The BBC declined to have a statue of George Orwell outside its headquarters. Quite right - his genius deserves better

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 12:58 GMT, 22 August 2012 | Updated: 19:38 GMT, 22 August 2012

What a weird organisation the British Broadcasting Corporation is.

Day in and day out they pump a diet of increasingly overt Leftist propaganda into our homes - this week driving even mild-mannered Employment Secretary Ian Duncan-Smith to an uncharacteristic expletive-filled fury about their bias - yet when it is suggested that they put up a statue to socialist George Orwell, undoubtedly the greatest writer to have been (albeit briefly) a BBC employee, Director-General Mark Thompson reacts with all the horror of a maiden aunt caught with her bloomers down.

Veteran BBC broadcaster (and naturally a Labour stalwart) Baroness Joan Bakewell says she made the statue suggestion to Thompson at a BBC reception earlier this year. Lady Bakewell, a member of the George Orwell Memorial Trust which has commissioned the stature from sculptor Martin Jennings, cornered the DG at a party and urged him to site the statue outside the BBC's expensive new HQ at Oxford Circus in central London, close to where Orwell once laboured in Broadcasting House. But to her baffled dismay, Thompson did not exactly welcome her plan to honour the great man, allegedly telling her it was far too Left-wing an idea.

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George Orwell: The literary titan worked for the BBC from 1941-43, broadcasting a mix of war propaganda and intellectual chat to India

Coming from a man who has admitted that the BBC once had an institutional Leftist bias (though he laughably went on to claim that this is now a thing of the past), Thompson's reaction is somewhat surprising.

There are several possible explanations for the DG's reluctance to honour Orwell with a statue on BBC premises. It could be sheer ignorance of Orwell's work and politics. It could be bureaucratic inertia. Or it could be the hatred still held  by many on the Left for Orwell - the man who in his novels 'Animal Farm' and '1984' wrote the most damning indictments of Marxist totalitarianism ever penned.

During the Second World War, in 1941-43, Orwell worked for the Beeb broadcasting a mix of war propaganda and intellectual chat to India, where he had once worked as an Imperial policeman in Burma. Orwell finally quit the Corporation, partly in disgust at the poor quality of the propaganda scripts he was required to read, and partly because it dawned on him that his high-minded literary talks on - to take one example - the verse of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins - would mean little to the average Indian peasant, who would be unlikely, in any event, to even possess a radio set.

Another reason for Thompson's horror may be that he knows that Orwell's view of the Corporation was, at best, ambivalent. He savagely caricatured it in '1984' as the 'Ministry of Truth', pumping out a daily diet of lying propaganda on behalf of the ruling party's ideology 'Ingsoc' (Newspeak for 'English Socialism'). Does that sound familiar?

But even if Baroness Bakewell's idea did give Mr T the shudders, Orwell still richly deserves his statue. Far from being 'Left-wing' in the sense we now understand it, Orwell's thought moved during his life from an understandable disgust with the harsher aspects of imperialism and capitalism, experienced during his Burmese days and his time as a tramp down and out in Paris and London, through the Great Depression when he witnessed unemployment and the life of miners at first hand.

Orwell's Socialism was literally knocked out of him by his appalling experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Going out to Catalonia to fight Franco's military revolt against the Spanish republic, he was shot through the throat by a sniper, and while recovering, was caught up in a bloody purge launched by Spain's increasingly Communist-controlled Republican Government.

The experience of being hunted by the secret police and seeing his comrades arrested, tortured and killed by the Spanish Stalinists and their Russian bosses gave Orwell an abiding horror of Marxism, Soviet Communism and Stalin's many British apologists - including his own publisher, Victor Gollancz, who refused to publish Orwell's account of his Spanish experiences 'Homage to Catalonia' for fear of upsetting the Communists. Finally, Orwell saw what crimes could be committed in the name of 'socialism' and devoted the rest of his literary life to denouncing the perversion of the humane socialism he stood for.

Though dying of TB, Orwell lived long enough to transmute his horror of Communism into his twin masterpieces 'Animal Farm' and '1984' and at the dawn of the Cold War, drew up at the request of the British security services a list of 50 of his fellow writers whom he regarded as Communists or fellow-travellers.

A doughty warrior in the cause of liberty, free thought and political prose as clear as a glass pane, Orwell deserves his statue all right - but on second thoughts perhaps Mark Thompson is right.

Today's BBC - aka the Ministry of Truth - might not be the best place for it after all.

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