His favourite socialist politician was the great Aneurin Bevan, his editor at Tribune and a man of wide culture, who abominated all forms of authoritarianism and, even while fighting the entrenched medical lobbies in his effort to create the National Health Service, once remarked that the socialist movement was the only movement in human history that sought to attain power in order to give it away. For Orwell, there was always the hope that socialists could be for freedom, even if socialism itself had bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies.
