Winston Smith hated working out. Not that you can blame the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. If you lived in a totalitarian London, had to get by on rations and Victory Gin, and were forced awake by your television and then led in calisthenics by a shrill instructor who could call you out by name even while leading thousands of others in the same exercises . . . you’d probably hate it, too.
The U.K. today is not a full-on dystopia, the bobbies who arrest people for mean tweets notwithstanding. But a recent scheme initiated by Keir Starmer’s newly elected left-wing Labour government brings it just a little bit closer to a kind of despotism, albeit likely not one Orwell would have envisioned. And it’s one that could easily come to our own shores, if we don’t summon the political and the personal will to resist it.
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