Big Brother is alive and well and living in Westminster

Seventy-five years ago, on June 8th 1949, George Orwell published 1984, his classic novel on totalitarianism. It was not about the future, so much as an indictment of Communism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, but it gave us the language to speak about totalitarianism. It gave us doublethink, thoughtcrime and Big Brother, among others.

If one looked as many years forward from 1984 as Orwell had done from 1948, when he wrote it, those 36 years would take us to 2020. In 2020 we were locked indoors, only allowed out for essentials. We were banned from sitting down to rest outside. Police stopped people to see if their journey was ‘essential,’ and in shops the book sections were taped over as ‘non-essential.’

Schools and universities were forcibly closed, with many students confined in hostels, with barbed wire in some cases to prevent them leaving. A father was warned by police for playing in his garden with his children. Police drones were used to track and caution country walkers.

No meetings were allowed with strangers, or visits to relatives and friends. Foreign travel was prohibited. Mask mandates were enforced. Hymn singing was banned in churches. Some towns were sealed off, with no-one allowed in or out. NHS health inspectors enforced self-isolation by phone calls and unannounced visits.

No visits were permitted to hospitals and care homes, and attendance at weddings and funerals was limited to six persons. Most tellingly, a climate of fear was deliberately cultivated to force people to keep to the rules.

If anyone had told Orwell, or indeed anyone else in 1948, what 2020 would be like, they would have been met by astonished disbelief. Yet it happened, and much of it went far beyond what Orwell’s dystopian future had envisaged. The people who broke those rules received criminal sentences. The people who dreamt them up were knighted.

Those who say, 75 years after Orwell published 1984, that it could never happen, should be reminded that it did.