Orwell, perhaps England’s greatest-ever political writer, notes how the bourgeois-left intelligentsia use a lot of words to intellectualise issues without understanding them. He saw that they frequently Blimp-baited without engaging with the real challenges people face. And he saw that they were only prepared to discuss issues raised in a few select publications – mainly the New Statesman and News Chronicle back then – which they also happened to edit, read and write for. …

Those of us who want to engage in today’s difficult debates, including with people we don’t agree with, are banished to what the bourgeois left calls the ‘right-wing press’. This allows left-wingers to satisfy themselves that our arguments and our words can be ignored by association. We are no longer ‘legitimate’, our arguments can be discounted and our views kept out of their safe middle-class publications. These lefties feel no need to speak to a wider audience because, as they see it, that wider audience is simply wrong.

I think Orwell would see all this for what it is – a charade.