" 

 Sorry, I'm not budging! I simply don't accept that Orwell's socialism rested upon ""uniquely English"" ideas or that Marxism was ""alien"" to the socialist tradition to which he belonged. I don't think ideas have nationalities, and there has been a small Marxist current (or rather a number of small Marxist currents) in British socialism since the days of Marx. Of course Orwell was influenced by many English writers and by English people and customs. He certainly had little but contempt for the English left intelligentsia that had only hatred for anything English and who took their politics from Moscow and cooking from Paris. But there's a lot less evidence that he took Godwin or Morris seriously than there is of his critical engagement with Trotskyism and other varieties of dissident Marxism. And for all his enthusiasm for England and the English, he was also a great proponent of American and continental modernist writers, an anti-imperialist and for a while at least a European federalist. "