Politics

As far as we know, George Orwell never visited America. This is a great pity. What a joy it would be for a biographer to find in some provincial attic the long-lost diaries of his travels around the segregated South, or his acid reflections on working as a scriptwriter in late 1930s Hollywood. I think the best indication of how he thought of the United States is to be found in his essay Raffles and Miss Blandish. In this, he contrasts E.W. Hornung’s light-hearted tales of the cricket-playing gentleman thief Arthur Raffles and James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a violent crime thriller of the late 1930s, set in the USA, which became notorious — and successful — in Britain during world war two. Oddly enough it is technically English.

In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Roger Scruton often mulled on the nature and techniques of twenty-first century denunciation. For Roger, like others who had seen totalitarian societies up close, knew what intimidation and officially-imposed forms of thinking were actually like. Which is not to say, of course, that modern Britain or America are totalitarian societies. Only that we have people among us who act with precisely the same techniques as those did in totalitarian societies. In modern Britain, as in communist Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the habits are the same. A member of a profession comes into their workplace in the morning to find a letter of denunciation signed by all their colleagues.

The Labour Party claims to be learning lessons from its crushing defeat in December’s general election. But are they the right ones? While some have been moving through the stages of grief more slowly than others, the party has generally woken up to the reality that something’s gotta give. But it’s not yet obvious that the right lessons have been learned in the upper echelons of Labour - not even by some of the MPs putting themselves forward to be the next leader. Yes, the party faithful are shifting their focus back to northern and rural communities, whose decision to vote blue this time around turned decades’ worth of electoral voting patterns on their head. The first Labour hustings revealed some agreement that the election manifesto was flawed.

I am not going to lie: I am bored sick with Brexit. Like so many of you, I have become that frustrated child in the back of the car moaning, 'are we there yet?' Boris Johnson won’t tell us. Or at least not in precise terms. So on this marathon journey, just days before we leave the EU in a legal sense at 11pm on 31 January, the final destination can only be deduced, and certainly not with any precision. What Johnson says he wants, more than anything, is a trading relationship with the EU that returns to the UK a sovereign ability to set its own rules and regulations for business, such as companies’ duties to employees, their environmental obligations, their safety standards and so on.