Edward Lawrenson reviews The Spirit of '45, the film which has triggered a debate nationally about the kind of society we have become and the kind of society we want to be.
Ken Loach has just directed a documentary called The Spirit of '45. It is a stirring portrait of the founding of the welfare state by the post-war Labour government. It's thanks to the film that I have a credible version of the life I'd be leading if I were the age I am now back in 1945.
Feeding my details into the film's accompanying website, I learned that I'd probably live in a house without a bath or a shower, a visit to the doctor would have cost me about seven per cent of my weekly wage, and that I only had 30 years to live.
It's not the cheeriest news, but it did bring home sharply the everyday hardships people had to endure before such things as the National Health Service. Funded by the British Film Institute initiative to support forms of digital storytelling, the online arm of The Spirit of '45 is a provocative exploration of many of the concerns of the film. You can watch interviews from the film as well as those that did not make the final cut, and there's quaint footage, as well as a thoughtful timeline of the past 60 years of British social history (see Timeline Health).
Still, it's the film where my and Loach's priorities lie (speaking at a screening I attended a few weeks back, Loach professed to be unfamiliar with the internet). What Loach does best is make films, and The Spirit of '45 reveals the director in commanding form, telling of the massive programme of nationalisation by the incoming Labour government of 1945. It's an expert assemblage of archive material revealing just how bad life was for ordinary people immediately after the war, incorporating interviews with men and women who were involved in the first nationalised industries.
'After the war', writes Ken Loach, 'people had a sense that they had won the war together as a collective, and that brought a sense of unity in the country. They remembered the '30s, which was a time of great poverty and depression – between two and three million people unemployed, rather like now – and people didn't want to go back to those days. They wanted to use the same methods they had used to win the war to win the peace. So that was the spirit, really, that they would build a better world and do it together.'
The emotional impact of this is extraordinary. Among many testimonies is the childhood memory of a man called Ray, now in his eighties, of his mother dying from a preventable ailment the family doctor lacked the resources to cure. What emerges is a heartfelt tribute to a generation of activists who ensured an end to needless deaths, such as that of Ray's mum.
Of course, there's a loud and resolute political edge to all of this. If the first half of the film, which charts the heroic work of building the welfare state, inspires admiration, then the second part of it, devoted to the steady dismantling of nationalised industries, provokes anger. When archive footage of Margaret Thatcher flashed up on-screen, I could feel the audience greet the image with a collective and involuntary hiss.
It is unashamedly partisan stuff, and the film does glide over uncomfortable realities to advance its argument. A rosy glow, for instance, settles over the references to post-war town planning that ignores the ugly effects of so much centralised architecture.
Speaking on why he made the film, Loach concluded: 'The narrative is particularly apposite because we have two and a half million people unemployed, a million of them are young people. We are told there is no alternative, but if this is the only society we can imagine building it is a poor effort.' (see the interview).
The blurb of film states it is 'an impassioned documentary about how the spirit of unity which buoyed Britain during the war years carried through to create a vision of a fairer, united society'.
If it is at a cinema near you, do go and see it. For local listings see here.
Edward Lawrenson 12 April 2013
Edward Lawrenson's review originally appeared in The Big Issue, No 1043, March 18-24, 2013. It is reprinted here with thanks.
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Watch the Spirit of '45 trailer.
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.
Cartoon by Catherine Pain