Orwell Prize Blog Illuminates The Underclass

The Orwell Prize for blogs has been awarded for the second year, and the winner is the pseudonymous Winston Smith, writing a bog entitled "Working with the Underclass". It is a blog of literate and illuminating wisdom from a residential care worker whose heroic efforts to improve the lives of the 'underclass' are not hampered by unnecessary sentimentality. For those of us who could never imagine going into that area of work, it is a real eye-opener. If ever you start to feel that perhaps unrestricted drug taking is ok, or that the idea of a few moral values is a bit too middle-class as a concept to impose on others, go over to Winston Smith's blog, select a few posts, and see the consequences of such irredeemably vacuous and dangerous thinking.

The blog is clear evidence to those of us living in the middle class enclave of the existence of 'two nations'. No longer just the 'rich'and the 'poor' as Disraeli had it, but the valued and the neglected. And the neglect is both self-imposed as well as externally evident. The Orwell Prize's first award, last year, was interestingly given to another pseudonymous public service author - a policeman writing about his experiences with this suddenly fascinating and repellent underclass. We are unlikely to get fed up of reading about this, even while we bemoan our impotence and wonder how society ever threw up such inadequate systems that thwart the efforts of the brave few willing to offer their help.

After reading some of Winston Smith, writing a blog entry on David Cameron's victory over the 1922 Committee seems somehow rather banal!