Spartacus Blog

Should George Orwell have chosen the title, 2030, instead of 1984? Keir Starmer as Big Brother

In November 1944, George Orwell received a letter from Professor Gleb Struve, an expert on Russian literature, about a book he had just read. It was a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled We. The book had originally been written in 1920-21 but had not been published in the Soviet Union because it was seen as being hostile to the Bolshevik government. It has been argued that it was the first anti-utopian novel ever written and is a satire on life in a collectivist state in the future. (1) Orwell showed interest in reading the book and Struve sent him a copy that had been published in France. (2)

Zamyatin had been a student member of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). He was arrested and sent into exile. Although initially a supporter of the Russian Revolution he began to question the new government's attempt to control the arts. Zamyatin switched his support to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and wrote for Novaya Zhizn (New Life) a journal funded and edited by Maxim Gorky. In one of these articles, he attacked the Soviet government and its Red Terror. Ignoring warnings about the dangers of what he was doing, Zamyatin published the essay, I Am Afraid, where he argued that the attitude of those in authority was stifling creative literature. "Russian writers are accustomed to going hungry. The main reason for their silence is not lack of bread or lack of paper; the reason is far weightier, far tougher, far more ironclad. It is that true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." (3)

Dystopias and Literature

Zamyatin began writing We in 1920. People in this new society called One State, have numbers rather than names, wear identical uniforms and live in buildings built of glass. The people are ruled by the Benefactor and policed by the Guardians. One State is surrounded by a wall of glass and outside is an untamed green jungle. The hero of We is D-503, a mathematician who is busy building Integral, a gigantic spaceship which will eventually go to other planets to spread the joy of the One State. D-503 is happy with his life until he falls in love with I-330, a member of Mephi, a revolutionary organization living in the jungle. D-503 now joins the plot to take over Integral and use it as a weapon to destroy One State. However, the conspirators are arrested by the Guardians and the Benefactor decides that action must be taken to prevent further revolts. D-503 like the rest of the people living in One State, is forced to undergo the Great Operation, which destroys the part of the brain which controls passion and imagination. (4)

Yevgeny Zamyatin secretly distributed copies of We through literary circles. He was warned by friends that attempts to publish the book in the Soviet Union would lead to his arrest and possible execution. Zamyatin knew that he could not be published in the Soviet Union, but he managed to smuggle a copy of his manuscript abroad. An English translation of the novel was published in the United States in 1924. Three years later a Russian language edition began to circulate in Eastern Europe. The publication of We brought fierce criticism from the Soviet Writers' Union. (5)

Zamyatin responded by resigning from the Soviet Writers Union with the comment that "I find it impossible to belong to a literary organization which, even if only indirectly, takes a part in the persecution of a fellow member." Zamyatin's plays were banned from the theatre and any books that had been published in the Soviet Union were confiscated. Zamyatin described these events as a "writer's death sentence" and wrote to Joseph Stalin requesting to emigrate claiming that "no creative activity is possible in an atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year." He bravely added: "Regardless of the content of a given work, the very fact of my signature has become a sufficient reason for declaring the work criminal. Of course, any falsification is permissible in fighting the devil. I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men". (6)

Yevgeny Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev (1923)

It appeared only a matter of time before Zamyatin would be arrested and imprisoned. However, in 1931 Maxim Gorky managed to use his influence with Joseph Stalin to allow Zamyatin to leave the Soviet Union. Zamyatin settled in France where he wrote screenplays such as Anna Karenina. He also wrote an unfinished novel, The Scourge of God, a satire on the Russian Revolution. Yevgeni Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in Paris on 10th March 1937. His death was not reported in the Soviet Union. (7)

At the time George Orwell read Zamyatin's novel he was working the Eastern Service of the BBC. His main task was to write the scripts for a weekly news commentary on the Second World War that were broadcast to the people of India. At the same time, he was working on a new novel. Orwell thanked Gleb Struve for sending him the book: "I am interested in that kind of book and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later." (8)

During this period of research, Orwell also read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a novel that had been published in 1932. Set in the 26th century the world has attained a kind of Utopia, in which the means of production are in state ownership and the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is rigorously applied. It is a society where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Biological engineering fits the different categories of workers – Alphas, Betas, Gammas, etc. – to their stations in life and universal happiness is preserved by psychotropic drugs. It is probably no coincidence that the main rebel in the novel is an Alpha-Plus (the upper class of the society) is named Marx. (9)

George Orwell rejected the perversion of happiness, which Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin in We both made the motivating forces as an adequate account of the new despotisms. Orwell saw these as optimistic visions of the future. In one article he wrote in September 1944 Orwell claimed: "Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man's major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable… So you get the quasi-mystical belief that for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless but that someone in space and time will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it is now." (10)

Orwell's view of the future was illustrated in a letter he wrote to one of his readers. "I think you overestimate the danger of a Brave New World – i.e. a completely materialistic vulgar civilisation based on hedonism. I would say that the danger of that kind of thing is past and that we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique who are in effect a new ruling class, though they might be adoptive rather than hereditary. Such a state would not be hedonistic, on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leader-worship kept going by literally continuous war… I see no safeguard against this except (a) war-weariness and distaste for authoritarianism which may follow the present war, and (b) the survival of democratic values among the intelligentsia." (11)

Intellectuals and Dictatorships

Orwell was especially worried about how "intellectuals" would respond in the years following the Second World War. "The interconnection between sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate… Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who gave their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini… All of them are worshipping power and successfully cruelty… The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped. " (12)

Orwell's mood became even darker when his wife Eileen, aged 39, died of a heart-attack on 29th March 1945 in Newcastle under anaesthetic during what was believed to be a routine operation. The statement on her death certificate was clearly meant to absolve the doctors of any blame: "Cardiac failure whilst under anaesthetic of ether and chloroform skilfully and properly administered for operation for removal of uterus." (13)

In a letter that he wrote to his friend, Lydia Jackson, he pointed out: "The only consolation is that I don't think she suffered, because she went to the operation, apparently, not expecting anything to go wrong, and never recovered consciousness… Her death was especially cruel because she had become so devoted to Richard… It is a shame Eillen should have died just when he is becoming so charming, however, she did enjoy very much being with him during her last months of life." (14)

Orwell welcomed the Labour Party victory in the 1945 General Election. He was especially impressed with Aneurin Bevan who had been appointed as Minister of Health and Minister of Housing: "He is more of an extremist and more of an internationalist than the average Labour M.P., and it is the combination of this with his working-class origin that makes him an interesting and unusual figure… Bevan thinks and feels as a working man. He knows how the scales are weighted against anyone with less than £5 a week… He seems equally at home in all kinds of company. It is difficult to imagine anyone less impressed by social status or less inclined to put on airs with subordinates… Those who have worked with him in a journalistic capacity have remarked with pleasure and astonishment that here at last is a politician who knows that literature exists and will even hold up work for five minutes to discuss a point of style." (15)

Animal Farm was published on 17th August 1945. The first impression of only 4,500 soon sold out. As a result of the post-war paper shortage, it was not until November that a second impression of 10,000 copies was printed. That also sold out very quickly and from that time it has never stopped reprinting. Bernard Crick has argued: "Overnight Orwell's name became famous. Orwell-like became a synonym for moral seriousness expressed with humour, simplicity and subtlety intertwined." (16)

George Orwell was upset that so many took his left-wing critique of Stalinism as an attack on Socialism. In an article, Why I Write, published in September 1946, Orwell pointed out: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows." (17)

The Last Man in Europe

In the summer of 1946 Orwell began work on The Last Man in Europe (Nineteen Eighty-Four). He told Humphrey Slater: "I haven't really done any work this summer – actually I have at last started my novel about the future, but I have only done about fifty pages and God knows when it will be finished. However it's something that is started which it wouldn't have been if I hadn't got away from regular journalism for a while." (18)

George Orwell with his adopted son in 1946.

On 10th April 1947, George Orwell, along with his son Richard, and his youngest sister Avril, travelled to the island of Jura where he had rented a remote farmhouse called Barnhill. He had been ill that winter and was later to discover he was suffering from a fibrotic form of tuberculosis. Friends who visited him were amazed by the amount of writing he was doing. His housekeeper, Susan Watson, remembered him working in bed, lying on the iron bedstead in a dressing-gown. "He always returned to work after tea and often continued typing until three in the morning." (19)

The novel took longer than he expected. He wrote to Celia Kirwan that he was still "struggling with this novel" which he had not got on with as fast as he wanted because "I have been in lousy health most of this year, my chest as usual." (20) Four days later he admitted to Leonard Moore that "I am writing this in bed (inflammation of the lungs), so I shan't be coming up to London in early November as planned." (21)

Orwell finished the first draft of his novel at the end of October and at once took to his bed exhausted. He remained in bed for six weeks. Eventually he agreed to be seen by a doctor who told him he needed to go into a sanatorium in Glasgow for at least four months. On 24th December 1947 he entered Ward 3 of Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, near Glasgow. (22) It was confirmed that Orwell had tuberculosis, and he wrote to John Middleton Murry telling him that he had "the disease which was bound to claim me sooner or later". (23)

Orwell was unhappy with the first draft of The Last Man in Europe. He considered it "a most dreadful mess" and thought that "about two thirds of it will have to be rewritten entirely besides the usual touching up". (24) As one of his biographer's Michael Shelden has pointed out: "A large part of the manuscript has survived, and it reveals that this book did in fact go through a long and apparently painful period of revision. Much of it was written in longhand and then typed, and then revised extensively by hand, and then typed again. He was clearly attempting to create a work which was more advanced in every way than anything he had written before." (25)

Orwell was given an experimental drug streptomycin, which had been developed in America in 1944. It had unpleasant side effects: "I am a lot better, but I had a bad fortnight with the secondary effects of the streptomycin. I suppose with all these drugs it's rather a case of sinking the ship to get rid of the rats." (26) In early May he told David Astor, "My skin is still peeling off in places and my hair is coming out, but otherwise… I am a lot better. They let me up for an hour a day now and let me put a few clothes on, and I think they might let me out if only it was a bit warmer." (27)

In July 1948 Orwell was allowed to return to his rented farmhouse in Jura. By November he had finished the novel, though it was in such a disorganised state that a fair version needed to be typed before it could be submitted to the printers. Orwell tried to arrange for a typist to do the work, but it was impossible to make such arrangements on Jura and so he decided to do the entire job himself. This was difficult as the good effects of streptomycin had faded, and he was once again coughing and wheezing in an alarming way. He struggled to type the book sitting up at a desk and often carried out the task on a sofa with the typewriter balanced on his lap. (28)

Once the transcript had been sent to Fredric Warburg his publisher, Orwell agreed to enter the Cranham Sanatorium in the Cotswold hills between Stroud and Gloucester with views right across the Bristol Channel to the mountains of Wales. "The one chance of surviving, I imagine, is to keep quiet. Don't think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of how long I am likely to last, and not just be jollied along the way doctors usually do." (29)

Fredric Warburg began negotiations with Harcourt Brace, the American publishers of Animal Farm. They did not like the title, The Last Man in Europe, as they thought it would reduce sales in America. It was suggested it would be better to give a date for this predicted future. That Nineteen Eighty-Four was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948. It was argued that people were much more likely to buy a book that had a date that would take place in the reader's lifetime. The true date was around about eighty years after the book was written. In the book, Winston Smith, is in a discussion with Syme a lexicographer involved in compiling a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Syme claims the long-term goal was that, by 2050, Newspeak would be the universal language of the Party. (30) The impression is given that this date is not far away. Eventually it was reluctantly agreed to change the title to Nineteen Eighty-Four for commercial reasons. It was chosen as America's book of the month, which at the time was worth a minimum of £40,000. (31)

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8th June 1949 in London and five days later in New York. A year after publication 49,917 copies had been sold in Britain and 170,000 copies in the United States by Harcourt Brace and 190,000 in the Book-of-the-Month Club edition. It never stopped selling. As his biographer, Bernard Crick, pointed out: "How Orwell would have relished such details of the trade, quite apart from the power it gave him of complete financial security, freedom now to write what he liked and when he liked, if he was able." (32)

The book tells the story of Winston Smith, who lives in Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, that has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Thought Police. Oceana is made up of America, the British Empire and most of Western Europe.

There are two other superstates, Eurasia that comprises "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait". Eurasia was formed after the Soviet Union annexed continental Europe following a war between the Soviet Union and Allies. The ideology of Eurasia is Neo-Bolshevism. Eastasia consists of "China and the countries south to it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet".

Orwell wrote about his fears about superstates in the future in an article for The Partisan Review in 1947: "That the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. This seems to me the worst possibility of all. It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilisations of this type might remain static for thousands of years." (33)

This warning in 1947 is still true today. Even after the collapse of communism and the end of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) still exists. Every so often, as with the current crisis in Ukraine, politicians call for increased defence spending, and in the UK, the government has decided to pay for by reducing UK's aid budget from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027, "fully funding the investment in defence", which will rise from 2.3% of GDP. (34)

It could be argued that Orwell's claim that the existence of rival superstates will enable them to use fear to control its citizens. Orwell might well have written this if he was still alive today: "So this drive to military spending is based on a series of lies. It also assumes that an arms race and pivot to military spending will enhance security. The opposite is true. Meanwhile we know who is going to suffer: what is spent on military and ‘defence' will come from the budgets for overseas aid, but also care, education, housing, health and other public services. Here we are facing a vicious cut in disability benefits for some of the poorest in society, threats to local government funding, an unprecedented housing crisis, on top of the impoverishment of pensioners, those with families, the sick and disabled." (35)

Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Orwell was aware that soon after gaining power both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler ordered that school history books should be rewritten. As Nikita Khrushchev said in 1956: "Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything. They must be directed." (36)

Winston also revises past editions of The Times, while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes, which lead to an immense furnace. This job provides him with an insight into how the superstate keeps control over its citizens. As he says in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." (37)

In Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will, which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of the regime. In the appendix to the novel, "The Principles of Newspeak", Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Orwell tells us: "It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech." (38)

Winston begins a secret relationship with Julia, a young woman maintaining the novel-writing machines at the Ministry of Truth: "Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad." (39)

Novel writing-machines made no sense in 1948 but in recent years, with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it has become a reality. Companies such as Grammarly offer a novel writing service. In 2023, Death of an Author, a murder mystery written with the pseudonym Aidan Marchine was published. It's the work of the novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who created the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere. The book's language, he says, is 95 percent machine generated. (40)

Oceania is constantly worried about internal enemies. The main focus is on Emmanuel Goldstein who was a member of the Inner Party and brother-in-arms of Big Brother before rebelling against the government and forming the resistance group The Brotherhood. This character is based on Leon Trotsky whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Every day in Oceania, Goldstein is the subject of the "Two Minutes Hate", a daily programme of propaganda that begins at 11:00 hours; the telescreen shows an over-sized image of Emmanuel Goldstein for the assembled citizens of Oceania to subject to loud insults and contempt. To prolong and deepen the anger of the spectators, the telescreen then shows images of Goldstein walking among the parading soldiers of the current enemy of Oceania - either Eurasia or Eastasia. The Two Minutes Hate programme shows Goldstein as both an ideological enemy of The Party and a traitor aiding the national enemy of Oceania. (41)

Orwell had based Big Brother on Joseph Stalin. Orwell hostility towards Stalin dates back The Spanish Civil War. Despite only being married for a month he immediately decided to go and support the Popular Front government against the fascist forces led by General Francisco Franco. Orwell visited the headquarters of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and obtained letters of recommendation from Fenner Brockway and Henry Noel Brailsford. Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December 1936 and went to see John McNair, to run the ILP's political office. The ILP was affiliated with Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), an anti-Stalinist organisation formed by Andres Nin and Joaquin Maurin. (42)

As Orwell fought with POUM he was identified as an anti-Stalinist and the NKVD attempted to arrest him. Orwell was now in danger of being murdered by communists in the Republican Army. With the help of the British Consul in Barcelona, George Orwell was able to escape to France on 23rd June. Many of Orwell's fellow comrades were not so lucky and were captured and executed. (43)

This upset some pro-communist reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Kate Carr in The Daily Worker described the book as Cold War propaganda. (44) Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote in the Reynold's News that the object of the book was to abuse and stir up hatred against the Soviet Union and placed George Orwell on "the lunatic fringe" of the Labour Party. (45)

Goldstein also is the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a treasonous counter-history of the revolution that installed The Party as the government of Oceania and which slanders Big Brother as traitor of the revolution. James Preece has argued that "Goldstein's book represents various suppressed and ‘evil' books of the past, such as Machiavelli's The Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan and, in particular, the works of Trotsky about Stalinist Russia." (46)

Throughout the story, Goldstein appears only in propaganda films on a telescreen. This is followed by the "Two Minutes Hate" sessions where officials of Oceania scream abuse at Goldstein. Of course, today we do not officially have these hate sessions, but we do have something similar carried out by the media that is owned by wealthy individuals if politicians suggest increases in tax on multimillionaires. For example, consider the daily attacks on Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party. As with the case of Goldstein and Big Brother, the media constantly suggested that Corbyn was a traitor as he supported Putin. Yet, as Peter Oborne showed in his detailed analysis, "the truth is that no modern politician has been more consistent or more prescient when it comes to Putin than Corbyn". (47)

Research carried out by a team at the London School of Economics on the media treatment of Corbyn concluded: "Our analysis shows that Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism. All this raises, in our view, a number of pressing ethical questions regarding the role of the media in a democracy. Certainly, democracies need their media to challenge power and offer robust debate, but when this transgresses into an antagonism that undermines legitimate political voices that dare to contest the current status quo, then it is not democracy that is served." (48)

The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through telescreens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Telescreens are two-way video devices that are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance. Telescreens are the most remarkable prediction that appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four. " Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by the telescreen; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." (49)

The Surveillance State

No one in 1948 was suggesting that technology would move in this direction. Understandably, Orwell underestimated the technology that would be available to those who wanted to observe our actions. It was reported in 2019 that there are over 6 million surveillance cameras in the U.K. - more per citizen than any other country in the world, except China. (50)

However, it is the collection of our political thoughts that is most disturbing. Today, powerful individuals can observe and record our political opinions via our posts on social media. This enabled Keir Starmer to make sure that Labour Party members on the left did not become candidates in the 2024 General Election. (51)

Ruby Lott-Lavigna claimed in the journal Open Democracy that left-wing members of the Labour Party were not allowed to become candidates because of their posts on social media. For example, Maurice Mcleod, was told by the National Executive Committee (NEC), that it was not going to be on the candidate list because he had liked a tweet by former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas a few years ago. One reason given for the exclusion of would-be Milton Keynes candidate Lauren Townsend was that she had liked a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon. Former postal worker Matt Kerr, who had previously run for deputy leader of Scottish Labour, was blocked in Glasgow South West after due diligence found he had tweeted in support of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet members who had posted sexist and racist messages on social media were allowed to stand. (52)

One left-wing Labour MP who wanted to remain anonymous commented that the control over the selection of candidates was "the most fundamental attempt to change the DNA of the Labour Party in its entire history". This is the same party that has been the main vehicle of change in our society. This goes to the main point of Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Orwell pointed out in a letter to Francis A. Henson: "My recent novel is not intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism." (53)

George Orwell was a left-wing member of the Labour Party, and I imagine Orwell would have been horrified by the knowledge that the leader of the party would use the latest technology to make sure that people with opinions similar to Orwell's, would not be allowed to become members of parliament. Orwell was always suspicious of politicians and as he told his friend Leonard Moore. "I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, I believe that something resembling it could arrive." Orwell saw the book as a warning rather than a prophecy. (54)

When Edward Snowden addressed the world in 2013, after unveiled the extent of the surveillance state in the United States, it was to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four he turned: "George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us – are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be." (55)

If it was possible for Starmer to use technology to make sure Labour Party MPs thought like him, it is clearly possible for any government to discover the political opinions of its citizens. A couple of years ago I met a man on holiday who used to work in counterintelligence. He was one of those who was involved in doing security checks on people who had applied to join the service. I asked him about the process, and he said they relied overwhelmingly on people's social media posts and the organizations they joined while at university. In this way the security services could guarantee that the people you employed held mainstream views.

Is it possible that in the future that security checks will be done on all our citizens and these will used when anyone applies for jobs. This would be like the system employed in China. In 2003 China introduced a new electronic Resident Identity Card for everybody over the age of 16. A Chinese Resident Identity Card contains information like the holder's name, photo, gender, date of birth, ethnicity, permanent residence address, and an 18-digit identification number. These electronic cards store vital information for all 960 million eligible citizens on chips that the authorities anywhere can access. It made it much easier for the government to monitor political or religious dissidents. (56)

According to Jayant Mundhra: "The real turning point was the introduction of the Social Credit System in 2014. While controversial, this concept was designed to link digital identity with social behaviour, governance, and economic activities. This system uses a complex algorithm to assign citizens a social credit score based on various factors, including their financial creditworthiness, online behaviour, adherence to traffic laws, and social interactions. Individuals with high scores are rewarded with benefits such as easier loan access and faster government service approvals. In contrast, those with low scores may face restrictions on travel, employment opportunities, and access to social services." (57)

The Chinese government has been strengthening its tight control over the Internet and digital communication. In 2017, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a new regulation, which imposed restrictions on the production and distribution of online news. The regulation required all platforms, such as online blogs, forums, websites, and social media apps, to be managed by party-sanctioned editorial staff. All people who post must use their real names that is verified by their mobile phone numbers. (58)

In China citizens can be detained for comments posted on social media. This information is then put on their Identity Cards. Amnesty International reported that in July 2023, Kamile Wayit, a Uyghur university student, was found guilty of "promoting extremism" for posting a video about the A4 protests on the Chinese social media platform, WeChat, and she was sentenced to three years in prison. (59)

As of 2019, it was estimated that 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras of the "Skynet" system were being used in mainland China. State media in China claim that Skynet is the largest video surveillance system in the world, utilizing facial recognition technology and big data analysis. China now supplies surveillance technology to most of the world and believes it is in control over the mass surveillance industry. (60)

China is leading the way in the integration of digital identity into everyday life, potentially leading to a fully digital society where identity, credit, and social behaviour are interlinked. With the employment of Chinese technology and the use of information gained from social media companies we are close to becoming the type of society that George Orwell warned us about in his book about life in the first half of the 21st century.

Several critics on the left were upset by the fact that in the book Big Brother had introduced the ideology of "Ingsoc" (a Newspeak shortening of "English Socialism"). Even his publisher, Fredric Warburg, was shocked by this and soon after the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four landed on his desk he fired off an internal memorandum stating that: "The political system which prevails is Ingsoc = English Socialism. This I take to be a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally." He added that the book was worth a million votes to the Conservative Party and could plausibly be issued with a preface by Winston Churchill. (61)

Orwell responded to Warburg's complaints that current members of the present British government, such as Clement Attlee, Richard Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan would never willingly sell out socialism, because of their experiences of the 1930s. However, he did fear that in future, Labour politicians would emerge who would find authoritarianism attractive and would be willing to use technology to gain complete control over the party to stop members from challenging the power of the leadership. (62)

Is it possible that George Orwell was predicting the rise of someone like Keir Starmer. We now have the technology to create the world envisaged by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Starmer also has a large majority in Parliament who have been selected as MPs because of their willingness to be loyal to his leadership. We should watch closely Starmer's relationship with the dominant tech companies in the United States, GAFAM - Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft) who now seem to be Trump supporters. (63)

In March 2018, Rachel Reeves seemed to be aware of this problem and in a speech she argued: "It has been the monopolies of the new platform capitalism – Google, Facebook and Amazon – they have been the most voracious exerting monopoly power over knowledge and information; blocking competitive markets; avoiding taxation; extracting and commodifying information about the personal life and identities of consumers… and subjecting their employees to levels of control and injustice that should shame us all." (64)

In August 2022 Jonathan Reynolds (shadow business secretary) and Rachel Reeves announced that a Labour government would increase the Digital Services Tax, a levy on the income of online companies like search engines and social media platforms, from 2% to 10%, saying the income would be used to fund a reduction in tax paid by small businesses. However, the day after Reynolds and his wife attended Glastonbury festival in June 2024 as guests of YouTube, which is owned by Google, it was announced that Labour had ditched its proposal to increase the Digital Services Tax. (65)

Rachel Reeves also lost her fears of the power of the top tech companies. Once in government she announced that Doug Gurr, the man who used to run Amazon UK, was to be the new chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority. (66)

On 21 st January 2025, Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander announced the introduction of the GOV.UK Wallet and App as a means "to simplify access to services and documents." Citizens will be able to carry government-issued ID documents, like their driver's license or passport, directly on their phones. Alexander stated: "This is a game changer for the millions of people who use their driving licence as ID. The innovation puts power back in the hands of the people, making everyday interactions faster, easier, and more secure. We are delivering on the Plan for Change by making public services work for everyone." (67)

Despite the benefits, Chiara Castro, Director of UK-based privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch is concerned by the huge amount of personal information that will go into the app. "The Government is putting Big Brother in your pocket with a new app to access all your identity documents and more," she warns. The government assures that the "technology will make use of security features that are built into modern smartphones, including facial recognition checks similar to those used when people pay using a digital bank card…. The addition of our facial recognition data makes this sprawling identity system incredibly sensitive, intrusive, and a honeypot for hackers." (68)

Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, is a great advocate of this new system. Kyle said the new app would be voluntary and paper documents would continue to be used but added that he was striving to make the app's convenience so "compelling" that people would consider its use "unavoidable". These wallets include proofs of right to work in the UK, rights to benefits, and DBS certificates, which employers use to check the criminal record of someone applying for a role. The technology will include biometric security such as face scans. Critics claim this is a "launchpad for a mandatory ID scheme". (69)

James Baker, the campaigns manager at Open Rights Group, said: "Is there going to be pressure for the app to become the portal that you have to interact with the government through? Do you end up in a world where it's meant to be voluntary but it becomes so widely accepted that you can't live without it? One future problem is it ends up evolving into a national identity database where every interaction is tracked, which has considerable privacy implications." (70)

Is it possible that Keir Starmer wants to eventually introduce compulsory electronic identity card system based on the model being developed by China? I suspect that if this was suggested by Starmer as a way of dealing with illegal immigration and so called "benefit cheats" he would have the support of the mainstream media, Labour Party loyalists and right-wing politicians and Orwell's prophecy will become close to reality.