It's all relative, Tom, which is my point. In spite of my harangue, the English peasant always had it better than his counterpart on the Continent. He had legal protections, civil rights and the rule of law--trial by jury, etc, which were unprecedented in Spain or Germany. And even though Britain is not as physically rich as France, the English Yeoman wore leather shoes and ate meat more often than his counterpart across the channel, who wore wooden sabots and lived on gruel.

Britain had a Magna Carta, and a Parliament, and a solid Middle Class, and even though it had an execrable social class system, the Englishman had just cause to be proud, he had his rights, regardless of class. And yes, a strong commitment to free enterprise helped enormously in establishing this freedom and prosperity.

FACTOID: In Elizabethan London, a third of the adult population was literate. That is a record unmatched anywhere in Europe at that time except perhaps in the Jewish ghettoes.

From the late medieval to the Age of Enlightenment, England was simply a better place to live than anywhere else in Europe, with the possible exception of the uber-tolerant and (ahem) liberal Low Countries (and for very similar reasons).

As for snobbish Socialists, why not? Socialists love humanity as a group, they are perfectly free to despise them as individuals. And Orwell was not just an academic Socialist, he volunteered and fought for the Republic in Spain as an infantryman; he saw action, and he killed fascists.

And remember, absence of "all-pervasive state control" does not automatically lead to freedom. Neither is it its inevitable opposite. Some other form of plutocracy or oligarchy, either commercial or aristocratic, usually fills in the vacuum. The state is not the only form of tyranny, in fact, "the state" is a rather recent invention. Tyranny is older than Babylon.