Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television

In a discussion of the imagery historically associated with the representation of the working class, Huw Beynon adopts the following headings: ‘heroic labour’, ‘alienated labour’ and the ‘destruction of labour’.⁵²³ Although there is no straightforward move from one set of images to another, these categories may also be employed to indicate some of the shifts involved in Loach’s work. In the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, his films may be seen to have offered images of ‘heroic labour’. These refer less to the act of work itself than the emblematic struggles of workers for better pay and conditions that are dramatised in The Big Flame, The Rank and File and Days of Hope. These images do not disappear from his films but, as suggested in the previous chapter, become increasingly associated with international struggles rather than industrial conflicts in Britain. It would also be fair to say that the images of ‘heroic labour’ (achieved through industrial struggle) in Loach’s work always co-existed with a strong sense of the ‘alienation’ of labour under capitalism.⁵²⁴ For while Loach has sometimes been accused of romanticising the working class, this is hardly so of his representation of work. Indeed, when he was commissioned by the Central Office of Information to make a short film for the Youth Employment Service, Talk about Work (1971), he ran into difficulties due to the film’s depiction of factory work as ‘boring’ and lacking in ‘satisfaction’. This kind of criticism of work is also to be found in The Golden Vision and Kes, in which manual labour is shown to be an economic necessity but not a source of personal fulfilment. In Family Life, this diagnosis of the role of wage-labour under capitalism is taken one step further, becoming tantamount to an ‘alienation’ of the self necessary to the reproduction of the economic system.

However, if Loach’s work at this time looked to the possibility of new forms of economic organisation and ‘unalienated’ labour, his later films map the effects of the absence of any kind of meaningful work at all. By the 1990s, the combination of de-industrialisation, mass unemployment and anti-trade-union legislation that characterised the Thatcher years had drastically altered the condition of the British working class and seriously undercut its capacity for mass industrial action. While it was Looks and Smiles that first registered the impact of growing unemployment, it was Riff-Raff that most clearly bore witness to the changed conditions of labour, vividly illustrating how mass unemployment and deregulation put workers at the mercy of unscrupulous, cost-cutting employers. By the time this film appeared, Margaret Thatcher had, of course left office (forced out by her own colleagues in November 1990) but the Conservative government remained in power until 1997. For Loach, however, the return of a Labour government under Tony Blair in 1997 did little to reverse the direction that economic policies had taken under the Conservatives. Since the 1960s, Loach had, of course, viewed the Labour Party as irredeemably reformist, committed to the management rather than overthrow of capitalism. In the case of ‘New Labour’, however, even the rhetoric of ‘parliamentary socialism’ was abandoned in favour of an unqualified enthusiasm for the ‘free market’. As a result, New Labour followed Thatcherism in the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies that took a ‘hands-off’ approach to business, leaving the labour market largely deregulated and permitting the gap between the rich and poor to grow.⁵²⁵ As might be expected, Loach was deeply hostile to such changes and, as early as 1995, directed a short film making the case for the retention of Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution, which called for the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Even though this had become little more than a rhetorical commitment (even for ‘Old Labour’), the replacement of Clause IV possessed a symbolic importance for Blair and Loach found himself under attack for being out of touch (and, indeed, for no longer being a member of the Labour Party).⁵²⁶ For Loach, therefore, the election of ‘New Labour’ in 1997 failed to signal any fundamental change in policy direction but involved a basic acceptance of the Thatcherite project in the form of continuing support for ‘aggressive capitalism’ and the neglect of ‘the vulnerable and exploited’.⁵²⁷ This is also reflected in his films of the period, in which the representation of the lot of ‘the vulnerable and exploited’ at the hands of ‘aggressive capitalism’ remains much the same irrespective of whether the Conservative (1979–97) or Labour (1997–2010) administrations are in power.

This may be seen by comparing Riff-Raff (1991) and The Navigators (2001), which, despite being made ten years apart under different governments, nevertheless address substantially the same issues. Written by former building worker, Bill Jesse, Riff-Raff mainly focuses on a young Glaswegian, Stevie (Robert Carlyle), who joins a group of casual labourers on a building site in London. In a loose metaphor of the time, the men are involved in converting a disused hospital (symbolic of the demise of the welfare state) into private luxury apartments for the well-to-do. Ironically, Stevie is himself homeless and graduates from sleeping in a shop doorway to squatting. In an effective revival of ‘the lump’, the men are held responsible for their own tax and insurance at work, while employers show little concern for safety and oppose any hint of unionisation. Loach’s longtime collaborator, Jim Allen had, of course, written an exposé of ‘the lump’ in his 1960s ‘Wednesday Play’ of the same name. However, while the men in the two films may be confronted with similar conditions, the spirit of fighting back that animated the earlier play has more or less disappeared by the time of the latter.

The return of the ‘lump’: Larry (Ricky Tomlinson) loses his job in Riff-Raff

In Riff-Raff, Larry is a Liverpudlian activist who attacks the policies of the Thatcher government and urges the men to organise. His speechifying, however, is largely ignored by the other men, who regard him as something of a political dinosaur. In this way, the film not only highlights the ruthlessness of the employers but also reveals the lack of militancy among the workers themselves as a result of the loss of their employment rights. Thus, when Larry is dismissed by an uncaring foreman (Willie Ross) for speaking out about work and safety conditions, his fellow workers have little option but to acquiesce in the decision if they want to hold on to their own jobs. The film does, of course, end with an arson attack on the building site by Stevie and Mo (George Moss) following the dismissal of Shem (Jimmy Coleman) and the hospitalisation of Desmonde (Derek Young) as a result of an accident at work caused by faulty scaffolding (one of the issues that had been raised by Larry prior to his sacking). Mo had previously remonstrated with Larry for his political sermonising in the tearoom, interrupting Larry’s account of the iniquities of Margaret Thatcher’s government with the observation that Stevie only wants ‘a fucking squat’. Larry had, in turn, criticised Mo for his lack of political consciousness, suggesting that Marx had him in mind when he employed the term ‘lumpenproletariat’. To this extent, both Stevie and Mo move away from political apathy towards active resistance directed against the employers. However, as Loach himself acknowledges, this act does not so much constitute a ‘formed political response’ (of the kind to be found in The Big Flame) as a ‘case of alienation’ that is destined to leave the men worse off.⁵²⁸

Like Riff-Raff, which drew on Bill Jesse’s reminiscences of working on building sites, the idea for The Navigators was based on Rob Dawber’s experience of working for the Signalling and Telecommunication department at British Rail in Sheffield and deals with the consequences of railway privatisation (a highly controversial set of measures, involving the break-up of British Rail and the separation of track and train operations, introduced by John Major’s Conservative government and not reversed by the ensuing Labour government despite promises in opposition to do so). Loach’s ambition was to tell the story of railway privatisation in ‘a very specific, concrete way’ and the film focuses on a group of railway maintenance workers at a Yorkshire depot in 1995, shortly after the sell-off of the railways has occurred.⁵²⁹ The film charts the gradual disintegration of the group as a viable economic entity as market pressures undermine working conditions and the men fail to ‘stick together’, taking up agency employment that is apparently better paid but lacks any guarantee of regular work, holidays or sick pay and requires the men to provide their own clothing and transport. In this way, the film shows how the men end up doing more or less the same work as before but on poorer terms and conditions and without proper safety precautions. The consequences of this come to a head at the film’s end when four of the men from the depot, now working for an agency, are hired to concrete a signal base. Because of cost-cutting, not enough men have been hired and, without a proper lookout, Jim (Steve Huison), formerly a watchman, is hit by a passing train (bringing into stark relief an earlier statement by the new depot management that deaths should be kept to ‘an acceptable level’). In this situation, the men themselves are faced with a terrible moral predicament when they realise the consequences that the accident will have for them. Mick (Tom Craig) had previously been blacklisted by the (‘New Times’) employment agency for expressing concerns about poor safety conditions and the low calibre of the men hired (some of whom had purchased personal track safety cards on the black market). Faced with pressures at home to find work, he had, however, promised the agency that he’d ‘learn to fit in’. He now realises that any inquiry into the accident could blame the men for not working safely and they will lose the chance of future employment. He therefore persuades the other men to run the risk of Jim dying by moving him from the track and onto the road above so that they can pass the accident off as a hit and run (‘We shouldn’t be doing this’, one of the men complains sadly). This sequence is, in many ways, understated – the accident is not shown and its significance is not immediately apparent. However, it also represents a climactic narrative turn, forcing the men to make an ‘impossible’ choice. In this way, the film not only critiques the economic policies that have resulted in a lowering of safety standards but also makes this concrete by showing how flawed, but fundamentally decent, people have been trapped in an intolerable situation by circumstances outside their control.

As in Riff-Raff, the power of ordinary workers to resist these economic pressures is shown to be negligible. At the start of the film, the men belong to a union with a recognised set of agreements with management. The arrival of new private employers, however, leads to these agreements being unilaterally scrapped. Shop steward Gerry (Venn Tracey) seeks to represent the men but he fails to halt the changes that ultimately lead to the closure of the depot on economic grounds (and, with it, the destruction of the men’s work-based culture of mutuality and support). Soon Gerry is the only track worker left at the depot, reduced to playing chess with himself as he ‘works’ out his redundancy notice (explaining to a remaining secretary that ‘checkmate’ means that ‘whatever move you make you lose’). Unable to face Jim’s mother (and be forced to lie about how he died), three of his former colleagues arrive at the depot at the film’s end to ask Gerry to return Jim’s bag. The film concludes with an aerial shot of the men walking away from their former depot and gradually disappearing from view, in an image eloquent of the devastation visited upon both the men and the depot for which they once worked.

If Riff-Raff and The Navigators examine the changed conditions under which manual work is undertaken, other films – such as Raining Stones (1993), My Name Is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) – explore the consequences for those left with no job at all. To this extent, Loach’s films may be seen to portray the lives of those who have lost most from economic restructuring and the decline of manufacturing by focusing on the poorest sections of the working class. This group is sometimes associated with the idea of the ‘underclass’ (or the ‘post-working class’). However, as Ken Roberts observes, ‘there is in fact no clear division between the long-term employed and the rest of the working class’, which occupies ‘a continuum ranging from those who are continuously and fully employed … through various types of sub-employment (occasional or recurrent spells out of work) to those who stay workless’.⁵³⁰ Indeed, insofar as Loach’s characters occupy social terrain that is commonly identified with the ‘underclass’ (long-term unemployment, poverty, limited life chances), his films may be seen to offer a riposte to the moralising or stigmatising discourses that attribute poverty to psychological or cultural attributes (such as indolence, fecklessness or immorality). The strategy of the films, in this regard, is not only to provide telling reminders of those who have lost out in the transition from an industrial to a services-led economy but also to insist upon the centrality of economic factors in accounting for the problems that the characters face (and, therefore, the considerable difficulties involved in ‘solving’ them). Accordingly, the films seek to avoid explaining the actions of characters simply in terms of psychological make-up or moral outlook but to demonstrate how they result from the social and economic pressures that weigh upon them (and which therefore restrict the possibilities open to them).

This may be seen in Raining Stones, the film that followed Riff-Raff, set on the run-down Middleton estate in Manchester and focused on the unemployed worker Bob Williams (Bruce Jones) as he ‘ducks and weaves’ his way through a series of casual jobs and scams (stealing a sheep, clearing drains, digging up the turf at the local Conservative Association), trying to keep himself and his family afloat financially. Bob, however, is a devout Catholic and is determined that his daughter Coleen (Gemma Phoenix) should have a new outfit for her first communion despite lacking the means to pay for it. In some respects, Bob is a victim of ‘false consciousness’, given that he is repeatedly warned (by his wife and even the local priest) that the expense of a new dress is unnecessary. However, his motivation is also understandable insofar as the purchase of the dress so clearly represents an attempt to hold on to the last remnants of his sense of self-worth. His stubborn insistence on buying the dress, however, leads him into debt and places his family at risk from a ruthless loan shark, Tansey (Jonathan James), who enters the family home and threatens Bob’s wife in front of their daughter. The desperation of Bob’s situation then comes to a head when he assaults Tansey in a car park, inadvertently contributing to his death.

Holding on to the last remnants of self-worth: buying the communion dress in Raining Stones

Like the resort to arson at the end of Riff-Raff, this individual act of hitting out initially looks set to make matters worse (by rendering Bob liable to arrest and imprisonment). The film, however, pulls back from this conclusion by having Bob turn to Father Barry (Tom Hickey) who advises him not to confess to the police or to his wife (reassuring him that ‘there’s lots of good people on this estate who will sleep easier in their beds because of his [Tansey’s] passing’). Coleen’s communion then takes place as planned and Bob successfully avoids the scrutiny of the police (who do appear at the film’s end but only to say they have found Bob’s missing van). Given this ending, the film proved mildly controversial among Loach and Allen’s admirers given its relatively sympathetic portrait of Catholicism. However, while, at one level, the film endorses the practical support that the church provides, it also seeks to draw a distinction between the church as an institution and the actions of an individual parish priest. In an interview, Ken Loach commented that, while the writer Jim Allen was an atheist who regarded ‘the Church as an agency for the ruling class’, ‘the strength of the priest in the film is that he reacts like a human being’ and does not talk about ‘the after-life’.⁵³¹ In this respect, the film also seeks to demonstrate the (secular and humanist) virtues of a culture based on mutual support and concern without endorsing any explicitly religious, or spiritual, beliefs.

As the preceding discussion might indicate, the blending of comedy and tragic melodrama has also become an increasingly common feature of Loach’s work.⁵³² Although some critics saw the use of comedy in Riff-Raff as a new departure, it has, in fact, been present in his films since the 1960s, ranging from the social satire of Diary of a Young Man and The End of Arthur’s Marriage to the comic deflation of authority figures in Kes. However, it is undoubtedly The Golden Vision that most obviously anticipates later developments. This was the first Loach production to employ a number of club entertainers (such as Bill Dean, Johnny Gee, Joey Kaye) who brought with them a quick wit and capacity for comic banter grounded in traditional working-class culture. In subsequent films, such as Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, The Navigators and Looking for Eric, Loach has also recruited members of the cast from northern clubs who have brought a similar spirit of working-class humour to the films. In his overview of British film comedy, Richard Dacre distinguishes a music-hall tradition, reliant upon performers originating in music hall and variety, from a ‘literary’ tradition, dependent upon well-crafted scripts and character actors.⁵³³ In a sense, Loach’s films might be said to belong more to the ‘music-hall’ than literary tradition of comedy, relying upon ‘entertainers’ rather than skilled actors and comic interludes rather than a clearly structured comic narrative. Although his films do move – often slowly – towards a narrative conclusion, plots are generally episodic, consisting of scenes that are only loosely connected in conventional, ‘classical’ narrative terms. A number of these scenes, in effect, become ‘comic turns’, consisting of comic incidents, humorous talk and joke-telling that possess a degree of independence from the narrative overall (such as Larry’s discovery by Arab women in the shower in Riff-Raff or Tommy’s (Ricky Tomlinson) mooning at a helicopter in Raining Stones). While such scenes may lack a strong narrative motivation, they do nonetheless contribute, as in The Golden Vision, to the vision of working-class life that the films project. For while Loach may look to club entertainers in order to escape from established British traditions of acting associated with the theatre and ‘heritage’ cinema, he also seeks to import the sense of a shared working-class culture with which club comedians are associated. In this respect, much of the comedy of the films is employed to suggest how a shared sense of humour is central to the camaraderie, and sense of community, that the characters possess and how it may be able to sustain them in the face of adversity as well as collapse under the weight of social and economic pressures.

However, although Loach’s later films often rely heavily upon comedy, with the possible exception of Looking for Eric, they are difficult to describe as comedies per se. Commenting on the humour in the films, Barry Ackroyd has observed how Loach commonly ‘juxtaposes’ comedy and serious drama: ‘you always get a funny thing before you’re going to get the bailiffs knocking on the door or the police coming in or the enemy attacking you’.⁵³⁴ In this respect, many of Loach’s later films may be seen to pursue a strategy of ‘montage’, consisting of the juxtaposition of sequences that demonstrate contrasting moments of happiness and despair. This oscillation in tone may also be linked with a shift between comic and melodramatic modes. For while the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ in Loach’s films is often understood to stand in opposition to melodrama, the criticism of social conditions, and their impact upon characters, to be found in his films often pushes them in the direction of melodrama. As previously noted, this is evident as early as Cathy Come Home, in which much of the play’s emotional power derives from its use of melodramatic conventions (the victimisation of a ‘blameless’ heroine, unexpected turns of event and scenes calculated to arouse pathos). To some extent, this melodramatic tendency is embedded in what Deborah Knight refers to as the ‘determinist’ form of naturalist narratives that aim to account for characters’ actions in terms of their social and economic environment (such that even Zola, for all his concern with ‘scientific’ observation, may be seen to have veered towards the melodramatic and sensationalist).⁵³⁵However, insofar as ‘environmental’ factors, such as unemployment and poverty, weigh characters down that much more heavily in the later films, the element of narrative ‘determinism’ involved in the downfall of characters may also be said to have become that much stronger (and, in some respects, more overtly ‘rigged’).⁵³⁶ In this respect, the mixing of comedy (born of a degree of improvisation) and melodrama (with its drive towards ‘determinism’) also involves a degree of demonstration of how the limited ‘freedoms’ that the characters enjoy are ultimately crushed under the weight of social ‘necessity’. This would certainly seem to be so of two of Loach’s bleakest works: the ‘Scottish’ films My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen. As Loach himself has observed of My Name Is Joe: ‘we gradually realized that again we wanted to make a film that began as a comedy, and ended as a tragedy, because the reality wasn’t funny at all’.⁵³⁷

Prior to the 1990s, Loach’s films had been set primarily in (the East End of) London and the north of England (historically the two most common settings for British working-class dramas). However, from the mid-1990s, Scotland was to become an increasingly important location for Loach. As previously noted, the main character in Riff-Raff is Scotsman Stevie, played by Robert Carlyle, who briefly returns to Glasgow for the funeral of his mother. Carla’s Song, which also features Carlyle, begins in Scotland and was followed by the unofficial Scottish trilogy, My Name Is Joe, Sweet Sixteen and Ae Fond Kiss … . This Scottish ‘turn’ could be partly explained by Loach’s collaboration with Scottish writer Paul Laverty. Laverty was a human-rights lawyer who approached Loach with a script based on his experiences in Nicaragua (that subsequently became Carla’s Song). Since then, Loach and Laverty have been regular collaborators and Laverty’s Scottish background undoubtedly made a move to Scotland more practicable. Loach has also placed a particular premium on both writing and acting that draws on lived experience, and would therefore have regarded it as appropriate for Laverty to address themes related to Scotland. The move north of the border was no doubt encouraged by the increasing availability of public funding in Scotland as well. Although the money drawn from Scottish sources consisted of only a proportion of the films’ overall budgets, the sums involved were still sufficiently substantial (around £600,000 in the case of My Name Is Joe) to make working in Scotland attractive. In the case of Carla’s Song, for example, Laverty’s original idea was to set the whole film in Nicaragua.⁵³⁸ While the inclusion of material set in Scotland may, in the end, have served a narrative purpose (by helping to ground the Nicaraguan conflict in relation to contemporary UK realities), it also made obtaining Scottish funding that much easier. Given its political complexion, however, it might also be said that Scotland itself appeared to provide a relatively congenial environment for Loach.

This was particularly so given the way in which the discourse of class continued to survive in Scotland despite the changing character of the workforce. As Paterson et al. indicate, the resistance to English Conservative rule during the 1980s and 1990s involved a continuing attachment to collective values that often found expression in the language of class identity and politics. Citing evidence that a majority in all socioeconomic groups within Scotland identify themselves as ‘working class’, the authors indicate how ‘Scotland still thinks of itself as being a working class country’ despite the changes in patterns of employment wrought by the move towards a ‘post-industrial’ economy.⁵³⁹ Given Loach’s own commitment to the politics of class struggle, and his frustrations at the abandonment of the rhetoric of class by ‘New Labour’ (which, as previously noted, he regarded as merely following in the footsteps of Thatcherism), it could be argued that Scotland, like the north of England, continued to maintain a consciousness of the politics of class, as well as the virtues of collectivism, that resonated with Loach’s own political outlook.

This sense of growing political confidence in the face of the unfairness of Thatcherism, and continuing attachment to ‘communitarian’ values, however, finds relatively little expression in Loach’s Scottish films. Like Raining Stones, My Name Is Joe is set in the bleak new world of the housing estate (this time in Glasgow) in which unemployment, debt, drug-taking and crime have become commonplace. Emblematic of this world are the young couple, Liam (David McKay) and Sabine (Annemarie Kennedy) and their baby Brendan. Liam has been in prison for drug-dealing but is seeking to go straight and keep clean. Sabine, however, is both on junk and on the game and has plunged the family into massive debt. Their situation, in turn, comes to weigh heavily on the film’s main character, Joe Kavanagh, movingly played by Peter Mullan. Like the men in Raining Stones, Joe is unemployed and survives the best he can, prepared to ‘do the double’ when the opportunity arises. He is also a reformed alcoholic and our perceptions of him are radically transformed halfway through the film when his violent past is revealed in a disturbing flashback that carries echoes of Ray Winstone’s alcohol-fuelled violence in Ladybird, Ladybird. The possibility of redemption, however, is offered to Joe when he encounters Sarah (Louise Goodall), a health worker involved with Liam and Sabine. By offering to decorate her flat, he comes to know her better and a tentative romance begins to develop (despite Joe’s initial hesitation about asking her for a date, given that he has no money and is loathe to go into pubs). As this emphasis on money suggests, a romantic relationship, as in other Loach films, cannot exist in a vacuum but, of necessity, occurs in a specific social context.

Emblematic of the bleak new world of the housing estate: Sabine (Annemarie Kennedy) in My Name Is Joe

Social and economic circumstances also shape the choices he makes. Discovering the extent of Liam and Sabine’s plight, he tackles McGowan (David Hayman), the local drug-dealer, with whom he went to school. As a result he is confronted with a sociologically grounded variant of the melodramatic choice between ‘duty’ and ‘love’: between doing what he can to help Liam, a member of his surrogate ‘family’ – the football team – by agreeing to transport drugs for McGowan or risking his own happiness with Sarah by plunging back into the world from which she has offered him escape. He opts, from the best of motives, to assist Liam but from then on his relationship with Sarah is in jeopardy, as is revealed in the highly charged scene where Sarah discovers that he has lied to her (and, even worse, used the proceeds from his activities to buy her a ring). Joe attempts to reverse his decision but succeeds only in making matters worse, culminating in his return to drink and Liam’s suicide. However, typically of Loach’s work, Joe’s choice is seen not simply as a matter of personal morality but one that has been forced upon him by his socioeconomic situation. As he attempts to explain to Sarah,

I’m sorry but we don’t live in this nice, tidy wee world of yours. Some of us cannae go to the polis. Some of us cannae go to the bank for a loan. Some of us cannae move house and fuck off out of here. Some of us don’t have a choice.

Sarah’s failure to sympathise with Joe’s predicament also highlights the social barriers that still divide them. It is in the character of Loach’s observational realism that it should emphasise the role of those middle-class authority figures who impose most heavily on the day-to-day lives of the working classes. Hence, it is the failure of the professional middle classes – such as teachers, doctors, judges and social workers – to understand, or provide relevant support to, the working class that prompts so much of the anger in films such as Cathy Come Home, Kes, Family Life and Ladybird, Ladybird. Thus, in Ladybird, Ladybird, the social workers constitute a largely malign presence, cruelly interfering in the lives of others and adding to their misery rather than helping them. In My Name Is Joe there is rather more sympathy for the ‘helping’ professions and a greater recognition of the burdens that are imposed upon them. The scenes at the health centre show basically good people struggling against the odds to care for the unwell and the needy (‘I’ve put a lot of work into this family’ declares Sarah as she attempts to dissuade a doctor from dropping Sabine and her family from the register). The point the film makes, in this regard, is not so much that the social services are fundamentally flawed but that the need for them is exacerbated by unemployment and poverty, precisely the two areas where ‘interference’ is most required but not forthcoming. Nevertheless, for all of her caring and nurturing qualities, Sarah seems unable to make the imaginative leap into Joe’s world, and it is her rejection of him that precipitates the film’s final downward spiral of events. Sarah does make an appearance at Liam’s funeral at the film’s end but, by this time, it is unlikely that their relationship can be repaired.

Sweet Sixteen also highlights the difficult choices and limited scope for action available to its main characters. In this film, the teenager Liam (Martin Compston) aspires to make a home for his mother when she is released from prison. Although his money-making schemes initially prosper, his dreams are in shreds by the end of the film when his mother has rejected him and he is in flight from the police after stabbing her boyfriend, Stan (Gary McCormack). As in earlier films, the use of hard drugs is identified as a particular scourge of deprived working-class communities. Indeed, as early as Riff-Raff Loach had introduced a brief scene in Glasgow in which Stevie returns to the city for the funeral of his mother and encounters his brother and his wife, who are both recovering junkies. In Raining Stones, Jimmy points to a couple of bickering smackheads as a symbol of the problems faced by the estate (‘it’s mapped out … it’s all cut and dried … no work and no hope … it’s all despair’) while Sabine’s addiction to heroin is central to Joe’s downfall in My Name Is Joe. Heroin use, of course, is also a central feature of the ‘breakthrough’ Scottish film, Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1995), set in the estates of Leith (near Edinburgh). Although Trainspotting could hardly be said to glamorise drug-taking, its employment of attractive young actors, pop soundtrack, witty voiceovers and general air of self-conscious knowingness did render it vulnerable to charges of ‘heroin chic’. In Loach’s universe, however, heroin dependency is divested of its rock-culture associations and much more firmly linked to class disadvantage and material hardship. Thus, while Renton’s (Ewan McGregor) famous voiceover at the beginning of Trainspotting (‘choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact-disc players and electrical tin openers’) invokes the rhetoric of bohemianism and its rejection of social conformity and materialism, the implication of the Loach films is that the majority of these acquisitions do not lie within the grasp of its working-class characters in the first place.

Failed romance: Joe (Peter Mullan) and Sarah (Louise Goodall) in My Name Is Joe

However, while drug use features prominently in both My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, the primary emphasis of the films is less on ‘the needle and the damage done’ than the role that drugs play within the ‘local economy’. It is, of course, a convention of gangster films to allegorise crime as a kind of extension, or mimicry, of conventional business practices. Similarly, in Sweet Sixteen, it appears as though the vacuum left by the demise of traditional manufacturing (and shipbuilding in particular) has been filled by the new service industry of illegal drug supply. In an ironic commentary on the ‘enterprise culture’, championed by successive UK Conservative and New Labour administrations, the film also indicates how drug-dealing represents one of the few ‘career opportunities’ still available to ambitious but socially disadvantaged youngsters. This had already been illustrated in Raining Stones in which the daughter of Bob’s mate, Tommy, who is also unemployed, is revealed to be dealing at a club where Bob obtains temporary employment. Even more strikingly, in Sweet Sixteen, Liam seizes the ‘business opportunities’ available to him by gravitating from selling stolen cigarettes in pubs to working for the local ‘Al Capone’, Douglas (Jon Morrison), who operates under the cover of a smart health club typical of the new middle-class Glasgow. There is, in this respect, a further parallel with Trainspotting in which Renton, on moving to London, relishes the amorality of the enterprise culture and betrays the majority of his friends by stealing the proceeds from a drug deal. In Renton’s case, the money offers the possibility of individual ‘escape’, leaving behind the environment and friends that have dogged him and making a new start (at a time when ‘the world is changing’). In My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, however, the resort to drug-dealing proves a false avenue of ‘escape’ and the main characters end up in worse circumstances than those in which they began (as McGowan tells Joe once he has agreed to work for him, ‘you cannae get oot’).

The sense of gloom that pervades both My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen is made all the greater by virtue of the absence of any character, or characters, who might offer a more developed, or politicised, perspective on events. While such characters may run the risk of appearing to be artificially introduced into the action (in a way that endangers the films’ commitment to surface ‘verisimilitude’), it is none the less common for Loach’s films, especially those written by Jim Allen, to offer a degree of political argument. As previously noted, in Riff-Raff, Larry (played by the actor Ricky Tomlinson who was himself a former political activist) good-naturedly lectures his fellow workers on the shortcomings of the Tories and the men’s lack of political consciousness. In Raining Stones, Jimmy (Mike Fallon), is a community activist who argues with his son-in-law Bob about the need to change the system and embodies a tradition of political radicalism that throws into relief the ineffectiveness of the Labour councillor seen scurrying out the door of the tenants’ association. While, of course, the voice of the political activist in Riff-Raff and Raining Stones proves largely impotent, overwhelmed by the weight of economic forces bearing down upon characters, it does at least hint at some kind of alternative to the existing system. In My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, however, this voice has disappeared altogether, making the oppressiveness of the circumstances which the characters face that much greater. Loach has, of course, stressed the comedy that he unearths from even the most desperate of situations (citing, for example, the antics of the football team in My Name Is Joe) as well as the resilience that his characters demonstrate in the face of economic and social disadvantage. He has also suggested how the vitality with which the actors embody their characters creates a sense of ‘possibilities’ that will prompt audiences to question why these are being strangled by the circumstances in which they live.⁵⁴⁰ Nevertheless, given the relentless downward spiral in which his characters are caught, and the lack of any viable escape route, My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen remain two of the bleakest films that he has made.

A downward spiral: Liam (Martin Compston) and Pinball (William Ruane) in Sweet Sixteen

This sense of pessimism, and discourse of failure, also appears to acquire a particular significance in the Scottish context. In some respects, the ‘Scottishness’ of the films might be seen to be of little consequence. Given the absence of references to Scotland in Loach’s work prior to the 1990s, it could well be argued that Loach’s films made in Scotland have been driven by the necessities of raising production finance and involve little that is specifically Scottish. In an interview about his script for My Name Is Joe, for example, Paul Laverty suggests that ‘no great premium’ is placed upon the Glasgow location which he argues is no ‘less or more complex than any other city’.⁵⁴¹ Loach has also suggested how Glasgow – with its ‘strong working-class culture’ – possesses much ‘the same quality as Liverpool’, a city that has served as the location for a number of his productions before and since.⁵⁴² For Loach and Laverty, therefore, it is the shared experience of the working class that is most important, with the implication that more or less the same stories could be told of characters in Liverpool or Manchester (cities that could, indeed, have provided the locations for these films had the money dictated it). Nevertheless, it is also the case that in moving to Scotland, the films end up negotiating, explicitly or implicitly, the traditions of representation that have informed films that have been set in Scotland. Colin McArthur, for example, has argued how, despite the transformation of Scotland by industrialisation and urbanisation during the nineteenth century, cinematic imagery of Scotland (at least up until the 1980s) remained indebted to the discourses of tartanry (romantic evocations of the Highlands) and kailyard (sentimental portraits of small-town life).⁵⁴³ It is, of course, in the character of Loach’s predominantly urban realism that it should seek to distance itself from these representational traditions. This is especially evident in My Name Is Joe when Joe, for the only time in the film, abandons the city in order to collect a car, containing drugs, from outside a seaside B&B (‘Stella Maris’). On his return drive to Glasgow he stops off at a ‘Highland’ tourist location (identified as Glencoe in the script), where he observes a piper playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ while a group of tourists gather round to take photographs. Observing the scene from a distance, Joe engages in sardonic banter with the woman serving him tea from a caravan kiosk (‘Bonnie Scotland eh?’, ‘Bonnie Scotland right enough’). In this way, the film gently deflates the tourist view of Scotland (associated with tartanry) and hints at its divorce from the oppressive ‘realities’ of urban working-class life. In Sweet Sixteen, Liam’s aspiration to escape from his drab housing estate is symbolised by a caravan located on a hill overlooking the Clyde estuary (which he enthusiastically describes as ‘paradise’). This too proves a forlorn dream and the caravan is subsequently burnt to the ground.

However, in deromanticising rural imagery in this way, the films do not so much subvert conventional representations of Scotland as draw upon the tradition of ‘Clydesidism’ that has historically focused on the urban working class and been associated with discourses of ‘hardness’ (be it either hard physical labour or hard fighting and drinking).⁵⁴⁴ Indeed, Sweet Sixteen is specifically set in the former shipbuilding town of Greenock, located on the Clyde estuary. However, as the films were made at a time when Scottish heavy industry (such as shipbuilding) had experienced a sharp decline, it is hardly surprising that Loach’s films avoid any heroisation of manual labour or invocation of the spirit of ‘Red Clydeside’. The beginning of Carla’s Song introduces us to the character of George (Robert Carlyle), a Glasgow bus driver whose personality is characterised by anti-authoritarianism and sympathy for the underdog. However, his rebelliousness is confined to provoking the irritation of low-level officials and it is Nicaragua, rather than contemporary Scotland, that the film identifies with a genuine spirit of revolution. Nevertheless, as Colin McArthur indicates, ‘Clydesidism’ is not necessarily celebratory in tone and, in later variants, has involved an element of lament for ‘the demise of shipbuilding on the Upper Clyde’.⁵⁴⁵ Thus, for all its apparent differences, Clydesidism may be seen to share an elegiac tone and sense of national loss with the discourses of tartanry associated with the massacre of Glencoe, the Battle of Culloden and the Highland clearances. Thus, while virtually all of Loach’s films made in the UK since the 1990s have focused on the collapse of heavy industry and its impact upon the traditional (male) working class, they may be seen to possess a distinctive ideological resonance in the Scottish context, given the importance of class for constructions of Scottish identity and the way in which, as in ‘Clydesidism’, the demise of the traditional working class may take on a ‘national-allegorical’ dimension.

This sense of loss, moreover, is underlined by the ways in which the films draw links between Scottish and Irish experience. For while ‘Scottishness’ may have been absent from Loach’s oeuvre prior to the 1990s, the discourse of ‘Irishness’ has played a much more prominent role. Characters of Irish stock have featured in Loach’s work since the mid-1960s and Ireland itself provided the setting for part of the opening episode of Days of Hope in 1975 (and later for the whole of The Wind That Shakes the Barley). Some of the attraction of Liverpool as a setting has also been the city’s association with the Irish diaspora and the contribution of the Irish-Catholic working class to the city’s politics and culture. This emphasis is, of course, partly attributable to the Irish lineage of Loach’s collaborators (Jimmy O’Connor, Jim Allen, Paul Laverty) but also the potency of the symbolism of the Irish as both the victims of British colonialism and its opponents. Given these resonances, it is perhaps not surprising that Loach’s portraits of the Scottish working class are invested with a clear Irish-Catholic dimension through the use of names such as Liam and the occasional religious reference (‘I’m a good Catholic boy’, Liam tells Sarah as a cover for his lying in My Name Is Joe). Like Catholics in Liverpool, the majority of Catholics in urban Scotland are of Irish origin, having emigrated from Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and are historically associated with poorly paid manual jobs. Thus, while Catholics represent only about one in six of the Scottish population, the foregrounding of the Irish-Catholic working class in Loach’s films performs a double function, not only highlighting the experience of a section of the working class in Scotland that has historically been the most disadvantaged (and also, on occasion, the most militant) but also invoking a history of Catholic oppression in Ireland and Scotland alike.⁵⁴⁶

However, while the films’ narratives of victimisation and failure may draw upon a long-standing tradition of representation, there is, given the films’ production context, an element of irony that this should be the case. As previously noted, the funding available to support film-making in Scotland has been the product of public initiatives designed to promote Glasgow as a financially attractive place to work and to encourage the kind of local ‘creative economy’ regarded as necessary for urban regeneration. The production of films such as My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen have therefore played an important role in raising the profile of Scotland as a centre for film production and helping to circulate images of Scotland around the world. However, as Jonathan Murray has pointed out, the desire to reinvent Glasgow as a ‘vibrant contemporary creative hub’ is, to some extent, subverted by the reliance of the films themselves on images of Glasgow as ‘a depressed and depressing post-industrial dystopia’.⁵⁴⁷ This was a feature that did not, of course, go unremarked. The local Labour MP, David Cairns, worried that Sweet Sixteen’s bleak portrait of the Greenock area would act as a deterrent to investment while others fretted about the impact of such images upon tourism.⁵⁴⁸ Referring to Loach as ‘our Visiting Professor of Doom’, Channel 4’s Head of Nations and Regions, Stuart Cosgrove also complained that screen representations have ‘tilted Scotland too far in the direction of perceived failure’ and that, while ‘poverty and deprivation’ remain a ‘challenge’, they do not constitute the ‘defining characteristic’ of contemporary Scottish experience.⁵⁴⁹

By this time, however, Loach and Laverty had, in fact, moved in a new direction and produced, possibly as a result of earlier criticisms of their work, a considerably more upbeat account of contemporary Scotland. Partly conceived as a response to the changing atmosphere towards Muslims in wake of the events of 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’), the film deals with a romance between a second-generation Glaswegian Asian, Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub) and an Irish-Catholic teacher, Roisin Hanlon (Eva Birthistle). One of the more striking features of Loach’s films since the 1990s has been an increasing emphasis on romantic encounters, such as those between Stevie and Susan in Riff-Raff and George and Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) in Carla’s Song. However, while romance is shown to present regenerative possibilities, allowing characters to uncover new aspects of themselves, Loach’s films, such as My Name Is Joe, also lay stress on how romantic success or failure depends upon social and economic factors and not just personal attributes. In Ae Fond Kiss …, therefore, it initially appears as though religious and ethnic differences will prove sufficiently powerful to prise the couple apart. Although Casim and Roisin have embarked upon a relationship, Casim has omitted to tell Roisin that he is due to marry a cousin from Pakistan, an arrangement which, out of loyalty to his family and religion, he feels unable to renege upon (‘It’s not about love. It’s much more than that’, he tells her). Roisin, in turn, is confronted by the prejudice of the local parish priest who refuses to sign the Certificate of Approval that would allow her to take up a permanent post at the Catholic school where she works on the grounds that she is living ‘in sin’ with a non-Catholic (‘we’re stuck in the middle’, she subsequently complains to Casim). The title of the film derives from a Robert Burns song about parting (‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever! Ae farewell, and then forever’) and the song’s gloomy sentiments appear to anticipate, as in other Loach films, the breakdown of their relationship. Thus, after Casim has told Roisin he is not her ‘match’, the song is to be heard on the soundtrack over shots of Roisin crying and Casim driving away in his car.

To this extent, the film resorts to the relatively well-worn narrative convention of love across the cultural divide to comment on the state of contemporary ‘race relations’. It does so, however, in a way that seeks to avoid mapping East–West relations in terms of a simple contrast between tradition and modernity. Although Casim’s father, Tariq (Ahmad Riaz), is shown to be opposed to his children’s exercise of the normal Western ‘freedoms’ (choice of partner, choice of university course), the film is also at pains to emphasise how Tariq’s outlook has been shaped by his experience of colonialism, migration and racism. Moreover, even though it may possess the air of a somewhat contrived ‘balance’, the film’s emphasis upon the narrow-mindedness of the Catholic church also acts as reminder that the ‘West’ itself is hardly to be regarded as a repository of secular rationalism. By making Roisin Irish rather than Scottish, the film also hints at how both Ireland and Pakistan have been shaped by a colonial legacy of partition and historic patterns of emigration. However, somewhat remarkably for a Loach film, Ae Fond Kiss … also strives to overcome the inbuilt pessimism of its narrative set-up and demonstrate that the couple possesses the capacity to overcome the divisions that separate them. This is not only an unusual characteristic for a Loach film but a significant one, given the period in which the film was made. The events of 2001 and its impact upon British Muslims had prompted the production of a number of films and television dramas, such as Yasmin (2004) and Bradford Riots (2006), that sought to highlight the growth of ethnic tensions within contemporary Britain. Yasmin, for example, was made by Loach’s old production company Parallax, and produced by his erstwhile collaborator Sally Hibbin. Although shot in the north of England, it also enjoyed the backing of Scottish Screen as a result of the involvement of the Scottish director, Kenny Glenaan. Compared with Ae Fond Kiss …, however, Yasmin is much less optimistic about the state of community relations. In response to the growing prejudice around her and the heavy-handed actions of the police in the wake of ‘9/11’, the film’s central character Yasmin (Archie Panjabi) comes to reject her ‘Westernised’ lifestyle and the possibility of a romance with her white co-worker. In contrast, Casim in Ae Fond Kiss … does ultimately defy the wishes of (the majority of) his family by choosing his own partner despite his father warning that it will end badly. Thus, while films such as Yasmin and Bradford Riots suggest how the pressure of political events is encouraging Muslims to reject ‘in-between’ identifications in favour of more clearcut forms of ethnic and religious affiliation, Ae Fond Kiss … embraces the continuing possibility of living with new, hybrid forms of cultural identity. This is expressed, almost didactically, at the film’s beginning when Casim’s younger sister, Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh), speaking at a school debate, denounces simplified definitions of a Muslim and declares how she represents ‘a dazzling mixture’: ‘a Glaswegian, Pakistani, teenager woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school’.

Love across the cultural divide: Casim (Atta Yaqub) and Roisin (Eva Birthistle) in Ae Fond Kiss …

It is for this reason that the production notes for the film describe Ae Fond Kiss … as ‘a film that deals with identity, not just personal identity’.⁵⁵⁰ The couple, in this respect, represent a new kind of social settlement in which a variety of forms of cultural identification and social inheritance may coalesce (particularly as the couple involved are both, in their ways, ‘outsiders’). However, this ‘national romance’ is also worked out in a particular way. In contrast to the earlier films, the drama is set among the well-to-do. Tariq is a self-made man whose children have, or will, all benefit from higher education. Casim is a trained accountant, and aspiring club owner, while Roisin is a teacher (with the means to fly to Spain at short notice). The characters all live comfortably in the suburbs and many of the scenes take place in the smart new Glasgow of fashionable nightclubs and upmarket bars (the iconography of which stands at odds with the social terrain traditionally occupied by Loach’s films). The only working-class characters of significance to appear in the film are the workmen – ‘Wee Roddie’ (David McKay), ‘Big Roddie’ (Raymond Mearns) and ‘Danny’ (Gary Lewis) – hired by Tariq to build the extension to his house. However, they are not central to the drama and mainly perform the narrative function of providing comic relief (as when they are recruited by Casim to move Roisin’s grand piano). In some respects, this change of social terrain makes the point that, because the characters are not plagued by financial problems, they have the capacity to exercise choices that characters such as Joe in My Name Is Joe do not. Thus, in their final confrontation, Casim is able to demand that his father ‘respect’ the ‘choice’ that he is making. The downplaying of material determinants may also be read as a kind of acknowledgment that ethnic and cultural tensions cannot be simply reduced to the economic (and, indeed, that within Scotland the relatively small Asian community is predominantly middle class). As the film’s production notes indicate (partly quoting Loach), ‘what’s at stake here is something less tangible than money but far further reaching. “It’s a film about how people define themselves.”’ However, in eliminating the issue of ‘money’ that had so dominated the previous two Scottish films, the film also appears to separate ‘identity politics’ from ‘class politics’ in preference to investigating the ways in which these intersect and intertwine.

If Ae Fond Kiss … deals partly with the experience of Scottish Asians and the pursuit of new forms of hybridised identities, It’s a Free World … (2007) deals with a very different kind of ‘multiculturalism’ associated with the economic migration that occurred following the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. Riff-Raff had, of course, suggested how workers were forced to travel from all over the UK (Scotland and the north of England) in order to find low-paid work in London. (Bread and Roses also dealt with migrants from Central America working in Los Angeles). In the case of It’s a Free World … it is migrants (both legal and illegal) from all over the world (but, particularly, Eastern Europe) who have ended up in London in pursuit of work that leaves them subject to various forms of abuse by employers. To this extent, the film possesses similarities with other films, such as Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002), dealing with ‘another’ London of displacement and marginality.⁵⁵¹ The film is primarily located in an anonymous East London (Leytonstone), which studiously avoids conventional images of ‘landmark’ London and looks little different from Katowice, the Polish city from which many of the workers have been recruited (except that, in London, many end up living in ‘third-world’ conditions in caravan sites). The unusual element of the film, however, is that it does not simply concentrate on the ‘victims’ of economic exploitation. As Loach has explained, he’d ‘made a number of films where the protagonist is somebody whose plight you get drawn into’. In this case, he and Paul Laverty thought ‘it would be interesting just to look at the attitudes and the mindset of people who were on the other side – who were doing the exploiting’.⁵⁵²However, in this case, the ‘exploiter’ is not so very different from the ‘exploited’. Angie is a working-class single mother, not hugely different from Maggie in Ladybird, Ladybird, who is initially shown working for an employment agency in Poland. However, when she objects to the unwanted attention of a colleague after work, she finds herself faced with the sack. This prompts her to set up her own agency with her flatmate, Rose (Juliet Ellis), using the back of a local pub as a recruiting ground for mainly East European migrants in search of casual work in factories and building sites. Although initially working with legal migrants, it is nonetheless a twilight world in which workers have no job security, employment rights are ignored and rip-offs occur. Thus, while Angie initially makes money (with additional income from renting rooms to the migrant workers), she comes unstuck when one of her contractors Derek (Frank Gilhooley) pays her with cheques that bounce and she, in turn, fails to pay a group of male workers. The film’s climax is when three of these men temporarily kidnap her son, break into her home and threaten her. However, this fails to prompt a change of heart and the film ends with Angie arriving in the Ukraine, determined to recruit illegal migrants who will, as indicated earlier in the film by the boss of a clothing factory, make more compliant workers than EU nationals.

‘Doing the exploiting’: Angie (Kierston Wareing) in It’s a Free World …

In this way, the film concentrates on a relatively amoral character who seeks to better herself by taking advantage of others. At one point, Angie describes herself as ‘a pathetic single mum’ and, in some ways, she conforms to the ‘victimised’ heroine of earlier films (such as Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow and Ladybird, Ladybird) at risk of a family break-up. Thus, in one scene, she attempts to persuade a Youth Offending Care Team to allow her son, who has shown disruptive tendencies and is living with his grandparents, to live with her. However, for Loach, Angie is also ‘a child of her times’ who feels no social obligation to anyone beyond herself and her immediate family (‘it’s a free world … I don’t give a shit’, she exclaims, after Rose has suggested ‘the decent thing to do’ would have been to give the unpaid workers some of the money that they have accumulated from renting).⁵⁵³ In this regard, Angie may be read as an exemplary ‘Thatcherite’ entrepreneur, prepared to put the making of money ahead of anything else, including her friendship with Rose (they part company after Angie informs on the residents of a caravan site in order to get accommodation for her own workers) and her romance with Karol (the young Polish worker whom she initially meets in Katowice). To this extent, she is counterposed to her own father Geoff (played by a former stevedore and union activist Colin Caughlin), representing an older tradition of stable employment, regulated working conditions and union representation, who expresses how shocked he is by his daughter’s activities when he visits her place of work with his grandson (‘I thought these days were all over’).

However, playing out the destruction of traditional working-class culture and exploitation of immigrants in terms of gender relations also poses problems. For while the film may avoid positioning the female lead as simply a victim of social circumstances, its use of her to emblematise the iniquities of free-market capitalism also runs the risk of identifying her with an ‘unnatural’ usurpation of male power. It is, of course, a feature of many of Loach’s films, and British films of the period more generally, that the declining economic and political power of the traditional working class is linked to an erosion of the traditional male roles of bread-winner and head of the family. In many cases, this ‘crisis of masculinity’ is also associated with the rising power of women and their appropriation of male roles and space. In some respects, It’s a Free World … follows in the footsteps of these films, portraying a woman who runs her own business, survives without a husband and takes the initiative in sexual relationships (summoning men by text). As in The Full Monty (1997), in which the men at the job club complain that they are ‘not needed no more’ and have become ‘obsolete’, the film also includes a scene in which the Scots barman, Andy (Raymond Mearns), proclaims, on witnessing how Angie and Rose conduct business via mobile phone, that ‘men are going to become completely useless’ and ‘youse women are going to rule the roost’ (a conversation interrupted, significantly, by a call informing Angie that she is supposed to be attending a meeting at her son’s school). Angie’s capacity to ‘rule the roost’ is, of course, heavily circumscribed and the actual economic relations of ownership and control underpinning the industries she serves remain unidentified in the film (and unknown to Angie herself, who is largely dealing with intermediaries). However, while Angie may be little more than a working-class woman on the make she is, nonetheless, the highly visible ‘front’ for these otherwise invisible relations of power and thus becomes the target for the men whom she has employed and cheated.

The film’s climactic scene, in this respect, involves the invasion of her home by masked men. Loach has suggested (on the DVD commentary) that this narrative device afforded an alternative to the introduction of a serious work accident of the kind that had occurred in Riff-Raff and The Navigators and that it is clear that the men want no more than the money they are owed. However, the film also possesses elements of a revenge fantasy in which the independent ‘heroine’ is humiliated by the men she has wronged. The sequence begins with Angie and her son Jamie (Joe Siffleet) at home watching a DVD. The film, Neil Marshall’s horror Dog Soldiers (2002), shows the British military under attack from – barely identifiable – werewolves. Although it is not entirely clear why this particular clip should have been selected, it seems partly to demonstrate the violence in popular film and to indicate the possible parallel between Jamie’s violent behaviour at school and the violence of the culture more generally. However, while It’s a Free World … is a very different kind of film from Dog Soldiers, the inclusion of the clip seems, almost by a process of transference, to take the film in a more generically coded direction. Jamie is kidnapped and, when Angie returns from searching the streets, she finds herself under siege from men in balaclavas, who suddenly appear from out of shot, tie her up and cover her mouth with tape (causing her to urinate involuntarily). Although one man makes a speech about how ‘people like’ Angie have shown no concern for those whom they rob and exploit, the scene relies nonetheless on an atmosphere of menace and violation inherited from the horror and crime film. Thus the film also implicitly carries some connotations of the ‘punishment’ of the career woman, who has become the – displaced – emblem of male disadvantage and disenfranchisement.

Under siege: Angie in It’s a Free World …

If It’s a Free World … is relatively bleak in tone, Looking for Eric (2009) returns to the relative optimism of Ae Fond Kiss … . In some respects, the film begins on familiar Loach terrain. Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a man at the end of his tether shown driving the wrong way around a roundabout following the onset of a panic attack. However, while Eric may appear to be defeated by life, his panic attack has not been prompted by unemployment or debt but by the prospect of meeting his first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop) after a period of thirty years. In this respect, Eric’s crisis is precipitated by personal rather than social and economic factors (even though these – through their impact upon his stepsons – may subsequently throw up obstacles to the regaining of his self-confidence). The key to Eric’s ‘recovery’, and the source of much of the film’s novelty, is his relationship with the former Manchester United footballer, Eric Cantona, who appears as an ‘imaginary friend’ in the film. Cantona and the French producer, Pascal Caucheteux, had, in fact, approached Loach with the idea of a film about a real-life fan and, although this idea was jettisoned, it furnished the inspiration for Laverty’s subsequent script.⁵⁵⁴

Loach himself is a football fan and made a short television documentary about Bath City FC – Another City: A Week in the Life of Bath’s Football Club (1998) – a team he had supported since moving to the city in the 1970s. However, the production the film most resembled was The Golden Vision, Loach’s documentary-drama about Everton in the 1960s. The Golden Vision’s title referred to the Everton centre-forward Alex Young whom the fictional fan Joe Horrigan fantasises emulating by scoring a goal at Goodison Park at the film’s end. In the case of Looking for Eric, Eric Bishop turns to his hero Eric Cantona as a way out of the crisis he is facing. Cantona’s first appearance occurs after a group of Eric’s workmates from the Post Office, led by Meatballs (John Henshaw), meet in Eric’s front room for a ‘self-help’ session. Relying on Paul McKenna’s book, Instant Confidence, Meatballs encourages the men to try out the ‘Possibility Generator’ by thinking of someone whose ‘confidence and charisma’ they wish to emulate. This leads to nominations for Sammy Davis Jr, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Frank Sinatra but, in Eric’s case, his choice is Cantona (‘King Eric … best footballer ever lived’). In an ensuing sequence, Eric smokes some of his stepson’s dope and, while talking to a poster of his footballing hero, the ‘real’ Cantona appears. Given Loach’s realist commitments, the use of fantasy is a rare occurrence in a Loach film (the imaginary goal in The Golden Vision is one of the very few). However, the fantasy here is also unusual insofar as it is actually Eric Cantona who appears in these sequences. Although Alex Young appears in The Golden Vision, it is in the form of documentary footage rather than as a character. In Looking for Eric, however, Cantona not only appears in the actual footage of goals he has scored (and his famous ‘seagulls’ interview) but also plays an imaginary character as himself (or ‘lui-même’ as the credits have it). The fantasy sequences could thus be said to take on an element of ‘documentarisation’ insofar as the film’s spectators are not only invited to interpret these as projections of a fictional character but recognise that they also involve an actual person (and thus an element of ‘documented’ reality).⁵⁵⁵

Cantona’s role is, of course, to act as a counsellor to Eric and help him to rebuild his life. Although this involves a number of Cantona-esque aphorisms – ‘he that is afraid to throw the dice … will never throw a six’, ‘the noblest vengeance is to forgive’ – his key observation is in response to Eric’s question about his ‘sweetest’ footballing moment during a ‘split-reality’ sequence in which Eric is delivering the mail but talking to Cantona at the same time. Contrary to Eric’s expectation, Cantona does not cite a goal but a pass – to Denis Irwin against Spurs – which the film then shows. Eric then asks ‘what if he had missed’ to which Cantona replies ‘you have to trust your teammates … always’. This is, in effect, the thesis of the film, which sets out to demonstrate the virtues of collective action in response to social ills. Although Eric’s life is beginning to change, and he is on the verge of a rapprochement with Lily, his prospects of an improved life are threatened by the activities of his stepsons, particularly Ryan (Gerard Kearns) who works for local thug, Zac (Steve Marsh), and is holding a gun in safekeeping for him. Although Eric intervenes on his behalf, he is humiliated by Zac and his men who post a record of their encounter, in which he is set upon by a pit-bull terrier, on YouTube. The solution to his predicament in fact proves not to be so much the actions of an individual hero – or ‘celebrity’ – but those of his ordinary ‘teammates’ – his fellow postal workers and football supporters.

A significant subtheme in this regard is the relationship of football fans to the club they support. As early as The Golden Vision, Loach had suggested a suspicion of the divide between those who supported a football club and those who owned it (such as the Everton director John Moores shown discussing the business side of the club). In Looking For Eric, this sense of a rift between owners and supporters is even more acute. In a memorable scene in a pub, Eric’s workmate, Spleen (Justin Moorhouse) is seen sporting an FC United top, the jersey of ‘the people’s club’ formed by Manchester United supporters in protest against the high ticket prices and moneyed interests at Manchester United.⁵⁵⁶ This prompts a round of banter with Manchester United fans in which Spleen and Meatballs complain about the selling off of the club to ‘the fat cats’ and the betrayal of its working-class origins among ‘lowly railway men’. (Ironically, one reason Ryan wanted to work for Zac was that it gave him access to Manchester United games, obliquely suggesting how the club has become the property of ‘gangsters’). Although some of the humour of the scene derives from Spleen’s continuing attachment to the Manchester United team despite his change of club allegiance (he rushes back into the pub when he is tricked into thinking he has missed a goal on TV), it is nonetheless the ‘people power’ that FC United represents that offers the way out of Eric’s family difficulties. This takes the form of ‘Operation Cantona’, a raid on Zac’s home by a group of mainly FC United supporters wearing Cantona masks (one of which it transpires is being worn by Cantona himself).⁵⁵⁷

‘Operation Cantona’ in Looking for Eric

In an essay written in the 1990s, I noted how Loach’s films of the period coincided with a run of successful British film comedies, such as Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty and Up ’n’ Under (1997), that drew on broadly similar material – deindustrialisation, unemployment, the crisis of masculinity – but used it to different ends.⁵⁵⁸ In these films, the social problems that the characters face are successfully overcome through ‘utopian’ endings uniting the characters in collective success (a brass band victory, a strip show, sporting triumph). In Loach’s films, however, it was suggested, that these imagined resolutions to ‘real’ social problems were rarely attainable due to the oppressive weight of social and economic circumstances. Looking for Eric, however, appears to disprove this thesis by celebrating the power of the collective to overcome the obstacles that individuals face (albeit that these are fairly specific problems rather than the general ones of unemployment or poverty). In some respects, this may be seen as a welcome development. As previously noted, the appearance of My Name Is Joe, followed by Sweet Sixteen, prompted concerns that Loach’s cinema was becoming almost completely devoid of any hope for social and political change. As Loach himself has observed, ‘[a]udiences are much less optimistic, much less prepared to engage in the possibility of change’ and ‘you have to work harder to get that [change] in their minds’.⁵⁵⁹ In this respect, the ‘utopian’ celebration of collective values at the film’s end may stand at odds with Loach’s normal ‘realism’ but can speak, nonetheless, to audience desires for forms of social connection and mutuality possibly missing in their own lives.⁵⁶⁰

On the other hand, compared with the ‘utopianism’ of an earlier era in which, as in The Big Flame, it was still possible to imagine a workers’ takeover of industry, this is a relatively modest form of fantasy. It is a fantasy of collectivism, moreover, directed at a psychopathic thug rather than at those who wield genuine economic and political power. It was previously noted how Loach’s work tends to be critical of those middle-class professionals (such as teachers and social workers) with whom working-class characters come into face-to-face contact. In films such as My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, the most threatening characters tend to be the drug-dealers and criminal ganglords with whom the characters, as a result of economic necessity, are forced to have dealings. The character of Zac follows this pattern but, unlike in the earlier films, his victims prove capable of fighting back. However, even allowing for the analogies between gangsters and capitalists, the humiliation of a low-grade thug appears to be something of a diversion from the main social and economic issues confronting the characters. Indeed, it is rather odd that the film makes so little of the fact that the men are mostly postal workers. Like the railwaymen, postal workers have suffered at the hands of an ideological commitment to economic competition and privatisation that has led to a loss of jobs, the closure of post offices (often with strong links to local communities) and compromised the Royal Mail’s capacity to deliver a universal service. There was clearly some fear on the part of the Royal Mail that the film would involve opposition to what was happening to postal services in Britain as Loach could not gain permission to film in an actual sorting office (which they had to recreate). However, apart from a joke that Zac will be unable to avoid discovery because the men are postmen, the film is curiously silent on the economic and organisational changes affecting the postal workers.

It has also been a criticism of social comedies such as The Full Monty that, while they may celebrate collectivist solutions to individual crises, they do so in a way that relies on backward-looking notions of community associated with traditional male working-class culture. It is for this reason that Claire Monk complains that The Full Monty and Brassed Off seek to resolve the problems of class disadvantage in terms of gender relations by reconstructing the ‘homosocial communities’ historically associated with ‘the workplace and the working man’s club’.⁵⁶¹ Although, in comparison to The Full Monty, Looking for Eric is less overtly concerned with the ‘crisis of masculinity’ brought on by deindustrialisation, (partly converting this into a crisis of middle age), Eric’s recovery of self-respect does, nevertheless, possess clear gender dimensions. At the film’s beginning, he had been abandoned by his second wife and, although employed, is unsuccessfully occupying the ‘feminine’ role of family carer (responsible for the upbringing of his two stepsons). His panic attack is also brought on by the prospect of meeting his first wife, who, unlike Eric, has ‘taken care of herself’ and holds down a good job in a hospital. In this respect, ‘Operation Cantona’ not only helps Eric to regain the respect of his two stepsons but permits a tentative reconciliation with Lily at their daughter’s graduation. It is also the actions of an almost exclusively (white) male group that has laid the basis for this return to full selfhood (and possibly ‘manhood’). In many ways, it is the northern, male working class that Loach’s films have identified, since the 1960s, as most representative of working-class experience. However, the decline of manufacturing and heavy industry since the 1970s has necessarily altered the character of the working class in the UK. This has not meant the ‘end of the working class’ as has sometimes been claimed but that the kinds of jobs undertaken by the working class have changed and are now much more concentrated in the service sector and light industry (and often geographically located in southern England rather than the north). It has also meant that the social composition of the workforce has also changed, relying much more heavily on female (along with black and Asian) labour. As Huw Beynon suggests, the ‘growing complex of jobs and labour contracts’ characteristic of contemporary forms of manual labour has combined with ‘gender and ethnic difference to produce a mosaic that is not easily represented in simple images’.⁵⁶² Thus, while the actions of the group at the end of Looking for Eric successfully give voice to the desire for a different kind of society in which community and ‘teamwork’ achieve a greater recognition and value, it is also the case that the model of community it proposes neglects much of the complexity of contemporary working-class experience.

It is, of course, worth noting the period in which Looking for Eric was made. The film was released some six months after free-market capitalism had brought the global economy to the verge of collapse and, in the UK, the state had been forced to bail out financial institutions, such as Northern Rock, HBOS and RBS. Although this clearly demonstrated the failure of the neo-liberal economic policies that had prevailed for the last thirty years, politicians appeared to be incapable of exercising authority over an economic system that had proved so dysfunctional or of conceiving any kind of alternative to it. Indeed, in the case of the UK, following the election of the Coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in May 2010, the economic crisis led to a reversion to the neo-liberal policies of the early 1980s in the form of an attack on the public sector rather than an overhaul of the private sector – and the financial markets – that had created the crisis in the first place.⁵⁶³ In this respect, events since October 2008 have rather vividly demonstrated the extent to which an ideology of ‘capitalist realism’ has circumscribed the field of political possibility. According to Mark Fisher, the idea of ‘capitalist realism’ refers to ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’.⁵⁶⁴ To some extent, it might be said that, in comparison to Loach’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, his films have had to adapt to this climate of ‘capitalist realism’. There has been a sobering emphasis upon the victims of economic neo-liberalism – and the injustices and indignities that they have faced – but relatively little sense of how lives might be lived differently. This, however, is only partly so. For, as in Days of Hope, there has also been a turn to the past in order to suggest how contemporary economic and social relations are not in any way ‘natural’ and fixed but could have assumed a different character. This is particularly so of Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which have returned to key political events – the Spanish Civil War, the Irish War of Independence – in order to excavate the alternative political paths that might have been taken. It will be recalled how, in Looking for Eric, the characters adopt the idea of the ‘Possibility Generator’. In a way, this term might also serve to describe the strategy of Loach’s history films which revisit the past as a means of generating a sense of political and economic possibilities that question – or ‘make strange’ – the inevitability of existing social and economic relations. As Loach himself has commented, in relation to Land and Freedom:

In a way we’re several paces back compared to how they were in Spain where people on the march saw the possibility of change. Now, by and large, we don’t see that possibility so … we have to recover that sense of power, sense of strength and sense of confidence. We have to show … that change is possible.⁵⁶⁵

523.Huw Beynon, ‘Images of Labour/Images of Class’, in Rowbotham and Beynon, Looking at Class, pp. 25–40.

524.The concept of the ‘alienation’ of labour is commonly associated with the ‘Hegelian’ Marx and is discussed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which were first published in English in 1959.

525.For a summary of how the gap between rich and poor has widened in the UK under a Labour government, see Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Unjust Rewards (London: Granta, 2008).

526.Loach responded to Labour’s campaign to discredit his film in the Guardian, 24 February 1995, Section 2, p. 4. Since then Loach has been associated with the Socialist Labour Party (founded by Arthur Scargill in 1996), for whom he directed an election broadcast in 1997, and Respect (founded in 2004 and strongly associated with former Labour MP George Galloway), for which he became an elected member of the National Council.

528.Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, p. 166. A fuller discussion of Riff-Raff may also be found in Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, Ch. 9.

529.‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, p. 47. The shooting of the film was underway when the fatal accident (caused by a cracked rail) at Hatfield occurred in October 2000. Shortly before the film was shown, the Labour Minister of Transport had finally arrived at the decision to put Railtrack, the body responsible for the operation and maintenance of the rail network, into receivership in October 2001.

530.Ken Roberts, Class in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 114. Stephen Edgell also argues that it is more useful ‘to regard the underclass as the underemployed and unemployed fraction of the working class’ rather than as a separate social grouping in Class (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 80.

531.Wally Hammond, ‘Estate of the Art’, Time Out, 6–13 October 1993, p. 22. Anthony Hayward also indicates that the Bishop of Salford refused to allow filming in the local church, partly, it is suggested, due to suspicion of the unorthodox activities of the priest in the film. See Hayward, Which Side Are You On?, p. 218.

532.The enhanced role of comedy and melodrama in Loach’s later work may also be linked with an increasing use of extra-diegetic music in his films. This may be seen, for example, in Riff-Raff in which Stewart Copeland’s keyboard-driven score not only sets the film’s comic tone but is also used to accompany the film’s key melodramatic moments (such as Desmonde’s accident).

533.Richard Dacre, ‘Traditions of British Comedy’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1997), pp. 198–206. Loach developed an affection for northern comedians during family holidays to Blackpool, an era he recalled in a programme for the BBC Radio 3 series ‘Between the Ears’: ‘Blackpool: The Greatest Show Town’ (tx. 23 June 2007).

534.Paul Laverty, Looking for Eric (Pontefract: Route Publishing, 2009), p. 22.

535.Deborah Knight, ‘Naturalism, Narration and Critical Perspective: Ken Loach and the Experimental Method’, in McKnight, Agent of Challenge and Defiance, p. 74. To this extent, naturalism may be seen to constitute a form of ‘secularised’ melodrama in which the workings of socioeconomic forces are substituted for those of ‘fate’.

536.One consequence of this is that the ‘contingent’ events, or coincidences, that are a feature of Loach’s ‘realist’ or ‘naturalist’ plots come to take on an added – and more intrusive – narrative significance. Examples of this might include the fire breaking out at the refuge when Maggie’s children are left alone in Ladybird, Ladybird or of the police raiding Eric’s house, in Looking for Eric, on the precise occasion that his ex-wife and baby grand-daughter are making their first visit to his home.

537.John Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, Sources of Inspiration Lecture, p. 4.

539.Lindsay Paterson, Frank Bechhofer and David McCrone, Living in Scotland: Social and Economic Change since 1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 101.

541.Interview, DVD extras, My Name Is Joe (1998). As previously noted, while it is important for Loach to shoot in actual locations (and ‘document’, or provide witness to, the conditions in which people live), it is not necessary for his locations to be recognisable as specific places. By avoiding the familiar features associated with specific cities, his films seek to suggest the representativeness of what is shown rather than its uniqueness.

542.James Mottram, ‘In the Mood for Love’, Sight and Sound, March 2004, p. 22.

543.‘Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers’, in Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982), pp. 40–69.

544.In his original discussion, Colin McArthur did not actually employ the term but suggested how certain films, such as Floodtide (1949) and The Gorbals Story (1950), sought ‘to define the meaning of Scotland in relation to the Clyde’ (‘Scotland and Cinema’, p. 52). Subsequent discussions have employed the term ‘Clydesidism’ to identify the celebration of both the Scottish male industrial worker and, more ambivalently, the Scottish ‘hard man’. For a useful account of ‘hard-man’ mythology in film and literature, see Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Ch. 1.

545.Colin McArthur, ‘The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema’, in John Hill et al., Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994), p. 120.

546.For a fuller discussion of how discourses of ‘Irishness’ inform Loach’s representations of the working class in Britain, see John Hill, ‘Routes Irish: “Irishness”, “Authenticity” and the Working Class in the Films of Ken Loach’, Irish Studies Review vol. 19 no. 1, 2011.

547.Jonathan Murray, ‘Anywhere but Here or Here but Anywhere? Glasgow on Screen’, Anglo-Files no. 146, November 2007, p. 34.

548.Juliette Garside, ‘Poverty, Crime, Drug Addiction, Violence: Why Is Cinema So Obsessed’, Sunday Herald, 2 June 2002.

551.Charlotte Brunsdon links Dirty Pretty Things to a narrative tradition of arrival in a London ‘not like you see it in the movies’ in London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London: BFI, 2007), p.117. Loach’s use of this tradition stretches as far back as Diary of a Young Man and Cathy Come Home in which ‘innocents’ arrive in a city that is very different to the one they had expected.

554.Since his retirement from football, Cantona had embarked upon an acting career and had made an appearance as the French ambassador in Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998). In his book, Cantona on Cantona (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996), published while he was still playing, the footballer describes cinema as one of his ‘enduring passions’ and calls for greater social justice in a section entitled ‘utopia’ (n.p.).

555.Paul Laverty notes how many of the lines that Cantona says in the film (about playing the trumpet or passing the ball) were based on actual conversations in ‘Introduction’, Looking for Eric, pp. 12–13. Their basis in reality also means that these sequences tend to overrun their status as fantasy. Eric, for example, is sometimes unable to understand Cantona because he is speaking in French (a situation that would appear to be impossible if it is actually Eric’s subjective fantasy).

556.The UK DVD release of the film includes a leaflet about FC United (under the title ‘The Fans United’) and an offer of free tickets to an FC United game. For an account of the formation of FC United following the Glazer family takeover of Manchester United, see Gary James, Manchester: A Football History (Halifax: James Ward, 2008), pp. 338–41.

557.It is something of an unresolved tension within the film that Cantona, a highly paid footballer who was himself a beneficiary of the hugely commercialised Premier League (founded in 1992), should function as a symbol of anti-corporate sentiment. Although it was still possible in The Golden Vision to draw parallels between a star footballer such as Alex Young and factory workers, it has become much harder to suggest the ‘ordinariness’ of footballers in an era of enormous salaries and celebrity status.

558.‘Every Fuckin’ Choice Stinks’, Sight and Sound, November 1998, pp. 18–21.

559.Harlan Jacobson, ‘On the Job’, Film Comment, January–February 2007, p. 22.

560.In a discussion of the television soap opera Coronation Street, Richard Dyer has suggested how a ‘utopian impulse’ may be seen to underpin its representation of working-class life by virtue of the emphasis which the serial places on community and mutual concern. See ‘Introduction’, in Richard Dyer et al., Coronation Street (London: BFI, 1981), p. 5.

561.Claire Monk, ‘Underbelly UK: The 1990s Underclass Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of “New” Britain’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 280–2.

563.Loach himself has interpreted the actions of the Coalition government as a pretty clear example of ‘class conflict’. Referring to the emergency budget of June 2010, he has argued that ‘the budget is the one we expected from a Tory government – their crisis, the deficit and their debts [that] they will make ordinary people pay for – by increased unemployment, by cutting welfare, by cutting public services’. See ‘Will This Be the Summer of Renewed Political Protest?’, 25 June 2010, <news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/west/8758626.stm>.

564.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), p. 2.