Days of Hope. Ken Loach and the defeat of the British working class…
Intro to Loach retrospective at the British Film Institute, 2011
I just discovered the text of a talk I did about Ken Loach’s films at the British Film Institute, Saturday 1 October 2011, so I am publishing it here. I would add that his later film, Route Irish, speaks even more strongly and in some ways finally to the issues I raised here…
Ken Loach’s films have, as their central subject, the working class of the United Kingdom. They stand, for me, not just as cinema but as a kind of journalism: a record of the micro- details of what happened to the community I come from.
It’s not a popular subject. Neither mainstream film nor mainstream journalism has liked the working class in this country. The mainstream media industry was the site of the second biggest battle in the entire period: during the print strike.
But there’s another reason. It is not pretty to tell stories of defeat, decline, degeneration. Of breakup, atomisation and humiliation.
Walk into any branch of Waterstones and you will find all these states addressed — but somewhere else. Actually there is more honesty about working class life in those much derided agony memoirs — “Sad Lives” — than there is in much contemporary literature or, beyond Ken Loach and a few others, cinema.
In order to understand Ken’s contribution to the story of the oldest industrial workforce and culture in the world — you have to understand what has happened to it.
Between 1980 and today, industry halved as a proportion of value added. From 40% to 20%. The number of workers employed in industry fell from 7m in 1980 to just over 2m today.
And you might ask: why are we bothered about this sector — manual industrial workers — who have always been a minority of the workforce, and who still survive today albeit in fewer numbers?
This was not a question Margaret Thatcher asked. Thatcher’s mission was to take on, defeat and destroy the workers movement, and destroy working political class culture, that was seen as posing a challenge to every government’s right to rule, and to managers’ right to manage.
Of the three recessions we’ve lived through, it was this one in the early 1980s which shaped the lives of every character in the Loach films; even the ones that were even not born then.
Because the actual process of defeating organised labour was through three events:
- Anti-union laws; beef up public order policing
- Inflict mass unemployment that subjects about 4m people to immediate, atomizing impact of the dole
- The miners’ and printers’ strikes of 1984–86
I should add a fourth: to lean upon the old Cold War-era networks of collaboration and incompetence in the trade union and labour hierarchies to make the defeats inevitable.
Of all these, the second was the most important and it could only be done by that rare tactic: the policy invoked recession.
In the 1980 budget Geoffrey Howe combined tax rises, interest rate rise and spending cuts and the removal of capital controls to accentuate the impact on British industry.
It provoked major workplace closures in the very industries that had been central to the 1978.9 “winter of discontent”: engineering, car making, and shipbuilding. After the closure of Swan Hunter on Tyneside:
“Those that found work generally found the terms and conditions of employment were poorer than at Swan Hunter. There was a general shift from permanent to temporary forms of employment and a concomitant reduction in average earnings. The local economy suffered from the negative multipliers generated by irregular and insecure work and reduced income.” (Tomaney and al., 1997, p. 410)
It should be added, even though the recession was over by 1983, as with most classic recessions, unemployment went on rising during the recovery — and when you then get the miners’ strike and the sacking of tens of thousands miners, the narrative of communities destroyed, lives atomized then persists right the way through to the late decade: by which time you get the financial big bang, the phenomenon of Yuppies and Sloane Rangers.
In order to fully understand what the destruction of this organised manual layer did, we have to go beyond graphs and into micro-detail.
If you take a council estate in the town I am from, Leigh: then by around 1983–4 you’ve got large scale layoffs of manual workers; so the older men are unemployed. What happens is that the social weight and consequence of the older, semi-skilled unionized, Labour voting worker — who is the conveyor of “decency” messages… this declines.
Now for every person like this there is a conniving little “toe- rag” who is not yet confident to deal drugs, steal your car etc: but he is setting up his security guard firm, contract cleaning, minicab, maybe doorstep lending. His message is the neoliberal message: every man for himself.
Oncefour million organised, stable workers are on the dole, their lives shattered it is not the numerical weight of the wide boy that matters: it’s the ideological weight. His actions look logical; the actions of the self-organised look illogical.
But then you get the impact of the early-1990s recession. This piles on the agony for working class communities, so by now you’ve got a generation growing up without work; and destructive serious drug networks have moved in. And if he can, the semi-skilled “respectable” worker has moved out: he’s exercised his right to buy, bought, sold and moved on.
But then the really interesting thing, from the late 1990s right through the boom of the 2000s, you get an almost uncontrolled takeover of such estates by organised crime. Doorstep lending, drugs, violence, security rackets. Knockoff stolen goods networks.
When I covered the shooting of 11 year old Rhys Jones in Croxteth Park, in Liverpool, I stumbled the next day on a very interesting scene a few miles away in Norris Green. Norris Green is a leafy council estate a few miles away. A lot like the classic, almost idyllic estate my Dad grew up on and my Grandma lived.
I found old working class women organising a demonstration in memory of a man who had been killed a year earlier in a gang gunfight; they were wearing t-shirts describing him as a “True Nogsy Soldier”.
The world of those people, and their kids, revolved around their street corner — and regular visits to their young men in a prison the state had built so close it was walkable. Numerous people claimed they could put their hands on guns that were yards away.
How did it get that way? You have to understand what completes the process of transformation from class to “underclass”.
Labour came to power determined to put right this collapsing social cohesion. It had CCTV, neighbourbood watch, the Pathfinder projects.
But it had no programme for re-industrialisation: indeed it had a programme for further de-industrialisation. Wealth would trickle down from the financial rich to the estate dwelling poor — and if it didn’t the welfare system would do the rest.
By the end of the Labour government you have 9 million people in the tax credit system; despite the low-ish levels of unemployment, you have high levels of benefit dependency: about 5.4m on out of work benefits.
The genius of Ken Loach’s work is that it captures this process in deep detail. If we look at two films at either end of the process — and which for me are two of his most important films: Raining Stones (1993) and Looking for Eric (2009) — we see the same kind of community at different ends of the process I’ve described.
In Raining Stones it’s the old, socially solidaristic workers who are ashamed of having to plunge into the world of the scally, the wide boy: rustling the sheep, getting the butcher to kill it and then turning up among their former peers — the oldsters in the working men’s club who turn their noses up at black market meat.
Their world is turning darker: the doorstep lender, the fragmenting world of Church, family and community.
At the other end, in Looking for Eric, you have the three worlds of the modern plebeian mass:
- The Dad — a last survivor of the world of solidarity, fantasizing to keep his dreams alive.
- The Son — getting dragged into the world of criminality and gangs.
- And the ex-wife, who’s part of the salariat, and for whom as for us this is an alien world.
Between these two landmarks you get a series of works that are always set in the newly precarious world of the globalised, declining working class: in its heartlands — Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and poor London.
In the 1970s and 80s there was a critique of Loach’s work that it wasn’t political enough; that it didn’t hit head on the issue that would take down the workers’ movement — namely Stalinism, hierarchies, the corrupt union bureaucracy.
Actually when he did try to address these things, Loach could not get an airing. Both his films about the Labour bureaucracy and miners strike got effectively banned by their commissioning networks.
But I think in clinging to the small scale story, Ken Loach did take a decision: that the world of uncertainty, of newly globalised workforce, precarious work, crime etc could only be told as individual narratives.
If we look back now, at what’s happened to British economy during 30 years of freemarket reform and 20 years of globalization:there is a traumatic, politically enforced recession; whose wounds were then deepened by a spontaneous second recession. That was Loach’s original subject.
Then, by the mid-1990s his subject becomes a process of decomposition and change.
By the 2000s we’re in a situation where though there is an asset boom, and a credit-driven consumption boom even among the poorest, there is a developing underclass, there is rising tension over migration, there is pervasive organised crime tolerated by, and a mirror image of, those very symbols of bubble economics: the well paid footballer in his flash car with his string of dodgy property investments and his drug dealer and his security guy, and the guy who chooses his clothes and procures sex workers. And then the whole basis of that world collapses: finance driven economics, finance funded welfare, credit fuelled consumption.
And Loach’s work is just like a series of snapshots into this process.
One question I should address: did the workers of the 70/80/90s actually watch Loach; did they see these representations? Yes.
I sat with my Dad and Mum and watched Days of Hope, religiously every week, and later the Price of Coal. My dad and grandad had been miners and my Dad was blown away by the realism, the humour etc. Later I remember watching The Red and the Blue — a documentary about the Labour and Tory conferences in the early 1980s — when I was a Labour Party delegate.
One of the big tragedies of now is that the mainstream TV networks are a closed book to this kind of drama and documentary film making, whether by Loach or his successors.
What British TV drama has started to do, just, is to move beyond high production values towards high production values and serious semi-real examinations of politics — eg with David Hare’s Page Eight.
But we will never see anything like Days of Hope or The Price of Coal ever made for TV. Ever. In fact, you will never see these masterpieces again even on the original TV channels for which they were made.
If you judge Ken’s work as a story about the working class in the process of defeat and survival over twenty five years this is one of the major social documents of modern literature.
