COVER STORY
Drowning
Post-truth politics and the age of outrage
By Ian Hislop
A
nyone who thinks that “post-
truth politics” is anything
new needs to be reminded
that George Orwell was writ-
ing about this phenomenon 70
years before Donald Trump.
Audiences listening to President-Elect
Trump’s extraordinary disregard for any-
thing resembling objective truth – and his
astonishing ability to proclaim the abso-
lute opposite today of what he said yes-
terday – will be forcibly reminded of the
slogans that George Orwell gave to his
political dictators: Black is White, War
is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is
Strength (the last of which turned out to be
true in the US election). But any journalist
trying to work out what the speeches actu-
ally mean, amidst the mad syntax and all
the repetition (“gonna happen, gonna hap-
pen”), cannot help but fall back on Orwell’s
contention that “political chaos is connect-
ed with the decay of language”. And the
sight of Trump praising Secretary Clinton
for her years of public service in his post-
election victory speech while the crowd
was still chanting his campaign catchphrase
of “Lock her up” was surely a perfect exam-
ple of Doublethink.
22 | NEW STATESMAN | 2-8 DECEMBER 2016
in filth
No wonder Trump is an admirer of
Vladimir Putin, who is an admirer of the
Soviet strongmen whom Orwell satirised
so well. These echoes from the past are very
strong in America at present but there are
plenty of them reverberating through Brit-
ish and European politics as well. Our For-
eign Secretary managed to accuse other Eu-
ropean leaders of a “whinge-o-rama” when
they issued qualified statements of con-
gratulation to the new president-elect, even
though he himself had previously accused
Trump of being “nuts”. Black is White, Re-
main is Leave, a Wall is a Fence, two plus
two equals five: but Brexit means Brexit.
You may find this reassuring, in that we
have been here before and survived – or
distressing to think that we are regressing
to a grimmer Orwellian age. But one of the
worrying developments attached to these
“post-truth” political figures is the increas-
ing intolerance in public debate of dissent
– or even disagreement – about what objec-
tive truth might be.
A great deal has been written recently
about the influence of social media in help-
ing people to become trapped in their own
echo chambers, talking only to those who
reinforce their views and dismissing not
only other opinions, but also facts offered
by those who disagree with them. When
confronted by a dissenting voice, people get
offended and then angry. They do not want
to argue, they want the debate to be shut
down. Trump supporters are furious with
anyone who expresses reservations about
their candidate. Pro-Brexit supporters are
furious with anyone who expresses doubts
about the way the process of leaving the Eu-
ropean Union is going.
I edit the magazine Private Eye, which
I sometimes think Orwell would have dis-
missed as “a tuppeny boys’ fortnightly”,
and after the recent legal challenge to the
government about Article 50 being put be-
fore parliament, we published the cover re-
produced on page 25.
It was a fairly obvious joke, a variant of
the “wheels coming off” gag. But it led to a
large postbag of complaints, including a let-
ter from a man who said he thought the cov-
er was “repulsive”. He also said he wanted
to come around and smash up the office and
then shove our smug opinions so far up our
arses that we choked our guts out.
There was one from a vicar, too, who told
me that it was time to accept the victory of
t
the majority of the people and to stop
RALPH STEADMAN

2-8 DECEMBER 2016 | NEW STATESMAN | 23


t
complaining. Acceptance was a virtue,
he said. I wrote back and told him that this
argument was a bit much, coming from a
church that had begun with a minority of
12. (Or, on Good Friday, a minority of one.)
This has become a trend in those who
complain: the magazine should be shouted
down or, better still, closed down. In the
light of this it was interesting to read again
what Orwell said in his diary long before
internet trolls had been invented:
We are all drowning in filth. When
I talk to anyone or read the writings of
anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel
that intellectual honesty and balanced
judgement have simply disappeared
from the face of the earth. Everyone’s
thought is forensic, everyone is simply
putting a “case” with deliberate
suppression of his opponent’s point of
view, and, what is more, with complete
insensitiveness to any sufferings except
those of himself and his friends.
This was in 1942, when the arguments
were about war and peace, life and death,
and there were real fascists and Stalinists
around rather than, say, people who disa-
gree with you about the possibility of rec-
onciling freedom of movement with access
to the single European market.
“Authority is always there to be laughed
at,” Orwell wrote. “There is always
room for one more custard pie”
Orwell also made clear, in an essay called
“As I Please” in Tribune in 1944, that what
we think of as the new online tendency to
call everyone who disagrees with you a fas-
cist is nothing new. He wrote then:
It will be seen that, as used, the word
“Fascism” is almost entirely meaningless.
In conversation, of course, it is used even
more wildly than in print. I have heard
it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social
Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting,
bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee [a Tory
group], the 1941 Committee [a left-liberal
group], Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek,
homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts,
Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and
I do not know what else.
When Orwell writes like this about the
level of public debate, one is unsure whether
to feel relieved at the sense of déjà vu or wor-
ried about the possibility of history repeat-
ing itself, not as farce, but as tragedy again.
The mood and tone of public opinion
is an important force in the way our soci-
ety and our media function. Orwell wrote
24 | NEW STATESMAN | 2-8 DECEMBER 2016
about this in an essay called “Freedom of the
Park”, published in Tribune in December
1945. Five people had been arrested outside
Hyde Park for selling pacifist and anarchist
publications. Orwell was worried that,
though they had been allowed to publish
and sell these periodicals throughout the
entire Second World War, there had been a
shift in public opinion that meant that the
police felt confident to arrest these people
for “obstruction” and no one seemed to
mind this curtailment of freedom of speech
except him. He wrote:
The relative freedom which we enjoy
depends on public opinion. The law is
no protection. Governments make laws,
but whether they are carried out, and
how the police behave, depends on the
general temper in the country. If large
numbers of people are interested in
freedom of speech, there will be freedom
of speech, even if the law forbids it; if
public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient
minorities will be persecuted, even if
laws exist to protect them.
This is certainly true for the press today,
whose reputation in the past few years
has swung violently between the lows of
phone-hacking and the highs of exposing
MPs’ expenses. In 2011 I remember at one
point a football crowd shouting out the
name of Ryan Giggs, who had a so-called
superinjunction in place forbidding any-
one to mention that he was cheating on his
wife and also forbidding anyone to mention
the fact that he had taken out a superin-
junction. He was named on Twitter 75,000
times. It seemed clear that public opinion
had decided that his private life should
be made public. The freedom of the press
was briefly popular. Later the same year it
was revealed that the murdered schoolgirl
Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked by
the News of the World, along with those of
a number of high-profile celebrities, and
the public decided that actually journal-
ists were all scumbags and the government
should get Lord Leveson to sort them out.
Those who maintained that the problem
was that the existing laws (on trespass, con-
tempt, etc) were not enforced because of
an unhealthy relationship between the po-
lice, the press and the politicians were not
given much credence.
In a proposed preface to his 1945 novel,
Animal Farm, Orwell wrote: “If liberty
means anything at all, it means the right to
tell people what they do not want to hear.”
This is the quotation that will accompany
the new statue of Orwell that has now been
commissioned by the BBC and which will
stand as a sort of rebuke to the corporation
whenever it fails to live up to it. The BBC
show on which I appear regularly, Have I
Got News for You, has been described simul-
taneously in the online comments section
as “overprivileged, right-wing Tory boys
sneering at the working class ” and “lefty,
metropolitan liberal elite having a Labour
luvvie whinge-fest”. Disturbing numbers
of complainants feel that making jokes
about the new president-elect should not
be allowed, since he has won the election.
Humour is not meant to be political, assert
the would-be censors – unless it attacks the
people who lost the vote: then it is impar-
tial and neutral. This role for comedy would
have surprised Orwell, who was keen on
jokes. He wrote of Charles Dickens:
A joke worth laughing at always has an
idea behind it, and usually a subversive
idea. Dickens is able to go on being
funny because he is in revolt against
authority, and authority is always there
to be laughed at. There is always room
for one more custard pie.
I think there is also room for a custard
pie or two to be thrown against those who
claim to be outsiders, against authority and
“the system”, and use this as a way to take
power. The American billionaire property
developer who is the champion of those dis-
possessed by global capitalism seems a rea-
sonable target for a joke. Just like his British
friend, the ex-public-school boy City trader-
turned-critic of the Home Counties elite.
The emblematic quotation on liberty is
from a preface that was not published un-
til 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement.
A preface about freedom of speech that
was censored? It is almost too neatly Or-
wellian to be true, and in fact no one seems
to know exactly why it did not appear. Suf-
fice to say that it is fascinating to read Or-
well complaining that a novel which we all
now assume to be a masterpiece – accurate
about the nature of revolution and dictator-
ship and perfect for teaching to children in
schools – was once considered to be unac-
ceptably, offensively satirical.
The target of the satire was deemed to be
our wartime allies the Russians. It is diffi-
cult to imagine a time, pre-Putin, pre-Cold
War, when they were not seen as the en-
emy. But of course the Trump presidency
may change all that. Oceania may not be
at war with Eurasia any more. Or it may

always have been at war with Eastasia. It is
difficult to guess, but in those days the pre-
vailing opinion was that it was “not done”
to be rude about the Russians.
Interestingly there is now a significant
faction on the British left, allied with the
current leader of the Labour Party, who
share this view.
T 
he right to tell people what they
do not want to hear is still the
basis of freedom of expression. If
that sounds like I am stating the
obvious – I am. But, in my defence,
Orwell once wrote in a review of a book by
Bertrand Russell published in the Adelphi
magazine in January 1939:
. . . we have now sunk to a depth at which
the restatement of the obvious is the first
duty of intelligent men.
Orwell himself managed to come round
to a position of accepting that an author
could write well and truthfully about a
subject even if one disapproved of the au-
thor’s politics: both Kipling and Swift were
allowed to be right even though they were
not left enough. So I am hoping that we can
allow Orwell to be right about the princi-
ples of freedom of expression.
In the unpublished preface to Animal
Farm he writes:
The issue involved here is quite a
simple one: Is every opinion, however
unpopular – however foolish, even –
entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form
and nearly any English intellectual
will feel that he ought to say “Yes”.
But give it a concrete shape, and ask,
“How about an attack on Stalin? Is that
entitled to a hearing?”, and the answer
more often than not will be “No”.
In that case the current orthodoxy
happens to be challenged, and so the
principle of free speech lapses.
One can test oneself by substituting con-
temporary names for Stalin and seeing
how you feel. Putin? Assange? Mandela?
Obama? Snowden? Hillary Clinton? An-
gela Merkel? Prince Harry? Mother Teresa?
Camila Batmanghelidjh? The Pope? David
Bowie? Martin Luther King? The Queen?
Orwell was always confident that the
populist response would be in favour of
everyone being allowed their own views.
That might be different now. If you were
to substitute the name “Trump” or “Far-
age” and ask the question, you might not
get such a liberal response. You might get a
version of: “Get over it! Suck it up! You lost
the vote! What bit of ‘democracy’ do you
not understand?”
Orwell quotes from Voltaire (the attribu-
tion is now contested): “I detest what you
say; I will defend to the death your right
to say it.” Most of us would agree with the
sentiment, but there is a worrying trend in
universities that is filtering through into
the media and the rest of society. Wanting
a “safe space” in which you do not have to
hear views that might upset you and de-
manding trigger warnings about works of
art that might display attitudes which you
find offensive are both part of an attempt
to redefine as complex and negotiable what
Orwell thought was simple and non-nego-
tiable. And this creates problems.
We ran a guide in Private Eye as to what
a formal debate in future universities might
look like.
The proposer puts forward a
motion to the House.
The opposer agrees with the
proposer’s motion.
The proposer wholeheartedly
agrees that the opposer was right to
support the motion.
The opposer agrees that the proposer
couldn’t be more right about agreeing
that they were both right to support
the motion.
When the debate is opened up to the
floor, the audience puts it to the proposer
and the opposer that it isn’t really a
debate if everyone is just agreeing with
each other.
The proposer and the opposer
immediately agree to call security and
have the audience ejected from the
debating hall.
And so it goes on, until the motion
is carried unanimously.
This was dismissed as “sneering” and,
inevitably, “fascist” by a number of stu-
t
dent commentators. Yet it was only a
2-8 DECEMBER 2016 | NEW STATESMAN | 25
t

restatement of something that Orwell

wrote in the unpublished preface:
. . . everyone shall have the right to say
and to print what he believes to be the
truth, provided only that it does not
harm the rest of the community in some
quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist
democracy and the western versions of
socialism have till recently taken that
principle for granted. Our Government,
as I have already pointed out, still makes
some show of respecting it.
This is not always the case nowadays. It
is always worth a comparison with the atti-
tudes of other countries that we do not wish
to emulate. The EU’s failure to confront
President Erdogan’s closure of newspapers
and arrests of journalists in Turkey because
it wants his help to solve the refugee crisis
is one such obvious example. An old Ger-
man law to prosecute those making fun
of foreign leaders was invoked by Erdogan
and backed by Mrs Merkel. This led Private
Eye to run a competition for Turkish jokes.
My favourites were:

“Knock knock!”
“Who’s there.”
“The secret police.”
What do you call a satirist in Turkey?
An ambulance.
As Orwell wrote in even more dangerous
times, again in the proposed preface:
. . . the chief danger to freedom of thought
and speech at this moment is not the
Funny peculiar: Private Eye’s cartoon provoked a decidedly mixed reaction – from one reader
the decades, but I have found in Private Eye grant/top up/dole payment do you lot get
that there is not much fury from the Tory, from the EU anyway? Are you even a Brit-
New Labour or Liberal camps when their ish publication?”
leaders or policies are criticised, often in In 1948, in an essay in the Socialist Leader,
much harsher ways than the newer, popu- Orwell wrote:
list movements.
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and
action, though often trivial in isolation,

direct interference of the [Ministry of
Information] or any official body. If
publishers and editors exert themselves
to keep certain topics out of print,
it is not because they are frightened
of prosecution but because they are
frightened of public opinion.
I return to stating the obvious, because it
seems to be less and less obvious to some of
the current generation. This is particularly
true for those who have recently become
politically engaged for the first time. Vot-
ers energised by Ukip and the EU referen-
dum debate, or by the emergence of Jeremy
Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, or by
the resurgence of Scottish nationalism or
by the triumph of Trump, have the zeal of
the newly converted. This is all very admi-
rable, and a wake-up call to their opponents
– the Tartan Tories and the Remoaners and
the NeoBlairites and the Washington Lib-
eral Elite – but it is not admirable when it
is accompanied by an overpowering desire
to silence any criticism of their ideas, poli-
cies and leading personalities. Perhaps the
supporters of the mainstream parties have
simply become accustomed to the idea over
S 
o, when Private Eye suggested that
some of the claims that the Scottish
National Party was making for the
future of an independent Scotland
might be exaggerated, there were
one or two readers who quoted Orwell’s
distinction between patriotism being the
love of one’s country and nationalism be-
ing the hatred of others – but on the whole
it was mostly: “When if ever will you igno-
rant pricks on the Eye be sharp enough to
burst your smug London bubble?”
Those who disagreed with the SNP were
beneath contempt if English and traitors
if Scottish. This was matched by the sheer
fury of the Corbyn loyalists at coverage of
his problems with opposition in his own
party. When we suggested that there might
be something a bit fishy about his video on
the lack of seats on the train to Newcastle,
responses included: “I had hoped Private
Eye was outside the media matrix. Have you
handed over control to Rupert Murdoch?”
Their anger was a match for that of the
Ukippers when we briefly ran a strip called
At Home With the Ukippers and then made
a few jokes about their leader Mr Farage:
“Leave it out, will you? Just how much of
are cumulative in their effect and, unless
checked, lead to a general disrespect for
the rights of the citizen.
In other words, the defence of freedom of
speech and expression is not just special
pleading by journalists, writers, commen-
tators and satirists, but a more widespread
conviction that it protects “the intellec-
tual liberty which without a doubt has
been one of the distinguishing marks of
Western civilisation”.
In gloomy times, there was one letter
to Private Eye that I found offered some
cheer – a willingness to accept opposing
viewpoints and some confirmation of a be-
lief in the common sense of Orwell’s com-
mon man or woman. In response to the car-
toon above, our correspondent wrote:
Dear sir,
I suffer from a bipolar condition and
when I saw your cartoon I was absolutely
disgusted. I looked at it a few days later and
thought it was hilarious. l
Ian Hislop is the editor of Private Eye. This is
an edited version of his 2016 Orwell Lecture.
For more details, visit: theorwellprize.co.uk
2-8 DECEMBER 2016 | NEW STATESMAN | 27
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