Britain's Pakistani Muslim Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told Labour Party Conference last September:

"I am a patriot, proudly so. Mine is the patriotism of Orwell. Pride in a country that is forever changing, while also, ineffably, always the same. It is a love of this country as an open, tolerant and generous place. But that broad vision of who we are is increasingly disputed. Patriotism, a force for good, is turning into something smaller. Something more like ethno-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me, and has a faith like mine, can truly be English or British."

George Orwell was born in India, but was inarguably an Englishman. So clearly it isn't birthplace which dictates whether one is British or English. Would George Orwell have recognised Shabana Mahmood as beign as British or English as himself? Would he consider her religion and politics to be inkeeping with England's traditions, or "British values"?

Or would Mahmood denounce Orwell as an evil racist ethnonationalist too?

Maybe, by Orwell, Mahmood meant the Doublespeak of Big Brother, which demands you recognise her as English in the same way Winston Smith was forced to concede that 2 + 2 can make 5...

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