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Wigan Sunshine House

THE FUTURE WE WANT

By Cloe Heaton 

Cloe is an undergraduate student in History and Politics at the University of Nottingham. During the lockdown, like all university students, Cloe returned home, to Wigan. Back at home and seeking ways to support her local community, Cloe began volunteering at Sunshine House Community Centre. During lockdown, the Orwell Youth Prize sought to support young people to write about their experience. Cloe  worked with journalist and Orwell Foundation Trustee Stephen Armstrong to write the below piece.

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Considering the future we want should be exciting. As young people, we are filled with ideas and a desire to do better than those who came before. However,  the outbreak of the coronavirus has changed life in unimaginable ways, and future has never been more uncertain. As humans, we are always moving on to the next thing and failing to reflect on our present situation. At a time when everything must be taken day by day the present has never been more important when considering the future we want.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, I was a university student living in Nottingham. I had made summer plans with my friends and was looking forward to my summer term. This all changed when the university had to close, and I had to move home to Wigan. It seemed as though my life was coming to a complete stop. All my plans were cancelled, and I said goodbye to friends for an indefinite amount of time. However, the pandemic allowed me a new opportunity. There is a community centre in Wigan called Sunshine House where I volunteered during the pandemic. What I learned there has brought the present into sharp and brutal focus.

To many who pass through the doors, the centre is simply a building used for room hire, but Sunshine House is many other things. A collective of groups such as the art class and writing class. Services that change lives; groups for isolated people, support for those dealing with addiction or unemployment and support for ex-offenders. Their goal is to never turn away someone who ask for help. This is so important in towns such as Wigan where options are limited. It is vital to recognise the work of these centres so that they are able to stay open and help those in our most deprived communities.

Sunshine House offers meals and shopping deliveries to local residents – vulnerable adults who had to self-isolate or were too unwell to leave home. For young people like me, it’s hard to imagine being unable to get my own food or shopping. After a week at Sunshine House, I soon realised how naïve I was. In my first week we delivered up to 40 meals each day, a number that has continued throughout the lockdown and as restrictions have eased.

Of even greater significance is the number of adults and families referred to the centre because they cannot afford food. This shocking reality has been made worse by the pandemic but is often unreported on the news. I was discussing the lockdown with a friend, who was distressed over a news report depicting America’s growing need for food banks. When I pointed out I faced the same reality daily at the centre, she seemed shocked – she could not accept our country faced as bad a situation as America. It is too common for our news coverage to focus on the state of other countries, unwilling to highlight the issues facing Britain. It breeds the perception that Britain is doing better than our counterparts. A day working at Sunshine House could show anyone that this is not the case.

 

For instance – recently, one of our delivery drivers delivered a food parcel to a household and discovered children also lived there. With the family having no food left, he decided to help them himself by taking them a full supermarket shop the next day. I helped out on a second delivery. An elderly gentleman called the centre and because he was unable to leave his house to do a weekly shop – we delivered it the next day. Seeing the gentleman so grateful and relieved made me wish everyone facing uncertainty could receive the help they need. The most shocking situation for me was a single-parent family of five who had nothing in their home. Two of the children were toddlers, but they had no food and even lacked nappies. I was particularly relieved when we were able to help them.

Some days it is difficult to comprehend how much help is really needed and how far we are from getting such help to all who need it. However, there are moments that are truly touching. At the heart of Sunshine House is Carol, the receptionist. Many of those who call the centre live alone and have had to self-isolate – they call to order a meal but also for conversation. This may be their only conversation of the day. Carol makes time for all of these people. She knows many by name and what menu items they like to order. It’s a service that can easily be overlooked but makes a huge difference to someone feeling lonely and isolated.

This is perhaps something that was lost in the world before coronavirus; a sense of community. I hear many elderly people describing the strong bonds that once existed in my town. The pandemic has in some ways allowed a return of old feelings of unity. In our response, we have come together to help face an unprecedented situation. In the future I want, the sense of togetherness bred by the pandemic would continue in our communities.

In depicting Sunshine House as a positive place, it makes it easy to assume things aren’t too bad in Wigan. But the centre is in one of Wigan’s most deprived communities. According to Wigan Council, Ince and Scholes, the two towns closest to Sunshine House, are within the top 20% most deprived in England. 25% of residents claim out of work benefits, far above Wigan borough’s average of 15.9%. Deprivation in Wigan is not new. It has existed for years – when George Orwell was researching The Road to Wigan Pier he stayed in Darlington Street, a few streets away from Sunshine House. On the books 80th anniversary in 2017, Wigan MP Lisa Nandy described how while Wigan has many strengths, the biggest its friendly and hardworking people, the town has been rocked by austerity in modern years. Wigan’s council has in fact received one of the worst budget cuts of any local authority in the last decade.

We have to ask why this is happening in modern Britain? In our future, we must aspire to a time where no one is allowed to go to bed hungry. Small community centres do not have the resources to tackle this alone. The struggle against deprivation is largely on a local level, and the issue is seldom raised nationally. Those not exposed to it are allowed to remain ignorant – although lockdown has started to change this to some extent.

Britain’s community centres have for too long been alone on the front line in the fight against deprivation in towns such as Wigan. It would be refreshing for Sunshine House to be free to flourish in the arts or community creativity if the need to fight poverty in their community was alleviated. There should always be a place for community centres, but they should be allowed to nurture the community spirit that has been reborn in the coronavirus pandemic. They cannot do this and serve everyone if future governments do not shoulder some of the pressure in helping our nation’s most deprived.

This was not the summer I imagined yet I am grateful for the lessons I learned. If we are to build the future we want we must learn from today. It is easy to make broad statements wishing for world peace or an end to world hunger. These grand dreams can start in reality if we make real change in our communities. I can use what I have seen to argue for a future where everyone in Britain has access to basic necessities. The deprivation in my town is deeply saddening, and I want a future where this is no longer ignored. We can choose to forget the unity bred by the pandemic and or we can use this difficult time to make a fresh start. Our community centres are already doing this job. We should empower them to show us the way.

 

We asked Cloe some further questions about her experience at Sunshine House

What prompted you to write this piece and who would you most like to read it? 

This piece was inspired by my experiences working at a community centre in my local area during the coronavirus crisis. This was an unexpected role, as obviously no one predicted what has happened in the past few months. I began volunteering not knowing what to expect.

What most shocked me while carrying out my role is the level of deprivation that exists within Wigan. I feel deprivation in working-class communities is not reported enough nationally. I was not aware of the extent of poverty until beginning my volunteering. This is too common. Those not directly affected by poverty are allowed to become ignorant to its presence in our communities. This allows the problem to only get worse. It also puts extreme pressure on small community hubs to deal with the issue alone, while they are also facing other issues such as funding cuts. The coronavirus pandemic was another issue that could not be planned for, therefore the problem was exacerbated further. This prompted me to highlight deprivation in Wigan in my piece to possibly bring attention to the issue, as I feel our country needs to address the ever-growing issue of poverty in our communities.

I feel the experiences described in my piece are important and relevant. My biggest ambition would be for my local MP to read and resonate with what I have written, allowing it to be read by further politicians. This could have a real impact, as for once the stories of those facing deprivation may be seen outside of their communities. I feel it is to stop turning a blind eye to social issues in working-class communities. I would also be thrilled to see my piece read by my community, to highlight the amazing work of Sunshine House and draw attention to the importance of community centres. This was another huge inspiration for my piece. The work of community centres is often unnoticed and underappreciated. Yet they are vital hubs in towns and small communities where services are limited. They deserve to finally get some recognition. If anyone with the influence to do this read my work, I would be delighted.

A lot of university students, like you, were forced to return home during the coronavirus outbreak, what do you think the impact of this was and what would you have done differently? 

The coronavirus pandemic cut short the university terms of students across the country. This was unexpected and cancelled many plans. I was fortunate that upon the beginning of lockdown I was able to begin volunteering at a community centre local to me, Sunshine House. However, many students were not able to secure a position and spent lockdown at home.

I feel students could have been utilised better in providing healthy volunteers. I had many friends say that they would have loved to volunteer in a similar manner to what I was doing but did not know where to go. This was while many centres and businesses were struggling to find help to stay open.

Many students also felt completely demotivated. Universities expected the usual standard of work. However, we no longer had physical access to resources such as the library and our university support network. This made completing work to a high standard difficult, not forgetting some students may not have had positive situations at home where they could work. It became increasingly stressful to complete assignments, stress which was not needed as the pandemic was unfolding.

It felt as though students were forgotten. This is a key thing that could have been done differently. Our whole lives were uprooted, with most having to move very abruptly. Yet university students were hardly mentioned by news outlets or the government. We were allowed to go home and wait for the lockdown to end. I feel this was a failure, as the skills of students could have been well utilised.

Paisley Workshops

The Orwell Youth Prize aims to give a platform to young people from across the UK. The closure of schools in 2020 made it more difficult to engage some young people in the prize – and even more important that their voices were heard.

These pieces were the result of online workshops organised with the help of the Star Project community centre in Paisley. They sit alongside our 2020 winners as equals.


‘My Today is Your Tomorrow’ by Ailsa Kay (18)

I want to talk about me. I want to write about me – because when I talk, no one listens. I am now, and always have been, the invisible girl. I smile when I am supposed to and always behave. My teachers told me I was a dream to teach, my peers ignored me or wished me harm – when they noticed I was even there.

The real world is not a good place for me. I am autistic. Diagnosis at 13 felt like a breakthrough. Suddenly I wasn’t the weirdo who didn’t like change and who couldn’t speak in groups. There was a reason I was different, and it helped, a little bit.

My imagination is a safe, comforting place. I see the world in cartoons, it makes me happy. I draw my emotions instead of experiencing them. I love developing my art skills, I feel proud of myself and people always compliment me on my drawings. I’m told I’m lucky.

In reality, I don’t feel that lucky. The bass beat of a song played in the next house is like a kick in my chest. It scares me, it makes me feel unsafe. I can’t eat in the same room as my family, their chewing and swallowing grates my eardrums and makes me want to cry.

The bright sunshine that people turn their face to, sears my eyes and gives me headaches. Landscapes whizzing by in the car make me dizzy. I sit in the back of the car, with my headphones on – that landscape isn’t for me – it doesn’t understand me.

I eat the same foods because it’s safe, not because I want to. I’m scared of chocking and any new taste that I’m not expecting stabs my tongue and makes me sick. I want to try new foods, I just can’t, it’s too much. Too much hassle, too much fear – too much.

I can’t have labels in my clothes, I rarely buy new clothes. They don’t feel right. It scratches and itches and makes me want to cry. I worry about what people went through to make the clothes. What animals died to make the clothes. Do people know that they are making animals more extinct?!? Every time I get something new, the thoughts go round and round my head. I’m so tired.

The smell of a nice cooked meal or a newly bought perfume brings tears to my eyes. It’s like someone has put a mask on me and is forcing me to only smell that. It’s sickly, I can taste it. It’s unbearable all the time.

So, I sit, self-imprisoned by my disability, in my safe, plain, clean, odourless, soundless room. An invisible girl who doesn’t fit in the world – or maybe the world doesn’t fit me. Ask me what I want the future to be? Safe. Accepting. Understanding.

I think about my disability a lot. My mum calls it my superpower. She says it makes me extraordinary and I can see, feel things that neurotypical people can’t. She thinks I’m a hybrid – the next generation of humans who base decisions on fact not on useless emotion. If she’s right, here’s my facts about what I suspect the future will be like for me.

My safe self-imprisonment won’t be safe anymore. Our world is burning. The apathy and ignorance shown towards the environment will continue to get worse. Celebrities preaching about ecology whilst flying in private jets and wearing a new fashion every day will continue to grow power. For a brief shining moment during the pandemic, their voices were muted, almost mocked, but they’re back. Singing songs from the comfort of their ivory towers about how WE (the little people) should live our lives. Sheeple nodding and smiling and agreeing with them. Massive environmental charities who spend more on their marketing budget than on solving problems are heralded like heroes. I feel despair and confusion. If, like my mum claims, I’m the hybrid, the one with the superpowers to make people see what their doing is wrong how do I change that? How do I change that from my tiny room?

The future I see has forest fires everywhere, no green spaces, the oceans are dried up with plastic, the animals are dead, more (unknown) medical crises will hit us. The air will be unbreathable and full of toxic carbon, the light density will be too bright because we won’t have an ozone layer.

With the trees gone, sound will travel further – you’ll hear it. You’ll hear it then the way I hear things now. You’ll hear the squeal of tyres on the road and honking of horns of angry, disillusioned, dying commuters who are too sick and tired to walk. Because, despite the planet dying, we still have to make money – because that’s what we’re told is important. The masks you hate wearing right now, will be mandatory, restricting your breath forever. Cotton will have failed so the clothes will be scratchy and bring you out in a rash. Your oh-so-special people with a disability will be locked in their house 24/7 as it’s too dangerous for them to be in the world.

Your future is my painful reality now. I am continually assaulted by my senses in a world that doesn’t understand me. But I understand it. I understand it so well that I’m confused why you’re not doing something to make it better. Maybe my only superpower is to beg you to think before using plastic – or buying that new ‘must-have’ leather bag. Maybe you don’t take the car today. Maybe you covet nature over materialism.

Autism may have imprisoned me, but you keep me there. Help me. Stop what you’re doing and protect me. I’m scared.

2020 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils winner and freelance journalist Ian Birrell had this to say about Ailsa’s piece:

“This piece is a wonderful slice of writing. For a start, it is beautifully written with elegance and maturity. Yet it also gets across with immense power the feelings, the mood and the profound strength of a young woman adult with autism confronting the world. I have often heard these sentiments from teenagers with autism and their families, yet rarely seen them expressed with such honesty and clarity. I look forward to reading more from Ailsa in the future.”

 

‘The End’ by Ryan McFedries (14)

I awake from my sleep of never-ending pain, hoping that this nightmare will just end. I look out the window, take a glimpse of Alice Street, fearful, ready for the worst.

Many years ago, an infection threatened our society. It ruined the lives of so many. We tried to stop the spread by keeping our distance, staying clean, but the scientists knew that it wasn’t enough. They claimed they made a vaccine.

It’s hard to escape onto the streets. The only thing worth going outside for is the old abandoned Royal Alexander Infirmary which contains necessities – but the chances of getting supplies were lower than low. It’s a battle to get anything, never knowing what’s going to happen next. I don’t even think about the next day, I deal with one day at a time.

Whoever took the vaccine was never the same. One after another they were injected until the last handful of survivors noticed the effects it had. I thought I was the last person on earth.

I hear an alarm. I conjure my courage to face the dangers of the world in the hope of finding another soul. I made my decision to go out. I leap out of my house onto Alice Street. I see a glimpse of a shadow passing. A cold breeze rustles across my back. I can’t help thinking I’m being watched.

BANG

There is a person in front of me. Something is wrong. Covered in blood with pale skin he charges at me. I’m going to die.  I run and I hear a scream from a tannoy – ‘help, come quickly, the STTC Test lab, come quickly, please.’ Then it cuts off.

I rush as fast as I can. All I can see is figures trying to break into the lab and there was the voice calling ‘over here.’

I look everywhere and notice a figure on the roof. I climb the fence, struggle up at the side and when I get up there’s a woman standing there saying, ‘they’ve mutated.’

She had been working on a solution. She nearly had it before they broke in and destroyed everything. The only thing left was a hard drive. All she needed was time to figure out what went wrong.

We walk and walk until it felt like forever. I’m not giving up on a chance to survive. We both freeze. Someone is watching us, the old familiar feeling.  Something bad is about to happen. We run until we see a light flashing.

The electricity stopped working soon after the government collapsed. There was no power left. The hospitals were no use any more. People went home to die.

We hope for shelter and a way for the doctor to figure it out. We are getting hungry, starting to be vicious towards each other. The danger when too many people want and there’s nothing to be had.

I go in search of food, keeping alert. I notice a shop door, all locked up. I smash the window, scared by the noise. Am I safe? I wait, then look for food. My eyes light up when I see an old freezer and I grab as much as possible. The next thing I know I’m hit in the back of my head.

I awake in a cold room wondering where I am. An uninfected lies before me, ripped apart by something I’ve never seen. I wait it out till morning, As soon as the sun is up, I dash back with the food around my waist. I enter the shelter, dump the food at my feet and fall to the ground, wanting just for this all to end. Silence falls. “I need to get what I can from my lab,” she says.

We start back, past looted shops. There is no noise at all – not even the wind blowing. We get to the lab and, see the door is smashed. The place is destroyed, barely any thing left. We search through the rubble, see the testing facility. The door is wedged shut. There is something inside. I can hear it moving towards us. We run. Again. Forever.

The MSP for Edinburgh Central, Ruth Davidson, commented: 

“Ryan McFedries’ lyrical and imaginative piece, ‘The End’, is a brilliantly bleak depiction of Paisley in an imagined future where a vaccine response to COVID results in a death sentence, is wonderfully evocative. The dystopia he draws shows the best and worst of humanity – feral destruction and selfless attempts to find a cure”.

 

‘Extinction’ by Christopher McFedries (12)

The year 2020 an infection spread across the globe putting us in lockdown, and we are not allowed out for even for a minute.

When I look out my bay window in Alice street not even a soul passes, Hope Hall Church and St Charles Church no more! There bells toll for sorrow and not rejoice anymore.

Shops are no more, so I need to scavenge for food.

I go to Morrisons, Aldi’s and the Co-op for food. Paisley is a complete ghost town. The Paisley Art centre and the Abby are empty. It’s usually full of people with joy in their hearts now sadness its overwhelming.

I keep thinking these lost souls are zombies, but they’re just abandoned. I fear for the oncoming generations kids born into despair and poverty; I wonder how we are going to survive.

How long can we cope?

If we can’t get access to essentials like pasta, beans and toilet roll because of silly panic buying how’s is a baby going to cope? Schools have stopped and they may never resume to full capacity.

How am I support my family? If I’m allowed to meet someone, could they carry the virus too?

The last time anything on this scale was the Spanish Flu – or maybe the time of the dinosaurs. Most people say it was an asteroid but what if it was a virus that killed the giant lizards?

And I wonder – could this be our time? The extinction of the humans?

 

An online workshop – the future we want now

Experience an Orwell Youth Prize workshop (or as close as we can get to it in lockdown) online!

We’ll be adding new segments and resources from writers in the next few weeks, but you can download the first two sections of our online workshop below:

Workshop: 

Segment 1: What is the Orwell Youth Prize? 

Segment 2: What future do we want now? 

Segment 3: What should I write about? 

Segment 4: 

Segment 5:

Extras

Guide to Style

Guide to Starting Writing

Guide to Form

 Future News & Views Worksheet-  Construct your future headline and the article that goes with it!

 

What do our writers think?

We asked Poet Matt Bryden what George Orwell means to him, and how Orwell himself might have written about what’s happening now.

Orwell Youth Prize: Matt Bryden from Mick Callanan on Vimeo.

Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne is a former political commentator of the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. He now writes about politics for Open Democracy and Middle East Eye. He is the author of The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Rise of Political Lying as well as a biography of the cricket Basil D’Oliveira.

I was a strong Brexiteer: Now we must swallow our pride and think again

British Journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news

As a lifelong Conservative, here’s why I can’t vote for Boris Johnson

Peter Oborne clearly and honestly articulated his own rethink on Brexit. Elegantly, yet with strong feeling, he set out the painful reasoning process that led him to shift from support to opposition and what he saw as the failures of integrity and leadership behind his change of heart.”

The Future We Want – Covid-19

 
In the time that the Orwell Youth Prize has been open for entries, thinking about ‘The Future We Want’ has taken on a different significance. Everyone’s world has shifted immeasurably over the last few weeks, and it feels easy to say that the future we want is the past we just had.

Now more than ever, we need the courage to imagine, and the creativity that difficult times bring. We have a big new global challenge, but one that has brought into relief many problems that were already with us: our relationship to the environment, our experience of education and healthcare, the way our government and media communicate, our connection to our communities.

What does the future look like now? What does it mean to write about a future we want? Who’s thinking about the future while we’re all thinking about the present?

Resources for Now

As things shift and change, alongside our existing resources, we’ll be pulling together reading and listening recommendations that may provide hope, comfort, new ideas or thoughtful commentary in this unprecedented period.

At the Orwell Youth Prize, we aim to cover a wide range of perspectives and interpretations from across the political spectrum, if you disagree with an argument made in any of our resources, think about why and how you would counter it, consider language, political bias and the overall aim of the piece.

Orwell for Now

George Orwell lived through tumultuous times. He also went out of his way to be a part of history, volunteering as a soldier during the Spanish Civil War and working for the BBC during the Second World War creating programmes for broadcast in India, which was then part of the British Empire. Orwell’s method – making sure he saw with his own eyes, and forever questioning his own assumptions – meant that he often changed his mind, though he was never shy of arguing for what he believed. Through his fiction, journalism and essay, he was constantly exploring what it means to tell the truth in an uncertain world. Across the Foundation website you can find examples of how his writing can be a source of inspiration now.

The current crisis means we cannot go out and find the story like Orwell did: the story has come to us. But Orwell’s method is just as important. His writing is an example of how there is strength to be found in embracing, and interrogating, change. Our present might at times feel like the lonely, limiting future which Orwell imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, it is worth remembering that Orwell’s present is our past. Orwell was writing when the United Kingdom was reeling from the Second World War, the communist Soviet Union was a world power, everyday life was very different to how it is today. Orwell described Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, not a prophecy. What warning would you give to the future?

‘It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure… It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.’ Nineteen Eighty-Four

‘Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent… At any rate, spring is here, even in London, and they can’t stop you enjoying it.’  ‘Some Thoughts on The Common Toad‘ (1946)

‘The actual differences in social atmosphere and political behaviour between country and country are far greater than can be explained by any theory which writes off laws, customs, traditions, etc. as mere ‘superstructure.’ ‘Fascism and Democracy’ (1941)

 

Coronavirus & The Future

In the short run we are all infected – Liam Stanley (London Review of Books Blog)

The Seven Early Lessons of Coronavirus – Ivan Krastev (New Statesman)

Outlook Podcast (BBC World Service)

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future – Francesca Melandri (Guardian)

Coronavirus futures – where might we be headed and to what kind of new normality – Ravi Gurumurthy, Charles Leadbetter (Nesta) 

Politics

Coronavirus has changed our world. Suddenly we face a stark choice: distance or death – Suzanne Moore (Guardian, Orwell Prize Winner)

Nationalism is a side effect of coronavirus – Gideon Rachman (Financial Times, Orwell Prize Winner)See if your school has signed up to free Financial Times subscription here – or request a free account )

How coronavirus is remaking democratic politics – Philip Stephens (Financial Times). See if your school has signed up to free Financial Times subscription here – or request a free account )

The Coronation – Charles Eisenstein 

 

Consequences 

The Economist’s coverage of the coronavirus – A selection of stories about covid-19 and its consequences  (The Economist) 

Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer? Peter Hitchens (The Daily Mail) 

How Power Profits From Disaster – Naomi Klein (Guardian)

Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract – Editorial Board (The Financial Times) See if your school has signed up to free Financial Times subscription here – or request a free account )

 

The Media 

Fact-Checking – Full Fact

Fact or Fake – BBC Bitesize

How you can fact check claims about the new coronavirus

What makes us believe a false claim? Age, education and cognitive biases all play a part

Work

It is time to make amends to the low-paid essential worker, Sarah O’Connor (Financial Times, Orwell Prize Winner) – Free to read 

Coronavirus means we have to put ideology aside and bring in a universal basic income, Alex Sobel (Independent) 

Youth 

It’s time for an NHS National Service – Aris Rossinos 

Education – When the Covid-19 crisis finally ends, schools must never return to normal – Niamh Sweeney (The Guardian)

Race

Why I’m fighting for an independent public inquiry into the Covid-19 deaths of people of colour -Rianna Raymond-Williams (Gal-dem)

BAME People Are More Likely To Die Of Coronavirus Than White People, Arj Singh (Huffington Post)

 

Environment

After Covid-19, The Climate – Anne Orford (London Review of Books Blog)

Listening: Short Cuts – Habitat – Josie Long (BBC)

A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Culture & Writing

‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope – Rebecca Solnit (The Guardian) 

What our contagion fables are really about – Jill Lepore (The New Yorker)

‘Poetry can be the bridge that connects us during these difficult times’ – Mary Jean Chan (Guardian)

Feeling overwhelmed? How art can help in an emergency – Olivia Laing (Guardian) 

Winter in the Abruzzi – Natalia Ginzberg 

Healthcare

‘As a chronically ill person, I know it is vital we approach coronavirus through the lens of community’ – Lauren Nathan-Lane (gal-dem)

Housing

The idea of sharing a home across generational divides is having a come back – Fatima Hudoon (The Bristol Cable)

Coronavirus UK – Sadiq Khan offering free food & hotel rooms to homeless – Joe Mellor (The London Economic)

Community

This Changes Everything, Neal Lawson (Rethinking Poverty – The Webb Legacy)

WRITING ADVICE

Guide to Style

Guide to Form

Encountering Orwell

The brilliant work of previous winners of the Orwell Youth Prize

If you have any further questions, suggestions, or thoughts, please get in touch with Alex Talbott, alextalbott@orwellyouthprize.co.uk

2019 Winners

On Friday 5th July 2019 at Pembroke College, Oxford, the Orwell Youth Prize announced this year’s winners, runners-up and highly commended entries. The winners were awarded their prizes by Christine Richardson, Senior Communications Manager at Oxford University Press and Bill Hamilton, Orwell Youth Prize Trustee, literary agent and literary executor of the Orwell Estate at A.M Heath.

Congratulations to our winners, runners-up and highly-commended – and to everyone who entered this year and gave their responses to the theme, A Fair Society? Every entry was read by at least two assessors, and the final 6 winners were chosen by the 2019 judge writer Caitlin Moran.

 

WINNERS

Junior Prize

Silke Dale Brosig, Teeth

Francesca Morgan, The Faceless Drug

Tom Warburton, The Man on the Side

Senior Prize

Nadia Lines, The Aptitude Test Kid

Jessica Johnson, A Band Apart

Theo Burman, Why Did You Organise the Protest?

 

RUNNERS UP:

Junior Prize

Sidra Hussain, Equal Importance

Elizabeth Tappin, Sewn Shut

Rosie Lewis, Care in the Community

Megan Robinson, Dignity

Clarissa Murphy, Through His Eyes

Senior Prize

Jazmine Bennett, Disable-Bodied

Asher Gibson, Brick Lane: A Case Against Social and Ethnic Exclusion in the UK

Cia Mangat, Britain

Devki Panchmatia, The Interview

Rhianna Prewett, Out of Body, Out of Mind

 

The following entrants were also highly commended:

 

In the junior prize:

Dean Chughtai, A Fair Society
Umme Hussain, Times Have Changed
Maia Biddle Mogg, Silence
Lidia Goonatilaka, Feminism
Aeneas Bonelli, 2055
Elan Davies, Mama
Tiana Chutkhan, Safe?
Ryan Vowles, The Peasant King
Niamh Weir, The Spike
Amos Miah, Apologies
Conor Holland, Partition of the Heart

In the senior prize:

Kylie Clarke, Her Story
Anna Young, The Fairness Tree
Morgan Davies, Property Law, and the benefits of violating it
Max Kelly, Once
Sally Piper, Discovery of Witches
Ella Tayler, The Britain you do not want to see, but undoubtedly have
Layomi Abudu, Society is as fair as I am white
Jade Van Jaarsveld, We, The Homeless (A Spoken Word Poem)
Isabel West, The Survival of a Moth
Aydin Maharramov, Potato Peel

 

 

Winners of Orwell Prizes 2019 revealed

The winners of The Orwell Prizes 2019 were announced this evening, Tuesday 25th June, at a special event at 20 Bedford Way celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Two panels of distinguished judges, entirely independent and working independently of one another on the inaugural Orwell Prizes for Political Fiction and Political Writing have chosen two books about the Troubles.

This year’s winners are:

  • The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction: Milkman, Anna Burns (Faber & Faber)
  • The Orwell Prize for Political Writing: Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe (William Collins)
  • The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils: ‘Behind County Lines’ by Max Daly (Vice)
  • The Orwell Prize for Journalism: Steve Bloomfield & Suzanne Moore

The Orwell Prizes, each worth £3,000 to the winners, reward the writing that comes closest to achieving English writer George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’. Each winner was presented with a Folio edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, signed by Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son, in the month the novel celebrates its seventieth anniversary. Prior to the announcement, Foundation trustee Arifa Akbar chaired a discussion of the novel’s legacy with Richard Blair, 2018 Journalism winner Carole Cadwalladr and journalist Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth.

The winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, sponsored and supported by Richard Blair and A. M. Heath, is Anna Burns for Milkman (Faber & Faber). Milkman won the Man Booker Prize in 2018 the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. Burns, born in Belfast, is the author of two other novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and of the novella, Mostly HeroNo Bones won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Milkman is a remarkable book — recording a specific time and a specific conflict with brilliant precision but universal in its account of how political allegiances crush and deform our instinctive human loyalties. Its tone of voice — wry and funny, furious and compassionate — is a marvel.

Tom Sutcliffe, Chair of Judges

The winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing is Patrick Radden Keefe for Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (William Collins). Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016 and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation.

This haunting and timely portrait of The Troubles opens with the disappearance of a mother of ten and radiates outwards to encompass the entire conflict, giving voice to characters and stories often shrouded in silence, and leaving an indelible and nuanced impression of the human cost of this unstable chapter of history.

Ted Hodgkinson, Judge

The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing are Tulip Siddiq MP (chair); Ted Hodgkinson, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre; Robbie Millen, Literary Editor of The Times; and Helen Pankhurst, author, women’s rights activist and international development practitioner. The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction are– broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe (chair); Sam Leith, Literary Editor of The Spectator; award-winning author Preti Taneja; and Dr. Xine Yao, Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2019, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was won by Max Daly, Global Drugs Editor at Vice for ‘Behind County Lines’, a ‘street-level investigation into the causes and nature of rising youth drug selling and violence’. Daly’s investigations highlighted the link between missing children and the drugs trade, and the way County Lines has fuelled, and been shaped by, the housing crisis.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is awarded to a story which has enhanced the public understanding of social issues and public policy. Rewarding innovative story-telling, the Prize encourages entries which report across a variety of media, including online, broadcast and print media.  The judges for the 2019 Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils are Rosie Millard OBE, Chair of BBC Children in Need, Sarah O’Connor, Investigations correspondent at the Financial Times, Campbell Robb, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Elle editor, Farrah Storr.

Max Daly’s reporting has brought us the best of journalism – getting under the skin of a difficult issue, giving a voice to people who are not often heard and challenging the assumptions of readers. By showing us the reality and the history of the drugs trade in our towns and cities, he has exposed the complex interactions between familiar problems, such as the housing crisis, violent crime and poverty. JRF is proud to support this prize for exposing Britain’s social evils, which recognises the importance of journalism that unlocks hidden or ignored stories and the ways in which poverty can take a grip of communities.

Campbell Robb, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The Orwell Prize for Journalism was awarded to Steve Bloomfield (Deputy Editor at Prospect) and Suzanne Moore (columnist at The Guardian). Steve Bloomfield’s submitted articles included ‘the inside story of the Foreign Office’s losing battle to find post-Brexit Britain a place in the world’ and profiles of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, while Suzanne Moore’s columns considered attitudes to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the wake of #metoo, the politics of remembrance and the aftermath of the Brexit referendum.

This is the third time in its twenty-five-year history that The Orwell Prize for Journalism has been awarded twice in a single year, most recently in 2016 when FT columnist Gideon Rachman and freelance foreign reporter Iona Craig both received the award.

The journalism that has won these two prizes represents the best of the Orwell tradition, incisive, relevant and human. It also represents the two sides of his journalism: There is Suzanne Moore’s stubborn and brave commentary, and Steve Bloomfield’s forensic research and reporting.

The Judges

The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Journalism are Tim Marshall (journalist, former Diplomatic Editor Sky News and author of Prisoners of Geography and Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls) Sam Taylor (Editor, The Lady) and the freelance video journalist and founder of the Frontline Club Vaughan Smith.

The Orwell Prizes 2019: Shortlists announced

Shortlists for the 2019 Orwell Prizes were announced today, Monday 10th June 2019, including the inaugural Orwell Prize for Political Fiction sponsored by Richard Blair and A. M. Heath and Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

  • The Orwell Prizes aim to encourage excellence in writing and thinking about politics. Winning entries should strive to meet Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. They should be of equal excellence in style and content, and the writing must live up to the values of The Orwell Foundation.
  • Shortlists announced for four Orwell Prizes: the Prize for Political Fiction, Prize for Political Writing, Prize for Journalism and the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
  • The winner of each £3,000 Prize will be announced at the Orwell Prize Ceremony, Tuesday 25th June 2019, 20 Bedford Way, London. Each is judged by an independent panel of judges.

The six titles shortlisted for the inaugural Orwell Prize for Political Fiction are:

  • Glen James Brown, Ironopolis, Parthian Books
  • Anna Burns, Milkman, Faber & Faber
  • Diana Evans, Ordinary People, Chatto & Windus
  • Nick Drnaso, Sabrina,  Granta
  • Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone, Atlantic Fiction
  • Leni Zumas, Red Clocks, The Borough Press

The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction are chair – broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe, Sam Leith, Literary Editor of The Spectator, Desmond Elliott Prize winning author Preti Taneja and Dr. Xine Yao, Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London.

The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, sponsored by A. M. Heath and Richard Blair, has been established to reward outstanding novels and collections of short stories that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative.

Chair of judges for the Political Fiction Prize, Tom Sutcliffe commented:

I think we’ve produced an excellent shortlist which demonstrates the great range political fiction can have — from sharply polemical works with a clear campaigning spirit to books in which the politics work on you almost without your knowledge. We tend to assume that serious political intent has to be at odds with reading pleasure and entertainment; all these books prove that that needn’t necessarily be the case.

The six titles shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing (previously, ‘Orwell Prize for Books’) are: 

  • Oliver Bullough, Moneyland, Profile Books
  • Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River, Bodley Head
  • Norah Krug, Heimat: A German Family Album, Particular Books
  • David Pilling, The Growth Delusion, Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, William Collins
  • Alpa Shah, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, Hurst Publishers

The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing are chair Tulip Siddiq MP, Ted Hodgkinson, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, Robbie Millen, Literary Editor at The Times and Helen Pankhurst, author, a women’s rights activist and an international development practitioner.

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing (previously, ‘Orwell Prize for Books’) is for a work of non-fiction, whether a book or pamphlet, first published in the UK or Ireland in the calendar year preceding the year of the Prize. ‘Political’ is defined in the broadest sense, including (but not limited to) entries addressing political, social, cultural, moral and historical subjects and can include pamphlets, books published by think tanks, diaries, memoirs, letters and essays.

Tulip Siddiq MP, Chair of judges for the Political Writing Prize said:

I’m delighted with our very strong shortlist of books. All the judges agreed that the books this year were of a very high standard and we found it extremely difficult to choose our final six. Congratulations to all the brilliant authors who made it into our shortlist – we have all really enjoyed reading your work.

The seven entries shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils are:

  • ‘Behind County Lines’ by Max Daly, Vice
  • ‘Disabled People and Austerity’ by Frances Ryan, The Guardian
  • ‘Exposed: Hundreds of Homeless Slaves Recruited on British Streets’ by Jane Bradley, BuzzFeed News
  • ‘Glasgow Women’s Strike’ by Eve Livingston, The Pool; Vice; The Guardian
  • ‘Gun No.6’ by Zac Beattie, James Newton, Georgina Cammalleri and Rupert Houseman, The Garden Productions
  • ‘The Presidents Club’ by Madison Marriage, Financial Times
  • ‘The Wolves of Instagram’ by Symeon Brown, Channel 4 News; The Guardian

The judges for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils are Rosie Millard, Chair of BBC Children in Need,  Sarah O’Connor, a co-winner of the 2018 Prize, Campbell Robb, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the editor of Elle, Farrah Storr.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is named in recognition of the task Joseph Rowntree gave his organization to ‘search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil’ that lay behind Britain’s social problems. Now in its fifth year, the Prize seeks to reward journalism that has enhanced public understanding of social problems and public policy in the UK today.

Campbell Robb, CE of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, remarked:

At a time when so many domestic challenges are being overlooked by Brexit and Westminster politics, this shortlist shows how journalists are undertaking outstanding work to shine a light on the challenges and injustices people across the country are facing.

When attention is being diverted, there has never been a more important time for fearless, thorough and dedicated social affairs journalism. I am proud we continue to support this vital prize and I’d like to congratulate all the entrants for making the shortlist.

Rosie Millard, Chair of BBC Children in Need, said:

It is clear from the huge range and quality of entrants that the journalism of today is absolutely not stinting in its traditional quest of shining light into dark areas of society. Campaigning journalism never seemed so strong. Being able to write about horror, and injustice, and evil, with panache and flair seems an impossible task, but these journalists manage to deliver both tasks with aplomb. Of course, this makes the journalism all the more powerful.

The six journalists shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Journalism are:

  • Peter Apps, Inside Housing
  • Steve Bloomfield, Prospect
  • Jason Cowley, The New Statesman; Granta
  • Robert Guest, The Economist
  • Lois Kapila, The Dublin Inquirer
  • Suzanne Moore, The Guardian

The judges for the 2019 Prize for Journalism are Tim Marshall (formerly diplomatic editor, Sky News, author of Prisoners of Geography and Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls) Sam Taylor (editor, The Lady) and freelance video journalist and founder of The Frontline Club Vaughan Smith.

The Orwell Prize for Journalism is awarded to a journalist for sustained reportage and/or commentary working in any medium.

Tim Marshall commented:

Judging this year’s entrants was both challenging and rewarding. Challenging due to having to choose from a wealth of quality and rewarding for the same reason – we could easily have put together the longest short list in history.

Notes to Editors

  1. The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity (1161563) providing free cultural events and resources for the public benefit. Every year, the Foundation awards The Orwell Prizes, Britain’s most prestigious prizes for political writing, to the work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. There are four Prizes: for Political Fiction, Political Writing, Journalism and Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.
  2. A. M. Heath celebrates its centenary in 2019. Their clients have won innumerable literary prizes, including the Man Booker five times, the Carnegie, the Costa, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book, the Somerset Maugham, the James Tait Black Memorial and the Orwell Prize.
  3. Richard Blair is George Orwell’s (Eric Blair) only son and was adopted by Orwell and his first wife, Eileen, in June 1944. After Eileen’s death in 1945, Richard spent much time on Jura with his father as he worked on his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Following his father’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 46 in January 1950, Richard went to live with his aunt, Orwell’s younger sister Avril.  Richard is a trustee of The Orwell Foundation and The Orwell Youth Prize and Patron of The Orwell Society.
  4. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) is an independent social change organisation working to solve UK poverty. Through research, policy, collaboration and practical solutions, we aim to inspire action and change that will create a prosperous UK without poverty.
  5. The Orwell Foundation uses the work of George Orwell to celebrate honest writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives and confront uncomfortable truths. Its aim is to connect with the many constituencies to whom Orwell and his writings are a source of inspiration and to offer a platform for debate and discussion designed to appeal to the widest possible public audience. The Foundation’s partners and sponsors include University College London, the magazine Political Quarterly, Richard Blair, A.M. Heath and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
  6. Since 2016, the Orwell Foundation has been based at UCL, which is also home to the world’s most comprehensive body of research material relating to Orwell, the UNESCO registered George Orwell Archive.
  7. The Orwell Book Prize was founded in 1994; in its 25 year history, fiction has won once. In 2006, the prize was awarded to Delia Jarrett-Macauley for Moses, Citizen and Me (Granta). In 2018, The Orwell Book Prize for Political Writing received 217 entries and The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction received 98 entries.

Our Judge

Caitlin Moran to judge the 2019 Orwell Youth Prize

We are delighted to announce that writer Caitlin Moran is judging this year’s Orwell Youth Prize, the theme of which is ‘A Fair Society?’.

Following Orwell’s example, entrants of the prize are encouraged to draw on their own experiences of the world around them and write in language that is clear, concise and compelling for their audience. The form the writing takes is up to the writer, previous winning entries have included poetry, prose, journalism and short stories. Moran will judge both the junior (aged 12-16) and the senior (sixth-form) categories of the prize and the winners will be announced at the annual Celebration Day on the 5th July.

Moran’s work has often drawn on her own childhood and teenage experiences with humour, wit and integrity and the youth prize is excited to have her on board with this year’s competition.

 

‘If you don’t come from the “right” background or school, it’s hard to know how to break into writing as a career. Who do you talk to? How do you apply?  That’s why I’m delighted to judge this year’s Orwell Youth Prize – as my career started when I entered a writing competition, at the age of 15, so I know just how life-changing awards can be. It might not feel like it, but there really is a whole industry waiting to discover new voices. Please – write something. Show us what you’ve got.’ Caitlin Moran 

Caitlin Moran wrote her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, at the age of fifteen. She has worked for The Times since she was eighteen as an interviewer, TV critic and columnist including, in the most-read part of the paper, the satirical celebrity column ‘Celebrity Watch’. She has won the British Press Awards’ Columnist of The Year, Interviewer of the Year, and Critic of the Year. Her bestselling memoir, How to be a Woman, won the National Book Awards Book of the Year, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and is published in twenty-five languages. The film of her novel, How to Build a Girl, produced by Channel 4 and Monumental Pictures, will be released later this year. With her sister, she co-wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves. She has published two bestselling collections of her journalism, Moranthology and Moranifesto. Caitlin Moran’s latest novel, How To Be Famous, was a number one bestseller on publication in 2018. She is published by Penguin Random House in the UK and HarperCollins in the US.

Caitlin isn’t her real name. She was named Catherine. But she saw ‘Caitlin’ in a Jilly Cooper novel when she was 13 and thought it looked exciting. That’s why she pronounces it incorrectly: ‘Catlin’. It causes trouble for everyone.

About the Orwell Youth Prize

The Orwell Youth Prize is an annual programme for 12-18 year olds culminating in a writing prize. Rooted in George Orwell’s values of integrity and fairness, the prize is designed to introduce young people to the power of language and provoke them to think critically and creatively about the world in which they are living.

For more information and details contact: Alex Talbott, Programme Manager, The Orwell Youth Prize, alextalbott@orwellyouthprize.co.uk

 

 

Darren McGarvey: Re-imagining Beveridge

Darren McGarvey (aka Loki), has experienced poverty and its devastating effects first-hand. He knows why people from deprived communities all around Britain feel angry and unheard.

His book Poverty Safari won The Orwell Prize for Books 2018, and at this special event at this year’s Aye Write festival, he examines the factors keeping people locked in poverty today.

Over 75 years on from the Liberal economist William Beveridge’s influential proposals to reform social welfare, what are the ‘Giant Evils’ of our modern society?

The Orwell Foundation is collaborating with Aye Write to produce this event as part of The New Poverty programme, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

2019 Theme: A Fair Society? – Resources

Do we live in a fair society? What might a fair society look like, and what challenges do we face in trying to create one? 

George Orwell wrote with integrity, truthfulness and fairness about the world around him. Now it’s your turn.

You can write in any form you like: journalism, essays, short stories, blog posts, poems, and plays are all welcome. How you respond to this year’s theme is completely up to you. However, we’ve pulled together a few resources that might help get you started or spark an idea.

George Orwell on Fairness

WHY ORWELL?

‘The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.’
George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

‘Is not England notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor?’
George Orwell (England Your England)

‘Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain pen.’
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)

‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’
George Orwell (Animal Farm)

As the Orwell Youth Prize, we find the man himself is often a good place to start.

Orwell wrote on a wide range of subjects relating to fairness, from economic distress in Britain in the 1930s, to the impact of the British Empire, and the dynamics of totalitarianism. He wrote from his own experience, but he also sought to explore lesser-known stories and perspectives.

It is important to bear in mind that Orwell was writing almost 100 years ago, so some of the language he uses may seem uncomfortable today. Try to think about what has changed and what remains relevant with regards to his subjects. Think too about the writing techniques Orwell uses and the imagery that sticks with you as you read. We have a host of Orwell resources available for you to get your teeth into, and some helpful context on Orwell and fairness to frame his work. Find out more.

 

THE UK TODAY

When we think about fairness and justice in our society, it is hard to know where to begin. Inequality affects individuals in many different ways. Poverty, health, employment, gender, race, education, geography and housing are just some of the key factors that impact inequality. Often, these factors do not stand in isolation but intersect.

Below are some links that explore how these factors are impacting individuals today. We will keep adding new resources throughout the course of the prize being open. This list is in no way exhaustive. Think also about news items you’ve seen, articles you’ve read and what you observe around you.

 

WHERE ARE WE NOW?
WATCH

Stephen Armstrong, ‘The New Poverty. The Beveridge Report: where are we now’ (Verso)

Professor Green: Living in Poverty (BBC -subject to TV license)

LISTEN

Truth and Lies about Poverty, hosted by LSE “Beveridge 2.o” and The Orwell Youth Prize

‘A Northern Soul’ hosted by June Sarpong MBE on Is anyone listening? The Joseph Rowntree Foundation Podcast

INEQUALITY & HEALTH
READ

Stephen Armstrong and Maruxa Ruiz del Arbol, ‘The rise of DIY dentistry: Britons doing their own fillings to avoid NHS bill’ (The Guardian)

WATCH

Darren McGarvey, ‘How childhood adversity can impact learning, health and wellbeing’ (NHS Health Scotland)

LISTEN

Unreported Britain: the nation’s teeth – The Story from The Guardian Podcast

 

RACE & CITIZENSHIP
READ

Amelia Gentleman, multiple articles on the Windrush Scandal (The Guardian)

Mark Townsend, ‘Four black men die. Did police actions play a part?’ (The Guardian)

WATCH 

Kamila Shamsie, ‘Unbecoming British: citizenship, migration and the transformation of rights into privileges’ – The Orwell Lecture 2018 (The Orwell Foundation and UCL)

 

FAIR EMPLOYMENT & WORK
READ

Richard Partington, ‘Four million British workers live in poverty, charity says’ (The Guardian)

Stephen Armstrong, ‘The young farmers who earn so little they cannot afford their own produce’ (The Sunday Telegraph)

Paul Brook, ‘Why working parents are struggling to repel the rising tide of poverty’ (Joseph Rowntree Foundation)

HOMELESSNESS, HOUSING & SHELTER
READ

James Beavis, ‘Spat on and ignored’: what I’ve learned from a month sleeping rough in London’ (The Guardian)

Anna Minton, multiple articles on housing and the city  (The Guardian)

WATCH

Stacey Dooley, ‘The Young and Homeless’ (BBC – subject to TV license)

 

REGIONAL INEQUALITY
READ

Sarah O’Connor, ‘Left behind: can anyone save the towns the economy forgot?’, (The Financial Times)

Juliette Bretan, ‘The North-South divide is getting worse – because London is sucking all opportunity from the rest of the UK’ (The Independent)

 

GENDER & INEQUALITY
READ

Aleksandra Wisniewska, Billy Ehrenberg-Shannon and Sarah Gordon – ‘Gender pay gap: how women are short-changed in the UK’ (The Financial Times)

As told by Kate Lyons, ‘Transgender stories: ‘People think we wake up and decide to be trans” (The Guardian)

 

WRITING ADVICE

Guide to Style 2019

Guide to Form 2019

Encountering Orwell

Don’t forget to take a look at the brilliant work of past Orwell Youth Prize winners too

And if you have any further questions, suggestions or ideas, please get in touch with Alex Talbott, alextalbott@orwellyouthprize.co.uk 

Winners of the Orwell Prize 2018 Revealed

The Winners of The Orwell Prize 2018 were announced this evening at the prizegiving ceremony at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

This year’s three winners each focus on modern Britain, revealing a ‘turn to the nation’ in political writing in the continued wake of the EU Referendum result.

  • Darren McGarvey won The Orwell Prize for Books for Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (Luath Press).
  • ‘On the Edge’, a Financial Times team of Sarah O’Connor, John Burn-Murdoch and Christopher Nunn won The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils for their spreadsheet-and-shoeleather’ report on the relationship between poverty and mental health in ‘forgotten towns’ left behind by the UK economy
  • Carole Cadwalladr won The Orwell Prize for Journalism for her reports in The Observer on the impact of big data on the EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election

The Orwell Prize rewards the writing that comes closest to achieving English writer George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’. Each £3,000 prize was presented by Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son. Each prize is determined by a separate panel of independent judges:

Each year prizes are awarded for political writing in Books, Journalism and the Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The Orwell Foundation, based at University College London, home of the Orwell Archive, is sponsored and supported by Political Quarterly, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Richard Blair.

The Orwell Prize for Books 2018 is awarded to Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey 

Chair of judges, Andrew Adonis said:

“George Orwell would have loved this book. It echoes Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier. It is heart-rending in its life story and its account of family breakdown and poverty. But by the end there is not a scintilla of self-pity and a huge amount of optimism. It made me see the country and its social condition in a new light.”

The judges for The Orwell Prize for Books are politician, academic and journalist Andrew Adonis (Chair), Literary Journalist and Artistic Director of Words and Literature of the Bath Festival Alex Clark, novelist Kit de Waal, and Deputy Life & Arts Editor for the Financial Times Lorien Kite.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is awarded to ‘On the Edge’ by the Financial Times team of Sarah O’Connor, John Burn-Murdoch and Christopher Nunn 

Campbell Robb, CEO of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said:

On the Edge was a piece of vivid, hard-hitting journalism, combining people’s experiences, data and analytic insight to show how so many people are being locked out and left behind by the way our economy works.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is named in recognition of the task Joseph Rowntree gave his organization to ‘search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil’ that lay behind Britain’s social problems.

FT team win for report on the critical links between poverty, mental health and the local economy in Blackpool. “Spreadsheet-and-shoeleather” approach aimed to produce a story that was robustly analytical, yet deeply human at its heart.

The judges for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2018 were Campbell Robb (Chief Executive, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), Editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, Farrah Storr, Senior Fellow at the King’s Fund Nick Timmins and 2017 Orwell Prize Winner Felicity Lawrence.

The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2018 is awarded to Carole Cadwalladr 

Chair of judges, David Bell said:

We had a great set of pieces to judge. Orwell would have been very impressed and reassured , as we were, by their very high quality. I only wish we had had more tabloid entries.

This years winner – Carole Cadwalladr – deserves high praise for the quality of her research and for her determination to shed fierce light on a story which seems by no means over yet. Orwell would have loved it.

The judges for the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2018 are David Bell, Suzanne Franks, Elinor Goodman and Rachel Johnson.

2017 Winners

We are delighted to announce the winners of The Orwell Youth Prize 2017. Congratulations to our winners, runners-up and highly-commended – and to all who entered. We received 178 entries and every entry was read by at least two assessors. Thank you for giving us a chance to read your writing.

The winners were chosen by best-selling and award-winning writer and journalist and Orwell Fellow Nicci Gerrard, who judged the final round of the Prize. Nicci said:

I’ve been bowled over by how freshly and fearlessly these young writers grappled with the subject of identity, finding their own ways of interpreting it, and their own vibrant voices to convey something of its complexity. It was striking how many of them acknowledged the constructed nature of the self, so that whether they were approaching identity through gender, culture, social media, inherited faith or the agonies of Brexit, the question was always there of of what it actually means to be ‘me’.

 

ANNOUNCING THE ORWELL YOUTH PRIZE 2017

 

Winners

Junior Prize

Senior Prize

 

Runners Up

Junior Prize

  • Joe Atkinson, Inconvenient Truths about Political Identity
  • Georgia Balmer, The True Identity of Lisa
  • Adam De Salle, Theft
  • Leah Figiel, The Dream Snatchers
  • George Robinson, Once Upon the Mind
  • Catherine Tickell, Mother, who are you?

Senior Prize

  • Zarah Alam, Monday 15th May 2017
  • Jessica Curry, Pride
  • Richa Kapoor, World Peace
  • Lauryn Kelly, Why left-liberalism hasn’t protected LGBT people
  • Naomi Kerr, Southbound Identity
  • Cameron O’Sullivan, Monsters and Men

 

The standard of entries this year was incredibly high. The following entries, from both categories, were also highly commended:

  • Ashna Ahmad, Hey, Who Stole My Culture?
  • Kate Baird, To Feel, Therefore I Am
  • Charissa Cheong, Generation Blank
  • Alex De Brunner, The Impact of Wanting an Identity
  • Blythe DeBeer, Citizens of Nowhere
  • Flo Ellary, You mixed?
  • Lucinda Hogarth, Angry women full of hope will change the world
  • Felicity Hudson, Are We Now What We Were?
  • Lucy Knight, Uncharted Territory
  • Matilda Lammin, Gender Identity
  • Ambrin McBrinn, A Letter on Identity
  • Lucy McManus, Cold Hands
  • Sasha-Annalies Moore, To Journey in the Dark
  • Lucas Pringle, Teenager. Texan. Undocumented. American.
  • Shaina Sangha, Sets of Numbers
  • Aidan Tulloch, The New Un-curiosity Shop
  • Hannah Wallace, I Can Sing a Rainbow
  • Niamh Weir, #Identity

Announcing the winners of the Orwell Prize 2017

The Winners of the Orwell Prizes 2017 were announced today at the Orwell Prize Ceremony, held at UCL.

The Orwell Prizes reward the writing that comes closest to achieving English writer George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’.

The Winners were presented with their £3000 prize money by Richard Blair, Orwell’s son.

The winner of the Orwell Prize for Books 2017 is Citizen Clem: A Biography of Atlee, by John Bew

Judge Jonathan Derbyshire said:

“Citizen Clem is both a magnificent renewal of the art of political biography and a monument to the greatest leader the Labour party has ever had. It presents us with a man whose socialism was learned, not acquired. Attlee’s career, in John Bew’s telling, is a tribute not to sham consistency or inviolable purity of principle, but to the primacy of politics – what Weber called the ‘slow boring of hard boards’.”

Judge Bonnie Greer commented:

“The timing of The Orwell Prize winner could not be more apt. The political battle in the UK since 1948 has always boiled down to one simple fact: the upholding or the whittling away of what Clem Atlee built. Post-war Britain was literally built by a man who built his own self: a self which was forged by war and the concern for a just and equitable society. ‘Citizen Clem’ will go a long way towards re-balancing the Churchillian narrative that currently dominates us.”

Judge Erica Wagner added:

“A book both magisterial and gripping, this biography of Labour’s unlikely postwar hero offers a portrait of a modest man whose achievement was not modest at all: the building of the modern Welfare State. Revealing both the strength of an individual and the strengths of a society, this is necessary reading in 2017.”

The judges for The Orwell Prize for Books were Jonathan Derbyshire (Executive Comment Editor, Financial Times), playwright and author Bonnie Greer, writer and broadcaster Mark Lawson, and writer and critic Erica Wagner

The winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2017 is Fintan O’Toole

O’Toole was selected by the judges for writing in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the Observer.

Dame Liz Forgan, one of the Judges. commented:

“It’s not often that penetrating intelligence, a keen historical understanding and sparkling prose coincide in one journalist. When he is also uniquely placed to write about one of the biggest issues of the day from an unusual but highly important perspective we are all in luck. 

Fintan O’Toole knocks the usual Brexit arguments about City jobs and fruit-pickers into proper shape by focussing eloquently on the existential implications of the referendum for everyone on the island of Ireland.  If only the whole campaign had been conducted with such style and seriousness…”

The judges for the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2017 were Dame Liz Forgan, former BBC special correspondent Allan Little and journalist, writer and broadcaster Francis Wheen.

The winner of the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is Felicity Lawrence

Felicity Lawrence wins the prize for cross-platform reporting of British social issues and public policy for her reporting of migrant gangwork in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The judges of the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2017 commented:

“Felicity Lawrence’s reporting on migrant gangwork in Wisbech represents investigative journalism at its best and was a clear winner in a very strong field. Felicity persistently pursued this story for several months: her report, which includes voices from the whole community, both victims and residents, draws together a wide range of issues relating to organized crime and migrant labour which have significant, urgent resonance for our understanding of social evils in a post-Brexit Britain.” 

The judges for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2017 were Claire Ainsley (Director of Communications and External Affairs, Joseph Rowntree Foundation) journalist and Front Row presenter Samira Ahmed and Professor Julian Le Grand (Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics).


The Orwell Prize is Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. Every year, three prizes are awarded to the work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’: the Orwell Prize for Books, Journalism and Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.

The Orwell Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, a registered charity (number 1161563) providing free cultural events and resources for the public benefit.

The Orwell Foundation uses the work of George Orwell to celebrate honest writing and reporting, to uncover hidden lives, to confront uncomfortable truths and, in doing so, to promote Orwell’s values of integrity, decency and fidelity to truth.

The Orwell Prize was founded by the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick in its present form in 1993, awarding its first prizes in 1994. The Prize is supported by Political Quarterly, Richard Blair (George Orwell’s son) and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The Orwell Foundation is based at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. For more information about the Institute of Advanced Studies and its activities please visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies.

Robert Colls

 

robert-colls-icshcWe first met on 30 October 1969 when I bought The Road to Wigan Pier in Sussex University Bookshop.  The light blue sticker on the inside verifies the date and place, and the back cover shows that I was willing to fork out 4s (or two days’ cigarettes) for the pleasure.

Was it worth it?  Well although it appealed at the time, I have to say now that considering it was a 1960s Penguin the cover was pretty crap: bearded man in flat cap stares past pit head. The beard was totally wrong but every essay has a dying metaphor and here’s mine: you can’t judge a book by the cover.  It’s in front of me now.  Flocked and crumbly of course, but still seeing service at the front and indeed in hand to hand fighting with 23 undergraduates only yesterday.

Inside, there’s my usual teenage inanities. If he is talking about ‘civilization’; I write ‘Civilization’ in the margin.  If he says it’s ‘hell’; I write ‘Hell’.  ‘Can’t do without coal’ summarizes chapter two in a way that obviously didn’t stretch me at the time.  Later on, there’s a nasty splutter of red exclamation marks at Orwell’s cosy picture of the working-class family resting by the fireside.  No idea why.  The fireside is one of my truest childhood memories.

The book helped me emotionally.  Back home, the terraces were red raw with female labour and all the men in my family came home black. Brighton’s terraces, on the other hand, were pinky pink and creamy blue and I never figured out where anyone actually worked.  Surrounded by such south coast degeneracy, I took heart from Orwell’s dark heroes driving forward “blackened to the eyes…throats full of coal dust”.  Pale superior persons – including you and me and the editor of the TLS, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Comrade ‘X’ author of Marxism for Public Schoolboys (like him) – I loosely identified with higher education and all the company of Sussex Heaven.

Unlike a lot of great writers, you can learn from Orwell.  I learned for instance that you could be subjective and objective at the same time, that you had to look for the tangible moment, that all sentences must be subjected to the severest literacy test, that there can be no criticism without moralism and all moralism is vulnerable.  Eventually, I also had my first example of a man not really seeing women no matter how hard he looked.  Best of all, he gave me the courage to speak as I find, even when he is the target.

Later on I bought the four volume Penguin collected essays dated, this time, ‘January 1973’.  I remember reading them in bed with my girlfriend in wintry Leyton.  Make of that what you will, but she and me are still together and George is still paying rent.


Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University and the author of the 2013 Biography George Orwell: English Rebel (OUP)

Clive Stafford Smith

1984 – Guantanámo Bay

 

close-up-cliveGeorge Orwell probably never heard of Guantanámo Bay, but he wrote about it. For some years now, I have had a game I have played to entertain myself when I go to visit my clients there: I take them books and magazines, to see which ones get through the bizarre censors. Jack and the Beanstalk was banned, I never worked out why: perhaps because a detainee would plant a bean in an effort to escape the razorwire fences. Likewise, Runner’s World was banned while Swimming Monthly got in. This was hard to understand since a runner could only escape by weaving through the minefield, whereas perhaps someone could swim across the bay to freedom in Guantanámo City.

Sometimes, the censor’s rational was easy to understand: The Gulag Archipelago was excluded because the military was sensitive about their own sobriquet, The Guantanámo Gulag. But An Innocent Man, by John Grisham, was censored too. Maybe the U.S. military did not like the idea that someone in custody might not be a terrible criminal. Grisham wrote an ironic piece in the New York Times, and his book was finally admitted.

One of the books that I got in for Shaker Aamer was 1984 by Orwell. It was, he said, his favourite secular book. “The Torture is for the Torture,” he pronounced, “the System is for the System.” He read it several times over.

We puzzled over how it passed muster. Surely they understood how it resonated with his experiences in Guantanámo? No, he said, they just did not understand what Orwell was writing about, any more than they had when I brought him Animal Farm, which the likely mistook for an agricultural treatise.

So I asked Shaker to write an educational piece on the book. He took one of the bendy four-inch ballpoints that are all a detainee is allowed and illustrated why the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. Shaker arrived in Guantanámo on Valentine’s Day 2002, just as his youngest son Faris was born in faraway London. He explained the dystopian world of 1984, as it had been replicated 18 years later on a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Now, belatedly, enlightened as to Orwell’s meaning, the military authorities banned the book.

 


Clive Stafford Smith is the founder and director of Reprieve and the author of two books short-listed for the Orwell Prize (Bad Men, about Guantanámo Bay; and Injustice, the story of Krishna Maharaj, a British man sentenced to death in Florida). Shaker Aamer was eventually released back to Britain in 2015 after 13 years without trial.

Victims of a Map – Carla Mufid and Kanaar Askari

 

Winner of the Orwell Youth Prize 2016, Years 12 and 13

In the summer of 2003, I found my naive young self in Istanbul Ataturk Airport waiting to board a plane with my parents. On calling out for my mother in my native tongue, I was surprised to be silenced with a firm hush.

“Don’t talk in that language!” my mother reprimanded. When I questioned why, my father responded with a brief explanation on how we were not welcome here. Despite the fact that this incident happened well over a decade ago it has been firmly entrenched in my memory.

As the years passed, I found myself in parallel situations. Another childhood incident embedded in my memory took place in my year three geography classroom. On being set the task of finding our home countries, I set about analysing the map in front of me in hope of discovering somewhere on the pink, blue or green shadings, the word Kurdistan.

Following a good twenty minutes of judiciously scanning the globe I was left in a state of confusion. As an eight year old being the only student in the class who had failed the task set proved to be upsetting. Aside from my frustration I also harboured feelings of dismay. My teacher was equally as confused as me; so much so that she left the classroom out of sheer curiosity to ask the receptionist to Google Kurdistan to find out where my mystery land lay.

Ten minutes later the receptionist returned with a sticky note, revealing to my teacher and I that Kurdistan was not on the map, because it was not recognised as an Independent State by the United Nations.

So where is my country? Where is Kurdistan?

The question of “what is a Kurd?” is one that I find myself being asked frequently.

While our historical origins are unclear, many historians link us to the likes of the ancient Medes and Mittanis. Others claim the Kardouchoi who Xenophon, Greek soldier and writer, refers to in his anabasis to be the ancient people who Kurds descend from. I myself favour the mysterious myths involving King Solomon.

Kurds are an ethnic group numbering 35 million, making us the largest without an internationally recognized homeland. Like the Assyrians and Palestinians, artificial borders devised by imperialist powers in the early twentieth century left us stateless. The Kurdish homeland was not only torn through its heart, but shredded into quarters following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Kurdish territory was partitioned between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

It is a sad truth and harsh reality that to the nations who rule over us, our lives are of very little importance. It is the vast amount of resources that can be derived from Kurdish inhabited areas that is the envy of occupying authorities. The Kurdistan Regional Government received $557,272,177 for oil exports in March 2016.

The dehumanisation of Kurdish lives and the avaricious desires of dictators has time and time again resulted in the deliberate shifting of the demographics of Kurdish areas. From 1958 to 2003, Kurds in Iraq were subjected to episodes of mass deportation and ethnic cleansing which maliciously reduced the Kurdish population in the oil rich province of Kerkuk to a minority, while increasing those of the Arab settlers to a majority. The Iraqi government also destroyed 4,000 villages out of 4,655 in the Kurdish Region of Iraq between April 1987 and August 1988.

From the creation of the Turkish state in 1923, under the rule of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to the current day AKP government that rules Turkey, Kurds have suffered immensely. Decades of forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing and institutionalised racism makes surviving in Turkey as a Kurd an achievement to be applauded.

From Kurdish politicians, actors and musicians to my own friends from North Kurdistan the effects of assimilation enforced by Turkish supremacy are apparent. Be it in their government assigned Turkish surnames, their inability to communicate in their native tongue or the way that many label themselves as Turks when their true ethnic identity is far from this lie. One story that struck me the most regarding the scale of ethnic assimilation forced upon Kurds is a tale from a friend who only discovered she was a Kurd when disembarking a plane which came from Turkey to the UK. Prior to her family’s migration, her parents had simply felt it unsafe to familiarise their young daughter with her ethnicity and culture.

In 1992, Nelson Mandela refused to accept the Atatürk-Peace-Award given to him by Turkey because of the harsh treatment the Turkish government inflicted upon Kurds. Nelson Mandela also went on to condemn the war waged by the Turkish government on the Kurdistan Workers Party as “a war against human rights”.

Kurds – even those without any nationalistic aspirations – are people of ardent and strong characteristics when it comes to their land and culture. Unfortunately, this was not only deemed as a criminal offence in the eyes of Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk but almost a century later embracing Kurdish heritage still has the same fatal consequences.

In 2016, I am fortunate enough to be able to securely visit my hometown in Kurdistan. However for some other Kurdish groups this is not a trip they can make so confidently or comfortably; in particular Kurds of the Yezidi faith. Yezidis have been victims of over 70 genocides, the latest being waged by ISIS. In November 2015, Kurdish forces discovered in Sinjar a mass grave with the remains of 78 Yezidi women believed to have been executed by ISIS. Due to the threat from violent extremists, many diaspora Yezidis would be greatly endangered if they were to pay the towns they originate from a visit.

Kurdistan has had a treacherous past full of suffering and injustices and a dismal present with only hope for the future generations.

 

 

Looking Back on the Spanish War

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I

First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish Civil War. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur; ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins et hoc genus; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from ‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a ‘firm line’ against Germany in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’, but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.

 

II

In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-18 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism – that the same horror stories come up in war after war – merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

 

III

Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:

Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet-field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still dark and return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.

What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.

One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular – the arm outstretched, the palm vertical – was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.

Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men: ‘Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist!’ etc. etc. As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got!’ (¡No hay cabo como el!) Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters, the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarity’, pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.

 

IV

The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda – that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail – but these were child’s play compared with the continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point – the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention, at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their ‘legionaries’. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable – even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways – the breaking-up of families, for instance – the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, ‘Felix fecit’. I have a vivid mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

V

The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run – it is important to remember that it is only in the long run – the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

 

VI

The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.

The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having ‘gained what no republic missed’.

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

 

VII

I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:

 

‘Una resolucion,
Luchar hast’ al fin!’

Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.

The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish war, and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man’s face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Pétain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘changes of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Pétain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would contain compared with Pétain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations that are likely to make one falter – the siren voices of a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics – all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the present war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able

To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!

For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.

Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?

For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.

Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

Written August 1942, Sections I, II, III, and VII printed in New Road, June 1943