Orwell, to put it kindly, does not win the Nostradamus award for prescience. Nor does he win an award for enlightened public policy. At one point, he pressed for capping individual incomes in Britain such that no person would earn more than ten times the salary of the lowest-paid worker. An unworkable plan, obviously, and that Orwell would suggest it betrays an ignorance of politics, policy, and human nature. It also betrays an ignorance of Frédéric Bastiat's wisdom about the relationship between liberty and equality -- viz, that mandating the latter will always destroy the former. Orwell advocated nationalizing not a few things, too: all major industry, all agricultural land, and all privately run schools. It is striking that the author of 1984 would write, approvingly, that at "the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is themselves."
A British government does not plan employment well and is far too remote from thw workforce to be repsonsive to it. keep to the Fen Causeway
The wholesale withdrawal of the UK government from direct and indirect control of markets and the efforts to marketise many public services have also not served the country well.
The problem, particualrly for labour administrations, is that they want to intervene directly. And they are spectacularly bad at running things.
It was Thatcher who first abdicated responsibility for governing the country economically, blair and brown simply perpetuated the abandonment of duty keep to the Fen Causeway
The UK does have a saner union and left wing tradition, but the old shop floor naturally selected for bully boy types. When put up against the emotionally handicapped public school victims in management, adversarial relationships were inevitable.
Thatcher eliminated the bully boys and gave the managers free reign. But the problem isn't so much with any particular class, as an overall culture of competitive selfishness and lack of generosity.
You won't get interdependence and cooperation from people who find the idea of interdependence personally offensive.
