George Orwell was 150% left wing, and the idea that he wasn't is a myth created by people who haven't read his work. The view of him as a right winger comes from a) the fact that he was critical of his fellow socialists in The Road to Wigan Pier, and of Stalinism in pretty much all of his writing, and b) his books 1984 and Animal Farm are seen as primarily anti-Russian allegories in the US, when they were in fact attacks on totalitarianism in general. Animal Farm criticized the corruption of the Soviet revolution rather than socialism itself, whilst 1984 took many elements from Nazi Germany to create its dystopia and was an attack on fascism as much as Stalinism.
If you believe Orwell to be a right winger, consider the following:
- Orwell spent much of 1936-1937 fighting on the left-wing side of the Spanish Civil War, specifically with a Marxist/Communist militia. He at one point described the atmosphere in the anarchist area of Spain as being his ideal realisation of socialism
- His essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn,’ published in 1941 at the height of WWII, was essentially a call for a socialist revolution in order to win the war against Nazi Germany The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius | The Orwell Prize (a highly recommended piece of writing even though I think his conclusion is…unwise)
- This quote ‘Every line of work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism,’ from his essay ‘Why I Write' in 1946
Orwell was an idealist in many ways, and was very willing to go against people nominally on the left wing ‘side’ if he felt that they were in the wrong. He was also extremely disgusted by Stalinism, seeing it as a perversion of Socialism, and regarded the ability to call it out as a key test of left wing intellectual integrity. But he was 100% a Democratic Socialist throughout the period when he was writing his most important work.