Statue of George Orwell Statue of George Orwell A statue of George Orwell by the British sculptor Martin Jennings was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, in London. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with Orwell's words "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", from an unused preface to "Animal Farm". The head of BBC history, Robert Seatter, said of Orwell and the statue that "He reputedly based his notorious Room 101 from "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on a room he had worked in whilst
George Orwell I never did before." Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. Although he was never a Trotskyist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime, and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. In Part 2 of "The Road to Wigan Pier", published by the Left Book Club, Orwell