What would George Orwell make of the Brexit right?

I don’t believe in turning George Orwell’s writing into Holy Scripture – he would have hated the reverence as much as anything else. But if the Brexit right is going to crow and quote his dislike of the communist-influenced left intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s it should read the rest of his work first.

Orwell believed in a united socialist Europe. ‘Democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area,’ he wrote just after the Second World War. ‘But the only area in which it could conceivably be made to work, in any near future, is Western Europe’.

If you can forget his belief in a post-war socialism that has gone, Orwell’s arguments for European unity stand up well. He noted the ‘Russians cannot but be hostile to any European union not under their own control’. Communism has been replaced by gangster capitalism but the hostility is ever present, as alleged Kremlin support for far right and far left parties across Europe shows.