Ken Loach (2013)
Ken Loach’s documentary has a U certificate – ‘suitable for audiences aged 4 years and over’ – and there’s no doubt this is political history for those who’ve not learned much about it yet. The public screening of British political propaganda in documentary form is unusual enough in itself to make watching The Spirit of ’45 an interesting experience, although its appearance in cinemas is doubly ironic. First, because it wouldn’t be getting any release at all if Ken Loach wasn’t a celebrity of British film. Second, because the audience of this paean and exhortation to working-class solidarity will be overwhelmingly middle class. The Spirit of ’45 supplies a good description of what the Attlee government tried to do – and, to what now seems a very remarkable extent, succeeded in doing. This part of the film culminates in shots of the Festival of Britain, the post-war Labour administration’s poignant swan song: the rapid closure of the South Bank exhibition by the incoming Conservative government in late 1951 only enhanced the Festival’s power as a political symbol. Loach cuts from these images straight to Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street in May 1979 and the words of St Francis of Assisi. To hear the arch dismantler of the post-war consensus express the hope of bringing harmony never fails to amaze and infuriate but Ken Loach’s complete excision of the complicated time between 1951 and 1979 is annoying too. He and most of the people he interviews in The Spirit of ’45 can’t possibly have approved of the Tory governments in power for more than half the twenty-eight years between the exit of Attlee and the entry of Thatcher. Given the purity of their socialism, it’s hard to believe these witnesses thought much of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour administrations that held office the rest of the time. But four-year-olds in the audience, and quite a few older people, will naturally assume from Loach’s storytelling that everything carried on fine until Margaret Thatcher spoiled it all.
Ken Loach offers no explanation of how The People allowed the Attlee government’s overall majority to plummet from 146 seats in the 1945 general election to five seats in 1950, and Labour to lose power the following year. The evasion is frustrating. There were obviously good reasons for a country that had just been through six years of war to become impatient with continuing austerity in peacetime. Loach appears to have little interest either in analysing the reasons for the Labour landslide that brought Clement Attlee to power, preferring to present the election outcome as an expression of a common will forged by the people of Britain working with and for each other during the war years. But Loach does at least include a couple of instructive passing references to other important factors. One of the very few right-wing contributors to The Spirit of ’45 is a Tory MP called Maurice Petherick (he died in 1985), who reads a letter from a constituent deploring the radical indoctrination of the British armed forces, warning that they’ll return from the war ‘pansy pinkos’. There’s also mention of Tory election literature in 1945, quoting Friedrich Hayek’s belief that the roots of Nazism lay in socialism. This hints at a theme more fully developed in a BBC television documentary of a few years ago, which suggested, convincingly, that Churchill’s attempt in the July 1945 election to characterise the Labour leadership as a totalitarian menace made no sense to an electorate that knew Attlee, Ernest Bevin et al as important and trusted players in Churchill’s wartime government. In The Spirit of ’45 there’s just a brief clip of Churchill on the hustings, being heckled by a section of the crowd and looking rather nonplussed by the experience.
Ken Loach has assembled a rich and fascinating collection of news footage – and he does well to set the political developments of the 1940s in the context of the enormous and terrible poverty of the inter-war decades. You’re reminded too, by excerpts from public information films of the time, how much Britain sounded like a socialist country in the late 1940s as it never had before or has since: the posh voice of the commentator on these films, which tells the audience what’s good for them, gives the instructions an establishment seal of approval. But Loach distorts the material visually as well as intellectually. The interviews are filmed in black and white, even though most of them seem to have been conducted recently. That seems phony from the start – but you assume it’s to show the interviewees as still infused with the spirit of ’45, as consubstantial with the monochrome newsreel of the time. The decision to stick with black and white beyond 1979 may be meant to express the grimness in the Thatcher years of the workers’ ongoing struggle but the contrived visual scheme is counterproductive. It’s not just the fact that anyone who’s seen Margaret Thatcher’s St Francis moment thinks of it as happening in colour. By not showing the Virgin Mary blue of the Blessed Margaret’s costume, Loach makes her misappropriation of Christianity less rebarbative than it actually was. It’s the same with his shots of the city boom boys of the 1980s: the monochrome drains their garish dynamism and reduces their offensiveness.
Loach also detracts from the distinctive power of the black-and-white archive film by decolourising so much else. At the very end, however, he does the opposite. The film concludes with a replay in colour of newsreel sequences shown in black and white at the start of The Spirit of ’45. (I’ve assumed from the closing credit for a colourist that black and white was their natural state.) The final shot is of a young woman who’s part of a celebrating crowd in 1945. The frame freezes on her smiling exultantly. It’s a strongly real image: you can’t help noticing on her blouse the darkness of sweat from the pit of her raised arm. You can’t help noticing either that the image serves as an epitome of Loach’s approach to the material. The young woman is surely celebrating VE Day rather than the coming of socialist government. Ken Loach’s intentional blurring of the two things is objectionable – and I say this as someone who’s very tempted to see 1945 as a hallowed, golden time because Britain won and Labour won (and my parents got married).
A larger proportion of the British population in 1945 was working class than it is now but Labour still had to get votes from elsewhere on the socio-economic spectrum to gain the huge victory that it won. Loach’s thesis that we need to revive the spirit of ‘45’ to repeat the trick ignores the practical problem of how to do that when the class balance has shifted in the intervening decades. He turns a blind eye too to the evolution of working-class values since 1945. One of the men interviewed condemns the sale of council houses in the 1980s; Loach doesn’t go anywhere near acknowledging that one of the most pernicious legacies of the Thatcher era was to make narrow self-interest a standard attitude among many people, from various social classes, who advanced materially then. Some of Loach’s witnesses – especially the doctors and nurses and a woman who now chairs a national pensioners association – are eloquent and admirable people but more than one of them echoes what seems to be Loach’s own naive belief: that rekindling a sense of decent, common purpose is all that’s needed in order for socialism to return to Britain.
One of the most infuriating things about supporting the Labour Party is that many of its members prefer powerlessness – it means their moral superiority is inviolable. But Ken Loach goes further than that. In an interview with The Big Issue coinciding with the release of The Spirit of ’45, he makes the case for a new political party to replace Labour, which he believes to be irredeemably ‘degraded’. It’s no surprise that Tony Blair isn’t even mentioned in the film (he must be miles beneath Loach’s contempt since he’s not even a class traitor) but the omission of any reference to Harold Wilson’s governments is more striking, and more illustrative of this documentary’s blinkered point of view. For Ken Loach and, I guess, most of the people who appear in the film, modest incremental moves to greater fairness count for nothing and the Wilson administrations’ handling of the economy is regarded as a failure by people of widely differing political persuasions. During the Wilson governments of the 1960s, however, capital punishment was abolished and abortion and homosexuality were legalised. As the Conservative journalist Alex Massie pointed out in response to Ken Loach’s Big Issue interview, you need to define your terms carefully – much more carefully than Loach does here – in urging a return to the Britain of 1945.
23 March 2013
