SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: This is one for the true believers: a documentary about the birth of the British welfare state in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when the national Coalition war leader Winston Churchill, having helped save Britain from Nazism, was turfed out by the electorate in favour of a radically reforming Labour government committed to the introduction of democratic socialism.
starts to increasingly seem like a conveyer belt of the usual suspects
Having grown up as a member of Britain’s post-war generation, I’ve never been quite able to get my head around how that could have happened, but this film puts it all clearly into focus. The pity is that after an initially strong first half, it should turn into such an intellectually complacent, Old Left snooze.
No-one should be surprised that its director is Ken Loach. Who else would be interested in, let alone be able to pull off the funding for, an examination of British politics of nearly 70 years ago including the birth of free health care? Okay, perhaps one other. Danny Boyle made a global splash with his London Olympics Opening Ceremony tribute to the national health system, a celebration of an institution long seen by most Brits as a birth right, so ingrained a part of British national identity that even Margaret Thatcher was unwilling to attempt to dismantle it. Under David Cameron’s Conservative-dominated Coalition government it no longer appears so safe. Hence The Spirit of ’45.
While Boyle mounted what to most outside of the hard right would have seen as an apolitical vision of the health service, Loach’s aim here is to re-politicise it, to remind people of its largely forgotten roots in the radical democratic socialism of the 1930s and ’40s. Post-war Labour leader Clement Atlee’s state takeover of the hospital system, spearheaded by firebrand health minister Aneurin Bevan, is rightly contextualised as part of the same political process as the nationalisation of the railways and coal mines. Here Loach’s politics helpfully inform the film – by stating out loud historical truths that, for ideological reasons, have been largely forgotten. But in resurrecting the politics of state ownership in essentially unreconstructed form, the film reveals its Achilles’ heel in the film’s second half, taking us through the 1980s Thatcher era until today.
Loach is famously a staunch leftist but it’s critical to note that he’s largely used his political beliefs to inform his films and not overpower them. Check Ladybird, Ladybird, which made villains of over-zealous social workers, the very representatives of the bureaucratised welfare state he regards so admiringly here; or his Spanish Civil War tale, Land and Freedom, primarily memorable as a wartime love story, as close to the spirit of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as to its more obvious role model, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
In other words, his films are often most potent for grounding his passionate socialist beliefs in personal realities and lived experience. That’s also true of this documentary’s first half. While using period newsreel footage to establish the historical backdrop, he drops in contemporary interviews (also in black and white) of witnesses to the grotesque poverty of the 1920s, with its mass unemployment and frequent despair. This can get a bit Monty Python-esque at times ('Eh up lad, you think you had it tough, my parents lived in a shoebox – and we were 'appy"), but that’s probably unavoidable.
But while there’s a few lively raconteurs here, the parade of old socialists and trade union officials starts to increasingly seem like a conveyer belt of the usual suspects, witnesses trotted out to lecture the audience along Loach’s pre-digested ideological line.
In pursuing his arguments about the need for centralised socialist planning, Loach carries on as if the economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and China’s successful embrace of aggressive multinational capitalism (mixed with some centralised state control) had never happened. This makes him look blinkered, too stuck in the certainties of the past to address the central ideological challenges of the early 21st century – a world in which both state socialism and free market capitalism have failed. That nostalgic vibe extends to the film’s traditional style, with its bog-standard mix of talking heads and newsreel clips. After a while I found myself longing for Michael Moore to come along and liven things up with one of his theatrical stunts. No such luck.
