Ken Loach’s documentary “The Spirit of ’45” has opened in Britain today to predictably mixed reviews. It’s not that Loach’s skill as a filmmaker is in doubt – he started his directorial career 50 years ago and has racked up such classics as “Cathy Come Home,” “Kes,” “Family Life,” “Raining Stones,” “Land and Freedom,” and “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” As always with Loach, what polarizes critical opinions about his movies is their frank socialist perspective. Throughout the West, he is revered by the left and despised by the right.
“The Spirit of ’45” calmly depicts, through archive footage and the on-camera reminiscences of elderly union organizers, historians, and the former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn, the optimism that greeted the birth of Britain’s welfare state – especially the creation of the National Health Service, which meant free healthcare for all (save consultancy medicine) and removed an odious system in which doctors doubled as their own debt collectors.
In the general election that followed the Second World War, the Labour candidate Clement Attlee enjoyed a landslide victory over Winston Churchill, the Conservative candidate, despite the popularity Churchill had won as the wartime leader of a coalition government. The Attlee government’s broad nationalization policy, spearheaded by Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health and Housing and architect of the NHS, put the major industries and services into public ownership. The result was full employment, affordable council housing, and a marked decrease in the poverty that had been rampant under the free market conditions of the 1930s.
Toward the end of the movie, Loach details Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative revolution, which privatized the nationalized industries, leading to mass unemployment, especially in the great working-class communities dependent on jobs in mining, docking, steel, and shipbuilding. The joblessness continues to this day and is the subject of Loach’s upcoming fiction film “The Angels’ Share,” opening here in April. The NHS survives but is slowly being dismantled under David Cameron’s Conservative government. The film concludes with the hope that the spirit of sharing and communal support can once again supplant greed and selfishness.
What continues to rile Loach’s enemies is his refusal to relinquish the political struggle he embarked on in the mid-1960 based on his class analysis of British politics and his realization “that social democrats and Labour politicians were simply acting on behalf of the ruling class, protecting the interests of capital” (as he said to me in an interview). Though vehemently anti-Stalinist, Loach was often tarred as a Marxist or a Trotskyist, labels that are “just used to beat you.”
Nothing’s changed. Chris Tookey, the film critic of the right-wing Daily Mail, wrote in yesterday’s review of “The Spirit of ‘45”: “This is not so much a documentary as a barking mad Marxist fantasy…. the one reason to welcome this film is that it reveals more clearly than anything else the backward-looking, scarily obsessive, extreme political agenda of those who subsidise films in Britain — and, indeed, those who ‘criticise’ them, for I guarantee that this will receive the most respectful reviews of any release this week.
“This will rank among the most deeply depressing movies of 2013, but not for the reasons Ken and his acolytes intend.”
The key words here are “extreme” – who is being extreme exactly? – and “respect.” Loach does get respectful reviews because of his respect for working-class people and disgust for those who would exploit and betray them. In film after compassionate film, he and his collaborators have demonstrated their belief that people not born into wealth should share in the plenty and have fairly paid jobs, safe working conditions, safe and hygienic homes, and the support of the social services in troubled times. If that’s wrong, then so is humanitarianism.
My review of “The Spirit of ‘45” is here.