The other day I learned that Westminster City Council has given planning permission for a bronze statue of George Orwell to be placed outside New Broadcasting House. The BBC has welcomed this, although the initiative didn't come from them and has in fact been paid for by private subscription.
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
