I hope his book is better than his weekly Times columns defending the Labour government, which break Guinness World Records in the field of sophistry. As an Orwell prizewinner he, along with Alibhai-Brown and Hari, brings that institution into disrepute. Why? Because in promulgating the case for the Iraq war he, along with his contacts in the Labour top brass and his old mucker Mandelson, entered into a de facto conspiracy to deceive the public. To my mind, an Orwell prizewinner would have fought very hard to expose a political gangster like Alistair Campbell, not do his bidding. May I propose that a subscription be raised to finance an Alternative Orwell Prize, to be announced each year as a corrective to the ‘real’ one?
Also at Harry's Place, I had occasion to quote Orwell in relation to this. People over at Harry's have played this as a trump card against those of us who feel that the British Muslim bloc and Muslims in general have done and said far too little about Islamic extremists. Yeah, great that this is going on; but you could easily look at those pictures and see them as the first skirmish in a long internecine struggle between the factions, such as we see fought out perpetually in the war zones of the middle east and elsewhere. All in all it made me think of Orwell's England Your England:
'The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time. But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good.’
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