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I chose to answer "Other" on the first question, because I think that Orwell missed some key concepts about language and politics (while still saying things of great value and wisdom that apply to us today).

I feel that language is meant to grow and shift, and that a language held in place and forced to be incredibly precise becomes a dead language. Only the academics will keep it. Often academics forget this, and so they go off on snotty rants about language. hah.

In politics, the audience is not made up of academics. A vast majority of the people will have no use for a candidate that stands up and uses perfect English in the most precise way possible. They want to be comforted, entertained, and left with the sense that they have been informed about something good by someone like them. That is ALL they care about. They will ignore all actual evidence of real life events if someone is a master of that craft (or more accurately, employs masters of it and reads their words).

This is extremely evident in US politics, and Orwell doesn't address the root of the problem anymore. It isn't that language is vague and decadent, or even that people who use such language are losing their ability to think clearly. It is that people in this country currently PREFER not to think precisely about politics, and no change in the language will inspire them to care.

The problem is attitude driven rather than language driven, and I don't think that a change in language would change the attitude. It would just lose people entirely, because we are in a nation so large and self important and self celebratory that the people in it don't think that government is something that they have to pay attention to or care about anymore. They cheer for it like they cheer for a favorite football team, mindlessly... and driven to serve capitalistic and corporate interests that they are only vaguely aware of in their hot dog eating and team chanting stupor.

The academics may be getting sloppy in their description of these events, but in the end...no one but other academics care.

The key will be finding a way to inspire the masses to care about what they SEE and EXPERIENCE. I think that is why photography will play such a major roll in the politics of the future. I think a candidate that would make good use of photography to show things actually related to politics (rather than stupid advertising images) could turn the tide. People need a picture book that explains the world right now, something that makes them feel that places other than here are real.

Vamp:)=

I'm an American, but I'm also looking at UK usage and politics.