Orwell wasn't a trotskyist, but democratic socialist. He probably leaned libertarian in his socialism, cause he admitted that he should join anarchist side and not POUM, which was some coalition of trotskyist and libertarian Marxists.
Read his treatise about the need for revolution in England ("The Lion and the Unicorn"), and it's clear he was firmly statist, not libertarian, but you're right he was certainly a democratic socialist.
Sure, but there are statists who dismiss libertarian leftism outright and there are ones who travel to fight for libertarian leftist project. Orwell was the second type clearly judging by his actions.
Absolutely agree with that. I think Orwell overall was sympathetic to any anti-authoritarian socialists, even though his own thinking was still caught up in the need for a state. E.g. what he argued for in Lion and the Unicorn [1] is more early (pre-Paris Commune) Marx, with his emphasis on nationalisation [2].
I've always found it curious that given both what he experienced in Catalonia, and his firm rejection of Stalinism in particular, but really the Bolsheviks as a whole, that he did not move further towards the libertarian socialist side out of fear of the power of the state. Instead he seems to think that the problem brought by the Bolsheviks was mainly the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", rather than the notion of a more powerful state in general.
As much as I love Orwell's writing, I don't tend to find him a very deep thinker. Animal Farm and 1984 are fantastic at ripping apart the surface problems, but juxtaposed against The Lion and the Unicorn, it feels like he just stopped delving deeper than the persons involved and the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and control of the press, and didn't think more about what e.g. allowed Lenin and Stalin to gain control of the Bolsheviks (e.g. he didn't delve into the split that created the Bolshevik faction itself, nor much into the effects of Lenins "democratic" centralism), as if he thought he had sufficiently solved the problem of what made them possible.
[2] "What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates." -- George Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, part 3, section II
Consider that he got shot through his throat in his 30's and died at 46 years old, so didn't have that much time to consider other approaches. When he was younger he had an experience as a policeman, which maybe is one of the reasons he was more pro-statist in his thinking that some could guess given his life experience.
