Ken Loach: "We need a new party of the left"

Scan Ken Loach's filmography and you have a pretty effective barometer for the quality of life for the people of the UK at the fuzzy end of the stick. For the majority of his celebrated 50-year career Loach has tended towards character driven narratives shot in a naturalistic, frills-free style — films like Kes (1969), Raining Stones (1993) and last year’s gentle whisky-heist comedy The Angels’ Share — but occasionally this MO shifts. When conditions for the working class really reach boiling point Loach drops his preferred social realism in favour of a more direct mode of cinema: documentary.

In 1966 Loach gave us his most formerly radical film, Cathy Come Home, a heartbreaking moc-documentary detailing the miserable life of a young woman as she struggles to keep her young family together and a roof over their head during the housing shortages of the time. When Liverpool dockers were striking with little success in the mid-90s Loach made The Flickering Flame, an angry documentary showing how the dockers and their families were sold down the Mersey by their cowardly trade union leaders. And during the 80s he made doc after doc (including four-part series Questions of Leadership (1983) and The South Bank Show-commissioned Which Side Are You On? (1984)) rallying against the Thatcher government’s ideological (and in the case of the miners’ strike – physical) assault on the working class.

This week sees the release of another Loach doc, The Spirit of ’45, which celebrates, using talking-head testimonies and archive footage, the better, fairer Britain that formed out of the bloody ashes of the Second World War. What social crisis has caused him to switch back to this more urgent form of filmmaking? Take your pick.

“It’s such a critical moment,” the softly spoken director tells me by phone from his Soho office. “There’s the collapse of the economies across Europe and the constant attacks on people’s living standards. And the health service is about to be destroyed: the incoming of private providers, the contracting out of services, I mean it will go if things carry on as they are.”

These attacks on the NHS are what brings The Spirit of '45 full circle. It was the incoming Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, who delivered us our universal health care. “The period after the war was extraordinary,” Loach says. “People had a consciousness of working together. It wasn’t G4S who sent private contractors over to beat Hitler, it was the state’s army. People of the time remembered the poverty of the 20s and 30s, the deprivation and the unemployment. And they thought, ‘if we can win the war together, if we can bring about peace together, then we can establish a better society after the war.’”

Loach’s film shows how this sense of common good was eroded and then finally destroyed by the arrival of the 80s and Margaret Thatcher’s ‘greed is good’ economy. Thirteen years of New Labour didn’t do anything to turn the tide and the recent economic crash has crushed the legacy of the government of 1945's message entirely. “There’s mass unemployment across Europe, a new kind of poverty; there’s homelessness and alienation,” he tells me. “It’s time we remembered the earlier model, which, some would argue, was much more successful.”

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“I think Ed Miliband’s past recall. If he can ignore the wisdom of his father so comprehensively I don’t think seeing our film will make much difference” — Ken Loach

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I ask Loach why he seems to turn to documentary at these moments of crisis. “Fiction will absorb an objective situation into character and into dramatic conflict, and it’s a much more layered way of working,” he explains. “A documentary: it is what it is. Those are the experiences of those people, that’s what they went through; and there they are and they tell you – and there are the images of the time that show what actually happened.” The result is a fidelity and an immediacy that the audience can connect with.

The Spirit of ’45 doesn’t quite have the fire of Loach’s earlier work, but it’s clear from recent press reaction that he still has the power to get some commentators hot under the collar. A few hours after our conversation Loach is accused on Newsnight of creating an agitprop. The claim would have carried more weight, perhaps, if the VT that accompanied the segment hadn't so shamefully skewed The Spirit of ’45’s message. “I wish you’d played a straight clip of the film,” he says to presenter Kirsty Wark, “because that was a nonsensical condensation of what was a rather complex piece.”

Over the years, Loach has become accustomed to this mistreatment and misrepresentation. He’s seen several of his films banned in the past, particularly ones made during the Thatcher years. I wonder if there’s ever the temptation to temper his anger, to make a few concessions to make sure the film actually gets seen. “Well, we didn’t temper the feelings in the film at all,” he tells me. “These are just the plain unvarnished facts.”

The difference with The Spirit of ’45 to, say, his banned Save the Children Fund Film (1971) (prints of which were almost incinerated by the charity because they were so incensed by the way its imperialistic treatment of vulnerable children was depicted) is that it’s produced for cinema. “It works differently in the cinema to television,” Loach explains. “I mean television is controlled by government placed men who can stop a programme going out. It’s not quite the same in the cinema. Plus, this is about 60/70 years ago.”

This last point doesn’t quite ring true. By showing archive clips of the abject poverty in the 30s and the improvements the social collectivism of the post-war years brought about, Loach is clearly drawing parallels with the inequality in today’s society. And by including snippets from the 1945 Labour manifesto, one can’t help but be reminded of how far removed New Labour is from the Attlee ministry’s political conviction and its sense of social justice. I suggest to Loach that the current opposition would do well to take notes during his film. “I think Ed Miliband’s past recall,” Loach says dryly. “If he can ignore the wisdom of his father so comprehensively I don’t think seeing our film will make much difference.” Loach argues that the UK needs an alternative movement. “We need a new party of the left to represent the good things that people are capable of: working together, creating things together, being answerable to each other, and to get off the market driven economy, which has brought such misery.”

Perhaps Loach is the person to lead this leftist revolt — would he ever consider standing for parliament? “My memory’s not good enough to be honest,” he chuckles. “I think if you’ve met many politicians it’s not a job you want to be in, is it? They’re a pretty disreputable bunch.”

This is typical Loach. His humble demeanor — he rejects the term auteur; when he talks about his filmmaking he emphasises the we instead of the I — couldn’t be further from the preening megalomaniacs that haunt Westminster. This lack of ego is evident in The Spirit of ’45 too. Loach was nine when the war ended, yet he doesn’t include any of his own recollections along with the film's other talking-heads. I take time at the end of our interview to ask him his memories of those post-war years.

“I remember the street parties and I remember the bombing,” he says. “It wasn’t a political house so I don’t remember the battles of the 40s, the political struggles. But I know we all benefitted from the health service, we all benefitted from everyone having a job and somewhere to live. Everyone could look forward to the future with some security after six years of that terrible insecurity of war. Looking back that was a huge benefit, which the kids now don’t have.”