Even those who have not read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, rated as one of “the hundred best novels”, will recognise some of the “Newspeak” which has been absorbed into our language: “doublethink”, “thoughtcrime”, Big Brother is Watching You, “2+2=5” and the dreaded “Room 101”, to name a few.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Winston Smith, a member of the “Outer Party” spends his days in a cramped cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, altering newspaper articles and statistics to tally with the latest announcements blaring from the inescapable telescreens and loudspeakers, taking care to post each instruction in a “memory hole” for incineration without trace. The superstate of Oceania is in a continual state of no doubt fictitious war with one of its two counterparts, Eurasia and Eastasia, but keeping track is a mind-bending business: in the middle of a “Hate Week” speech, Eastasia becomes the enemy instead of Eurasia, and Winston has to work frantically to “correct” all the records. Desperate to retain a sense of reality, he wonders what it is worth if it only exists in his own head.

Written during the late 1940s in the aftermath of World War 2, with the Soviet Union under Stalin’s control, it is clear where Orwell obtained many of the ideas for this work. It also seems quite dated in the portrayal of Winston’s shabby material existence very much as it must have been in a period of shortages and rationing. The bleak bombed terraces of London’s East End provide the setting for “the proles”, workers at the bottom of the social heap who are bribed with the promise of wins in a bogus lottery, but are at least spared the constant need to toe the ever-changing Party line.

When the real 1984 dawned, it seemed that technological advances and mass consumption had transformed the world in ways Orwell had been unable to foresee, but in 2022 the novel has regained a more chilling relevance. As I write this, President Putin is trying to conceal from the Russian people the fact that their military forces are in fact destroying rather than protecting Russian cities. Media outlets are being forced to close down since anyone who even mentions the word “invasion” faces fifteen years in gaol. Recently in the US, “fake news” became a common feature of President Trump’s regime, with his spokesperson justifying the use of “alternative facts”. In China, Muslim ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs are imprisoned in “re-education camps”. Even in the UK, the supposed cradle of democracy, one sees too many troubling examples of official attempts to manipulate situations, suppress information and “economise with the truth”, yet not widely challenged. As living standards are put under pressure by the costs of dealing with Covid and rising energy prices, the threat of war may prove a convenient diversion, also serving to discourage the growth of individualism which undermines unquestioning conformity.

The novel may seem a little rushed and underdeveloped at the end, perhaps because Orwell, who was dying of tuberculosis at the time, was racing to finish it. Despite this, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a thought-provoking warning against complacency over the behaviour of our political leaders. Orwell raises the dilemma of the risk that people driven by social idealism may end up creating a system that crushes individual freedom – rather like the excesses of the French Revolution when one comes to think of it…..