Orwell prize for journalists: For writers who loathe their own English culture

Reading about the Orwellian threat of sanctions likely to be imposed on the Swiss journalist Roger Köppel, the thought occurred to me that just about the only media outlet in Europe that genuinely retains the right to use the term “Orwellian” is this one.  This does not imply that what I’m writing is correct, merely that Brussels Signal will usually publish my opinions regardless of whether or not its editors agree with them. All it asks of its contributors is an aspiration towards grammatical literacy, a reasonable ability to spell and some knowledge of the laws of defamation. That, pretty much, is what George Orwell asked of his fellow writers. He did not ask for compliance with his beliefs, not least because, like most thinking people, his beliefs kept changing.

What have the names Jenny Kleeman,  Gary Younge, Wendell Stevenson, George Monbiot, John Harris, John Domoka, Janice Turner, Steve Bloomfield, Suzanne Moore, Carole Cadwalladr and Fintan O’Toole got in common? They were all winner of the George Orwell prize for journalists over the past decade. No less than eight of them wrote for The Guardian, The Observer or the BBC. Four of their submissions were explicit attacks on Brexit, though not from the euro-sceptical angle that you’ll find in these pages, but from the screechy anglophobic position held  by the English Left since Orwell’s time. Also to the Brexophobia wing of journalism must belong Turner’s reflexions on her mother’s incarceration in a care home, which were apparently a metaphor for Brexit. (Well, of course they were.)

Not philosophically far removed from Brexophobia were Bloomfield’s thoughts on Corbynism: “What’s surprising about the party’s current debate over foreign policy is that there is actually very little debate: Corbyn has won,” Bloomfield declared, before finishing…. “Of course, this remarkably smooth transformation to Corbynite conclusions reflects the utter failure of what came before.”

That surely belongs to the “Peace in our time” school of forecasting.  But whereas Neville Chamberlain has been ceaselessly ridiculed for his bathetic proclamations, Bloomfield’s were acclaimed with an Orwell prize. 

Intellectually in that same school were George Younge’s articles in The Guardian, “Lest we remember: How Britain buried it’s [note to sub: stet it’s] history of slavery.”

In fact, far from burying its memory of slavery, Britain has gone overboard in denouncing it: But no doubt Younge’s mastery of British history matches his knowledge of English grammar – as indeed does the Orwell prize website, where the delicious “it’s” still wallows in a voluptuous, grocerly squalor.

Thus a full decade of Orwellian journalism, and almost all of it effectively commandeered by The Guardian school of Europhilia, precisely of the orthodoxy-loving, dissent-rejecting kind that Orwell so detested. In other words, Izevstia has simply migrated westward from the Kremlin and set up home in the London borough of Quislington, from which it issues its sanctimonious self-loathing sermons about England and the English. 

There is one further quite delicious aspect to consider: The two outlets most represented here, namely the BBC and The Guardian, were also most vigorous in the lynching of his particular journalist in 2017, on the wholly spurious grounds of anti-Semitism and  Holocaust-denial. This was why I won a very large amount of money from the Irish national broadcaster RTE for repeating those lies, and is also a reason why last month I was a guest of the Israeli government on a tour of the country. Not quite the treatment Israel usually gives holocaust-deniers or anti-Semites. 

Yet so addicted to falsehood is The Guardian that it still calls me a “Holocaust Denier”, and like The Irish Times and RTE itself, refused to report my legal victory over RTE. And that, basically, is the polluted microcosm of the Orwell prize: A corrupt and self-regarding prize for niche-journalists, all inhaling from from the sewerage pipes connecting the newsrooms of London, Dublin, New York, LA and Sydney, enabling them to parrot the same rancid thoughts simultaneously. 

These charlatans can get away with this because their single body of opinions is cloaked by the self-attired mantle of Orwellian respectability.  This is not a new tactic. Totalitarians invariably lay claim to the virtues that in reality they deplore, most deliciously in the Lenin Peace Prize, which became a reward for useful Marxist idiots or retirement-prizes for former communist agents of influence. In leftism’s post-communist era, there is no need for Lenin’s tawdry tin: Its duty has been assumed by the Orwell factory of awards, not one of which (that I could find) has ever been awarded to opponents of dogmatic multiculturalism or defenders of the nation-state. 

That these are dark days indeed is indisputable, made even darker by the fifth column in our midst who pretend to defend freedom of speech, while in fact defending only their own freedom to repress dissent. Though I detest the corrupt and conceited values of The Guardian school of journalism, and its off-shoots in the BBC, The Irish Times and RTE,  I do not want to shut them down,. But nor will I declare that I will defend to the death the right of these outlets to spout their bilge. Such would be meaningless hyperbole. Why, I would not even defend even my own right to free speech if I thought  it would cost me a poke in  the eye with a burnt stick or an upward swipe into the groin with the sharp-edge of a cricket-bat. 

So, we may safely dismiss liberals who “will defend to the death”, et cetera, et cetera: For you may rely on it that they’ll do nothing of the sort. Their “selfless devotion to the freedom of speech of others” is usually from the safety of a free society that is protected by patriots whose service and duty are usually mocked by those very same liberals. Hypocrisy is invariably the hallmark of the liberal intelligentsia. 

This was why Orwell demanded clarity of thought and speech, and neither is possible when a word completely changes meaning according to context, bringing me to my first and final point. The word “sanction” can contradictorily mean either “authorise” or “punish”.  So, let us agree: one meaning only, while allowing the guardianistas to wallow in their bogs of self-regarding ambiguity. But, hush, never fear. Those idiots will have absolutely no idea what this paragraph means.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.