spiritual heirs but don’t believe the fakes!

Anyway, I have started scanning through 1984 quickly to prepare myself for Julia. Oh boy, how prophetic! Sorry, I am not thinking about that totalitarian stuff; I actually think Orwell has been anything but accurate about that. (Read Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism.)

I am thinking about his descriptions of the physical state of derelict London in the book, which resembles the accelerating urban decay in the more rundown sections of the capital and across Britain today.

“The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,” Orwell wrote. “It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.

“This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London … Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions.”

The real Truman Show of a BN(O)er and his family

Prophetic is the wrong word. Orwell was actually describing London in 1948. How could he have known much of his country in 2023 would revert to the old state of the immediate post-war years?

Today, more than 150 schools across Britain are deemed so structurally flawed and dangerous that they have been ordered shut. But it’s not just schools. Hospitals, courts, prisons and public housing have all reported the widespread danger of falling concrete and unsound structures. The once-respected National Health Service has a hospital maintenance backlog of £10.2 billion (HK$97.1 billion) without committed funding.

Two years before a terrorism suspect escaped last month from London’s Wandsworth prison, an official report described the facility as “crumbling, overcrowded,” and “infested with vermin’’. On the day of the escape, 40 per cent of the prison workforce were absent.

Public infrastructure problems in Britain are staggering; they are practically third world. Meanwhile, water companies and government officials ignore spilling sewage into rivers and the sea; the rail system is rarely on time.

England’s public councils are going bankrupt like falling dominoes. Birmingham is just the largest such local authority in Europe to have gone bust; other bankrupt councils include those in Croydon, Northamptonshire, Slough, Thurrock and Woking. Many others, including the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, are expected to follow suit. Perhaps the late queen was lucky not to have to see the downfall of such a blue-blooded council.

“The budget is currently showing an overspend of £7.3m for this year, and £6.2m for 2024-25,” it said.

“Council debt is standing at £203m, which is high relative to the size of the council’s budget. Rising interest rates have increased the costs of servicing this debt, with interest payments forecast to reach £8m this year and £14m in 2024-25.

“Low levels of General Fund reserves (£10.2m) limit the council’s ability to absorb unexpected budget pressures. A total of £5.8m of high-risk savings were included in the 2023-24 budget, of which £2m are at risk of proving undeliverable.”

That sounds dire.

Given the spreading state of dilapidation, Orwell would not have been surprised by the horrible tragedy at the Grenfell Tower in 2017 in which substandard maintenance caused a fire that killed 72 people in west London. It was the worst residential fire since the Luftwaffe bombed the capital during the second world war.

For BN(O)ers reading Orwell now, I wonder whether they prefer the totalitarianism described in Hong Kong or rather the crumbling state of housing, and public facilities and services all around in Britain.

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