BY STEWART SLATER
A useful rhetorical power move in any conversation about the future is to nod sagely and say, “Well, of course, Huxley’s vision was more accurate than Orwell’s”. Not only does this tell your companions that you have read at least one book which does not feature regularly on the GCSE English syllabus, but the “hedonist nihilism” (in Christopher Hitchen’s words) of Brave New World permits plenty of opportunities for sneering at the less sophisticated with their diet of fast food and reality television.
But books from the past do not need explicitly to aim to describe the future to tell us something about the present. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme. What was relevant in decades past may still be relevant today. And so, allow me to offer an uber-power move for future dinner parties, “Neither Orwell in 1984 nor Huxley were particularly accurate, but Animal Farm was pretty bang on.”
Conceived as a satire on Stalin’s Soviet Union (so thinly disguised it was rejected by several fellow-travelling publishers), Orwell’s tale tells the story of a farm on which the animals throw off their human masters. After a brief period when society is organised along the principles of the clearly communist “Animalism”, the pigs take over, setting themselves up as a leadership class with special privileges; life for the other animals, despite the initial promise of the revolution, differing little from what they experienced under human rule. By the end of the novella, although everything has changed, nothing has changed – “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”.
Orwell was a serious man, and we may reasonably doubt whether, had he been alive today, he would have been a fan of Taylor Swift. However, the furore over tickets to her concerts in the summer gave me a flashback to the Etonian seer and, since then, I have been unable to shake it off.
Coming under pressure on a chat show, a cabinet minister deployed the novel (and, to be fair, only once used) defence that members of the government work hard and thus deserve rewards unavailable to the common masses. It helps them help you, you see. People should want them to take freebies. Or, as Orwell put it:
Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”
Concert tickets are, of course, not sufficient in themselves to keep the government in tip-top governing form. They need offices which are congenial and decorated to their taste. They need personal photographers. They need to travel by private plane. Like Orwell’s pigs, which start to walk upright and carry whips, they need, it transpires, a whole raft of things for which they condemned their predecessors. The creatures outside looked from pig to man…
Still, it will all be worth it in the end. Just as the pigs plan to build a windmill to benefit the animals – heated stalls, electric light, running water – so too the government will invest to make the country better for its hard-working residents. And they will work hard – in the case of the animals to build the structure, in the case of the people to pay the taxes to fix public services. The pigs, of course, do not get involved in the hard labour of construction and the government’s members will pay no more to fund their new Jerusalem – the budget was so constructed that a cabinet minister will pay no more tax despite ranking well within the top 1% of earners. Not all broad shoulders, it appears, are as broad as others…
This is, of course, as it should be. For if work is good, public-sector work is better. It is right that those who do not selflessly devote themselves to the common good should compensate those who do. Not just the pigs (Labour ministers), of course, but the dogs (unionised public sector workers) who support them. They are a better class and deserve more than the others who might selfishly pursue their own interests.
The windmill is built in the book but just as GB Energy will not, it now transpires, reduce bills, it does not bring the benefits promised. There are no heated stalls or electric lights. This is, however, a good thing. For animals are easily corrupted, prone to believe they desire things which will prevent them leading the simple, austere lives they actually need. Things like private schools, foreign holidays, meat and, perhaps eventually, electricity on demand. It is not that the pigs tell the other animals how to live their lives, merely that they remove their options, leaving them with no choice but to “suck it up”.
I could go on. Those of a Corbynite disposition may see in their leader’s exile a hint of Napoleon’s purge of Snowball. Those who remember that National Insurance was not going to rise, that Sir Keir was “a friend” of his defenestrated boss and that tuition fees were going to be scrapped may raise a smile at the regularly revised slogans on the side of Orwell’s barn. Those surprised that a former writer for the British section of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency now wears suits costing thousands of Lord Alli’s pounds may see an echo of the pigs deciding to wear clothes like humans. The injured Boxer being sold to the knacker’s yard instead of being sent to the hospital for expensive treatment certainly casts an interesting light on assisted dying in a socialised healthcare environment…
This is not to suggest, like some of the shriller commentators, that we are becoming the Soviet Union nor that Starmer is the reincarnation of Stalin. Look across the Channel. Eurocrats earn tax-free salaries in highly taxed countries. They seek to discourage polluting travel while jetting to every global summit known to man (both the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council attend G20 meetings) and moving the location of their Parliament every six months. Look across the pond, where the new President is looking to purge the civil service of his opponents, gut higher education and slash taxes by imposing tariffs. Political power is, and has always been, about giving benefits to your in-group paid for by your out-group.
When Orwell chose to parody the Soviet Union, he was not poking fun at a unique phenomenon, he was merely attacking an extreme expression of a universal phenomenon. Stalin was not unusual in seeking to benefit his clique and punish his opponents, he was unusual in the small number he included in the former, the large number he consigned to the latter and the lengths he was willing to go. Whereas 1984 and Brave New World rely on society and technology changing in specific ways to come true Animal Farm merely needs people to stay the same. We all put our interests ahead of others and, as economists such as James Buchanan have shown, bureaucracies put the interests of their members ahead of their countries.
The Prime Minister’s mother was an NHS nurse (I don’t know what his father did, I don’t think he has ever said). The Chancellor’s parents were teachers in state schools. So, if you take your pay cheque from the government, well done. You’re a pig and you’ve got five years in the farmhouse drinking whiskey. If you don’t, well bad luck, you’re just an animal. And you’re going to be farmed.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.