The director who has spent 50 years poking the establishment on Brexit, right-wing broadcasters and the gig economy
Donald Clarke.Irish Times. Dublin. Wednesday, October 30, 2019
We can safely assume that Ken Loach wouldn’t like to be thought of as any sort of institution. For more than 50 years, he’s been poking the British establishment with a knobbly stick and reminding it of its outrages and inadequacies. Cathy Come Home, his TV drama on homelessness, has lost not an ounce of its power since its first broadcast in 1966. Just three years ago, he won his second Palme d’Or at Cannes (the first went to The Wind That Shakes the Barley) for a film that resonated just as strongly with audiences: the grim, gripping I, Daniel Blake.
His job is making life awkward for those in power. And yet. It’s hard to imagine England without him. The films are as part of the culture as real ale or rainy bank holidays. Familiarity dulls the attack not an iota. Sorry We Missed You, his latest, is ruthless on the iniquities of the “gig economy” and bogus self-employment. It will generate as much chatter as did I, Daniel Blake.
“A lot of people know that this is going on,” he says. “They have a sense it’s happening. It’s a secret everyone is keeping. When they see this they get a chance to acknowledge that secret. We all know there’s something not working in the way we allowed society to develop. It’s not right that we see so many people sleeping rough on the streets.”
Sorry We Missed You offers grim news from the frontline. Kris Hitchin plays a struggling dad who, still fighting to recover from the 2008 crash, invests in a new van and acquires a “franchise” as a delivery driver. He soon realises that the new arrangements allow new forms of exploitation. His children fret. His wife struggles to hold the family together. Paul Laverty, who has been writing for Loach since Carla’s Song in 1996, looks to have researched furiously.
Kris Hitchen and Katie Proctor, and in Sorry We Missed You (2019) Photograph: Entertainment One “Paul is like a terrier,” Loach says. “He began as a lawyer and he won’t include anything that’s not verifiable truth. There have been cases where people have died through missing hospital appointments. Don Lane, just 53, died because he felt he couldn’t afford to go to an appointment and miss his work. He died as a result! The way Paul pitched the story was: ‘This is not unusual. This happens.’”
I assume there have already been suggestions that the film exaggerates the iniquities.
“Oh, I quite welcome that,” he says. “Come with us and meet the drivers. One right-wing head-banger called Mark Littlewood said that it was all the bad things in one family. He should meet the families we’ve met. Because far worse things happened.”
Loach’s gentle manner — his Warwickshire accent largely unaltered — does nothing to dull the force of his argument. Rather than bellowing, he will gnaw away at an argument with a polite determination that leaves little space for interjection. Raised in an ordinary West-Midlands home, he eventually found his way to Oxford to study law. A spell as an actor intervened before he found work as a director at the BBC. From this remove, it looks as if the corporation was going through a golden age in those years. The impression is that, while working on slots such as The Wednesday Play, Loach could make whatever the heck he liked.
“I think they were more innocent days,” he says. “Television was in its infancy. We had more freedom because they didn’t know the potential they had. Also, it was sexy to be on the left in the sixties in a way it hasn’t been since. It wasn’t any golden age, but it was a good time to be in broadcasting.”
In 1969, Loach directed a piece that many critics set beside unlikely bedfellows such as The Third Man and Lawrence of Arabia as a candidate for the best British film ever made. Kes, the story of a young boy and his kestrel, was a critical sensation, but, sadly, the subsequent collapse of the British film industry did for its director and many of his contemporaries. By the 1980s, UK film was back. Loach was not, however, invited to the party.
‘Thatcher closed down industry, made laws against unions and attacked the working class full on’ “The eighties were the worst time,” he says. “There was conscious effort on the part of those who controlled news and film to shift culture to the right. Channel 4 actually advertised for right-wing producers. They advertised for that!”
Was that not an attempt to counteract a perceived left-wing bias?
“It may have been,” he says. “But they banned four films I made for them. They wouldn’t show them. So much for the left-wing bias. That was 1983. They’d only opened and they were banning left-wing films. They weren’t left-wing at all. They were cunningly concealed right-wingers — as most broadcasters are.”
I wonder if Loach was trying and failing to get dramatic features made in these years. His contemporary Stephen Frears returned to cinema with My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears. Mike Leigh was on the big screen with High Hopes. Was he consciously excluded?
“I was making documentaries then,” he says. “And I wanted to do that because the changes were so massive. Thatcher closed down industry, made laws against unions and attacked the working class full on. That was when the war was at its height. There wasn’t time to make a feature. I just wanted to get the documentaries out. Then they wouldn’t show them.”
Eventually producer David Puttnam, a driving force of the age, popped up and nudged Loach towards the film that became Hidden Agenda. Released in 1990, a study of the “shoot to kill” policy in Northern Ireland, the picture started a run of Loach projects that has continued unabated to the present day.
“A Tory MP called it the IRA entry at Cannes,” he laughs. “That probably helped. It got us some attention. That’s how we got back into the cinemas.”
It’s always “us” and “we” with Loach. The “us” and the “we” changes down through the years – currently including Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan – but Loach will always spread the credit about.
“There is a continuous collective,” he agrees. “It began with writers and producers in the BBC. Now [producer] Rebecca O’Brien and Paul. A film is nothing if it’s not a collective. The idea of ‘a film by so-and-so’ is anathema to me. You couldn’t look the others in the eye. I’ve worked with Paul Laverty for a quarter of a century.”
‘I voted remain, but with a very heavy heart’ Loach has had a complex relationship with the Labour Party over the years. He first joined in the 1960s and remained as a critical force during the years of Neil Kinnock’s leadership. It came as no surprise when, after 30 years in the camp, he left the party during the Blair era. He dallied with the Respect Party and helped form the Left Unity alliance in 2013. Then his pal Jeremy Corbyn took the Labour ermine and Loach returned to his old political home. He has been a loyal supporter ever since. He reacted angrily to the recent Panorama programme alleging anti-Semitism within the party. “It bought the propaganda from people who were intent on destroying Corbyn,” he said. And so on.
“We are good friends,” Loach says. “It’s desperately important that Jeremy Corbyn gets elected. They will strengthen trade unions. They will end zero-hours contracts. They’ll invest in public service and neglected areas like where we made this film. The whole landscape is concerning the Labour Party as it concerns us. But we’re never the voice of a particular political position. You just try and tell the truth.”
Not everybody in Britain or Ireland has been content with Corbyn’s relaxed opposition to Brexit. His campaign in the referendum lacked energy. He refused to confirm if he’d campaign for “remain” in any second referendum.
“I voted remain, but with a very heavy heart,” Loach says. “The European Union is based on the free market. It’s in the founding documents and the free market is the cause of all this stress: the poverty, the inequality, the destruction of the environment. It’s not an aberration of the free market. It’s a necessary consequence. No holiday. No sick pay. We sack you when we want. This is all a product of the European Union. So there is a very strong left case against it.”
This may all be so. But many Irish people are more concerned with the immediate threat of a breakdown in the political compromise allowed by EU membership on both sides of the border. This is a crisis right now.
Sorry We Missed You offers grim news from the frontline. “When it comes to Ireland – and I speak only for me – it has come time to right the historical wrong of 100 years ago,” he says. “The historic wrong of partition. It was divided at the command of people like Churchill to ensure that it stayed in the British Empire. We put in this crinkly border to maintain a majority for unionists. Ireland is one geographic unity. It is time to at least give people the chance to unite.”
But that’s not going to happen this month or next month. Brexit almost certainly will be with us before another spring.
“I see the threat,” he says. “But we need a longer historical perspective. What’s Britain doing owning part of Ireland? It’s been held at the point of a gun for most of those 100 years.”
Well, we aren’t going to solve any of these problems in the relatively short time allotted to our interview. We can have another go next time. If there is a next time. Journalists are always retiring Loach without asking his permission. Jimmy’s Hall, released in 2014, was rumoured to be his final film. So was I, Daniel Blake. Yet here we are. He’s 83 and seems uninterested in removing to the allotment.
“When you get older you take each game as it comes,” he says. “I’ll get this one launched and scratch around and have a think.”
Both President Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are waging the political battles of their lives. Already in campaign mode ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Trump now finds himself locked in a damaging, spiraling impeachment inquiry into his possible abuses of power. Johnson, meanwhile, entered office this summer determined to yank his country out of the European Union by hook or by crook. But he has been thwarted by lawmakers, as well as Britain’s Supreme Court — making a mockery of his vows of a “do or die” Brexit by the end of this month. Still, the two leaders on both sides of the pond are bent on subjecting their countries to a bitter, tribal fight.Every day, as more damning evidence comes out about the president’s attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating the son of a domestic political rival, Trump lashes out at his supposedly illegitimate political opponents and the “corrupt” media reporting on the imbroglio. He referred last week to a small but influential coterie of anti-Trump Republican intelligentsia as “human scum.” And he punctuates his incessant narrative of victimization with frequent tweeted reminders of the near-lockstep support he commands from within his Republican base. Johnson is now readying for a Dec.12 general election, a contest he probably wanted. Unlike Britain’s 2016 referendum result, the majority of the members of the current House of Commons are probably not in favor of Brexit, and even more oppose the “no-deal” crash out of the European Union that Johnson has said he’s willing to execute. The prime minister, though, has tied his political fortunes to a hard-line, pro-Brexit base of support and will be hoping their fury at the latest delay — Britain got another formal extension from the European Union to conclude their divorce deal by the end of January — will translate into a more effective parliamentary mandate before Christmas. In the meantime, he has borrowed from Trump’s populist demagoguery, casting Parliament as the enemy of the people and his opponents as guilty of “surrender” and “betrayal.” He rejected criticism of his inflammatory language as “humbug.”But as the two leaders slug it out with their opponents, the political parties they lead are feeling the heat. Trump has viciously turned against any former lieutenant, top administration official or Republican politician who has publicly contradicted him or criticized his actions. His proxies, including broadcasters at right-wing Fox News, have smeared career officials who delivered potentially damning testimony about Trump’s conduct. This week, that included Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Soviet refugee turned American war hero who served as a Ukraine expert within Trump’s White House. In America’s febrile political moment, noted Post columnist Greg Sargent, for the president and his allies, “there is no greater expression of disloyalty to country than a display of disloyalty to Trump.” A number of senior Republican politicians condemned the “shameful” pro-Trump attacks on Vindman’s patriotism. Many in private express a deeper disquiet with the course of events, especially the reckoning that may follow a possible House impeachment of the president. “In hushed conversations over the past week, GOP senators lamented that the fast-expanding probe is fraying their party, which remains completely in Trump’s grip,” reported The Post’s Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “They voiced exasperation at the expectation that they defend the president against the troublesome picture that has been painted, with neither convincing arguments from the White House nor confidence that something worse won’t soon be discovered.” But there’s little indication for now that any of these senators will risk Trumpist ire and back his constitutional removal. “They’ve decided that they’re going to take it all grudgingly — and privately, perhaps, in disgust — but they’re not going to give up the farm,” Al Cardenas, former chairman of the American Conservative Union, told The Post. In Britain, Johnson has already tested the unity of his ruling Conservatives. His tight embrace of a Brexit at all costs has been boisterously received by the country’s jingoistic tabloid press, and it may persuade pro-Leave voters otherwise eyeing the Brexit Party of populist gadfly Nigel Farage to remain in the Tory fold. But “the approach has come at the expense of a full-scale rupture among the Conservatives,” my colleague Griff Witte wrote earlier this year. “The most successful party in British political history has been divided for decades over the country’s membership in the E.U., with room both for fervent supporters and opponents.” A series of anti-Brexit or Brexit-skeptic Conservative lawmakers, including Johnson’s own brother, either quit the party or stepped down from senior-level posts. Some analysts now see the Conservative Party as a faction that stands for little beyond Johnson’s quest for power — something that remains firmly in his reach as the opposition Labour Party struggles with its own divisions under the stewardship of leftist Jeremy Corbyn. “Surviving Tory moderates … kid themselves that the party is still theirs, as if it hadn’t swelled with Brexit fanatics with no interest in governing,” British sociologist William Davies wrote earlier this month. “These men are opportunists, for whom nationalist fervor and chaos provide an opening to seize power. And a party in the grip of collective mania is more vulnerable to such machinations than one with a coherent ideology.” A similar diagnosis could be offered for Republicans who have sought to normalize Trump’s behavior. But the polarization that now defines politics in both the United States and Britain was weaponized by Trump’s and Johnson’s parties long before either came to power. And its grim effects are now entirely in view.“We’re perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests,” legal scholars Marty Lederman and Benjamin Wittes wrote in the Atlantic, gesturing to the climate of conspiracy theory and denial propagated by Trump’s backers. “Electoral uncertainty should not be cause for alarm in a mature democracy, and true democrats do not shy away from a polling booth,” wrote Guardian columnist Rafael Behr. “Still, it is hard to shake the fear that British politics will be even angrier and more divided after an election campaign than it is now.”
On August 10, 2019, Lt. Brian “Sully” Sullivan passed away unexpectedly at home after operating at Bronx Box 2150. Sully was a 27 year veteran of the FDNY and was well known and respected in the fire service community. He is survived by his wife Irene, and two daughters, Nicole and Samantha. To honor a great man, a memorial t-shirt has been designed by the members of Squad Company 41 with the proceeds going to help out his wife and two daughters. Shirts are $20 each. Contact Squad 41 to place your order.
RETIRED FIREFIGHTER IN NEED OF BLOOD DONATIONS
Retired firefighter Tom Kasprowitz, L-82, is looking for blood donations at Sloan Kettering Hospital. Tom is fighting Acute Leukemia. Any member interested in donating should call Joe Licatta at 212-639-8177 to set up an appointment. Free parking is available.
RANGERS FIRST RESPONDERS NIGHT
The UFA has partnered with Madison Square Garden once again to provide special access to discounted tickets for tomorrow’s Rangers First Responders Night on October 29 vs Tampa Bay at 7:30 PM. All attendees will receive a limited edition First Responders Night t-shirt with their ticket purchase. For every ticket purchased through the link https://tinyurl.com/Rangers1stRespondersUFAOct29, $10 will be donated to the UFA Widows & Children’s Fund.
RANGERS 5K PRESENTED BY NORTHWELL HEALTH
The Garden of Dreams Foundation is excited to announce the upcoming Rangers 5K Presented by Northwell Health. This 4th annual race will be in part benefiting the Garden of Dreams Foundation. The event will take place on November 17 at 10:00 AM in Flushing Meadows Park and is open to the public. Prior to the 5K, there will be a free 1-mile “Junior Rangers Mile” kids run for ages 6-12. Anyone who would like to participate in the 5K or the Junior Rangers Mile must register in advance. For more information, or to register, visit newyorkrangers.com/5k.
FDNY TRIATHLON TEAM AND CYCLING TEAM
The FDNY Triathlon Team and Cycling Team invites any interested members to their Annual Meeting on Wednesday, December 4, at 7:00 PM in the New Cafeteria at the Rock to go over last year’s accomplishments, talk about next year’s plans, and help you get ready to tackle any of your race goals. Experience is not necessary and all skill levels are welcome. Questions can be directed to Eddie Vega, President FDNY Triathlon Team, at Eddie@FDNYTri.com.
Northern Ireland is being detached from the UK. Get ready for it
English nationalism is changing the political architecture of these islands…
A border in the Irish sea has long been a red-line for the DUP but it seems to be one crossed in the Brexit agreement between Boris Johnson’s government and the EU.Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times. Dublin. Saturday, October 26, 2019
If you pass through Heathrow or any other large British airport, you will be assailed by large photographic posters declaring British greatness: Innovation is GREAT; Sport is GREAT; Design is GREAT, and so on. The tagline, of course, is Britain – all of these wonderful things are GREAT Britain.
Except that the whole concept is ruined by an awkward interloper. The copywriters had to add “& Northern Ireland” and that turbulent province wrecks the pun and deflates the slogan. “Music is GREAT Britain & Northern Ireland” doesn’t work. It creates a decidedly downbeat anticlimax.
And the ad agencies seem to be sneakily avoiding it. Last week in Heathrow I noticed three posters without the dangling appendage: Countryside is GREAT Britain; Culture is GREAT Britain; Heritage is GREAT Britain. No “& Northern Ireland”.
It is easy to sympathize – while it seems a bit harsh to imply that the bucolic splendors of Antrim and Tyrone are not so great, culture and heritage do become especially touchy subjects when you sail west across the Irish Sea.
The awkwardness and uncertainty of these posters makes them inadvertently telling images of a much larger ambivalence. The idea of Great Britain itself is under severe strain as Scotland seems destined to move towards another referendum on independence. The notion of British greatness has been weaponized politically – being great makes it unnatural and intolerable for Britain to be just another member of the European Union.
But most dramatically, that tenuous “& Northern Ireland” has never been so uncomfortable an adjunct to Britishness. It is not just the advertising copywriters who feel inclined to drop it altogether. Line crossedWhatever turns the Brexit saga takes—and his week’s events at Westminster promise many more to come—it is clear that what Arlene Foster called a “blood-red line” has been crossed. Boris Johnson’s breath-taking reversal of his previous position on the idea of a Northern Ireland-only “Backstop” makes October 10th, 2019 – the day of his meeting with Leo Varadkar in Wirral – a watershed in British and Irish history.
On that day, Johnson decided, in effect, that Northern Ireland can be detached from the British train and placed on a whole other track. The implications of this for the future of both islands are profound.
The scale of the volte face is clear if we remember that Johnson, as prime minister, had vehemently rejected on Unionist grounds even Theresa May’s deal with the EU that involved a much less radical degree of separation between Northern Ireland and Britain. On August 19th, he wrote to Donald Tusk denouncing what was then the “Backstop” as “inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK as a State” because “it places a substantial regulatory border . . . between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.”
But now he has actually agreed to a vastly more intrusive regulatory and customs Border in the Irish Sea. If May’s deal undermined the sovereignty of the UK as a single entity, Johnson’s blew it apart.
Mental separation
This is a bell that cannot be unrung. Whether or not the arrangements for a unique form of Brexit for Northern Ireland actually come into being (indeed, whether or not Brexit actually happens) a huge act of mental separation has occurred.
Johnson was not wrong – the “UK as a state” cannot survive official endorsement of a Border between Larne and Stranraer. Functioning, stable sovereign states simply don’t do that sort of thing. In November 2018, in a rousing speech to the DUP’s annual conference, Johnson said that if this were allowed to happen, “we are witnessing the birth of a new country called UK-NI”.
In fact, we are witnessing the birth of a new country called “GB for now and NI over there”.
The shock is all the greater because the jettisoning of Northern Ireland is so casual. It is not just that supposedly hardline unionist Tory MPs were so upfront in saying that, much as they love the union, England comes first and the DUP must, as arch-Brexiteer Steve Baker put it, simply “choke down” its betrayal – a slightly nicer formulation than “suck up”.
It is that even at the highest levels of the British government, there was little thought given to what a Border in the Irish Sea would mean. There was a telling moment in the House of Lords on Monday when the Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay initially claimed that Northern Ireland businesses would not have to fill out customs declarations to send goods to the rest of the UK before, after correction from the Treasury, acknowledging that “declarations will be required”. Johnson subsequently struggled to explain this in the House of Commons.
That something so basic could be so unclear tells us that we are experiencing a strange mix of the momentous and the thoughtless. A fundamental change in the nature of the UK (and thus of Ireland) is being unleashed, not through a process of careful deliberation, but in a spirit of pure reckless opportunism. Whatever gets Brexit through the night is alright. The consequences are for later.
The significance of this shift is hard to grasp because it is not part of the story most of us in Ireland recognise. Just five years ago, in any discussion of the future of the UK as an entity, the factors in play were Scottish nationalism, Irish nationalism and, to a lesser extent, Welsh nationalism. What was not being discussed was the idea that English nationalism might be the real destructive force. Yet its presence was not secret.
In 2012, four years before the Brexit referendum, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published a very powerful report, based on detailed survey data, that warned that “an emerging English political identity may over time come to challenge the institutions and practices of the UK more profoundly than anything happening in the so-called Celtic fringe”.
The 2011 UK census showed that, even given the option of ticking more than one box (English and British for example), a majority of people in England chose to identify as English only. Just 29 per cent of English people claimed to feel any sense of British national identity. And what is even more striking is that, in the years before the referendum, survey data were showing a very strong correlation of English feelings about what IPPR called “the two unions”, the UK and the EU – people who identified strongly as English rather than British were also anti-EU.
The institute warned that “any decision to ignore English discontentment for fear of guilt by association with right-wing populism is only likely to further feed such discontentment – and perhaps encourage it to develop more toxic undertones”.
The warning was, of course, itself ignored. And nowhere more so than within Irish unionism. One of the many staggering aspects of the Brexit saga is the decision of the DUP to ally itself to an English nationalist project that posed such a clear threat to a pan-UK British identity.
All the evidence both before and after the 2016 referendum was that the voters in England who identify as British are, by and large, Remainers. People who support one union (the UK) are very likely to also support the other (the EU).
Conversely, Leave voters, whatever their political representatives say, tend to care very little about the preservation of the UK as an entity. For them, Brexitness is far more important than Britishness: every poll has shown that Leave voters and Tory party members find the breakup of the UK an acceptable price to be paid for Brexit.
This was confirmed on Monday, in a new poll and focus-group study of English participants released by the Tory donor Lord Ashcroft. The threat that a border in the Irish Sea might pose to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK is not a big deal for most of them: just over a quarter of English respondents, and just a third of Conservative Leave voters, agree that it would be “unacceptable” for Northern Ireland to “have different laws and regulations from the rest of the UK after Brexit”.
Perhaps even more alarming for Unionists is the general air of English indifference. The focus group findings are that: “Apart from the observation that ‘the religious element is very strong’, very few had any grasp of the dynamics of Northern Irish politics, which seem complicated and even mysterious to many people. Some were not even aware that Northern Ireland’s long-term place in the Union was even an issue.”
When asked whether Brexit makes Irish unification more likely, the most popular response in the poll was “don’t know”. When asked directly whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK, just 35 per cent said yes, 13 per cent said no and a remarkable 43 per cent said: “I don’t have a view.” And when those in this latter category were asked how they would feel personally if Northern Ireland were to leave, 59 per cent said “I wouldn’t mind either way” and a further 8 per cent chose “happy to see them go”.
What has occluded this obvious reality is political piety. English nationalism is odd in that in has no real political voice. It remains taboo for any mainstream English politician—let alone a prime minister—to say that the people of England “don’t mind either way” about that complicated and mysterious place called Northern Ireland.
But sooner or later politics catches up with popular feeling. And this is what has now happened. The Brexiteers have now caught up with their base and made explicit what has always been implicit in the English nationalist project: Northern Ireland is neither here nor there.
Hence the weird mixture of opportunism and inevitability. Johnson seized an opportunity to keep his show on the road by cutting the Irish rope that tethers the balloon of post-Brexit Britain to the EU. But he could do so because he knows very well that his party and his potential voters have ceased to regard Northern Ireland as an integral part of their country. Once they decided that their country was England, there was already a psychological parting.
Chaotic consequences
This rise of English nationalism was bound to have long-term consequences – but Brexit has made them much more rapid and chaotic. The chaos comes from the reality that the separation is not active, not planned or thought through. It is not a decision to seek a divorce. It is just a relationship that, on the English side, has gone cold and lapsed into an unresponsive apathy. That is, for Northern Ireland, even more dangerous than an upfront decision to eject it from the union. The shrug of the shoulders is less engaged than the shove in the back, which at least has to be hands-on.
The great problem for Ireland, though, is that this is not our story. In the Irish story, a united Ireland might come about as a result of a long and careful process of reconciliation on the island. But what we are actually seeing is a whole other movie, made and screened in England. It is an avant-garde extravaganza that does not bother with a coherent narrative.
The Brexit project may ultimately be about the English exiting their “two unions”, the UK as well as the EU. But in neither of these exits is the desired destination known. Something is being left but it is not at all clear what will be left behind.
All we can really say for sure is that if Brexit tells us anything it is that if you ignore deep changes in national and political identity, they will probably turn toxic. That has happened with English nationalism – the warning signs were disregarded.
We are now witnessing a sudden and jerky acceleration in what was meant to be a slow and careful reshaping of the political architecture of these islands. We had better recognize it and try to deal with it before the poison of betrayal and abandonment enters the groundwater.END
