Outspoken British filmmaker Ken Loach added another prize to his collection when he received the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at a ceremony in Bochum, Germany, on December 12 last year.
Since the 1960s, Loach has been known for his hard-hitting social dramas exploring issues such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment and exploitation. In 1966, his pioneering television film Cathy Come Home was credited with transforming the debate on homelessness in Britain. The Cannes Palme d’Or winner is especially popular in continental Europe, where his films have gained European Film of the Year awards, the EFA Critics’ Award and the French César.
But as the European Union prepares to embark on a “European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion” in 2010, Loach is fiercely sceptical about the benefits of such an initiative for the estimated 80 million people living at risk of poverty across the EU.
Accusing European leaders of maintaining a political system that perpetuates social injustice, he dismisses the year of action as hypocrisy.
“What’s bizarre is that they are in charge, and they hold up their hands as though poverty is an act of god, but it isn’t,” he argues. “It’s a function of this way of organising economic activity. What do they expect? It’s a stunning failure to see what’s in front of them. It’s like the devil complaining about sin.”
Loach says his films are not merely a commentary on social injustice. “I hate reducing themes to one or two sound-bites. You try to do something quite complex. But one of the things the writers I work with have tried to do is relate personal experience to the social context in which we live.
“We don’t grow up in a vacuum. Everything is determined by the social and political context in which we live. The disregarded part is the people who are poor and – I don’t like the word ‘excluded’. They have an economic function even though they are unemployed, which is to drive down the value of labour. The idea that unemployment and social exclusion – to use the vogue phrase – is somehow an aberration is wrong. It’s implicit in their system: the people who own and control and provide a political framework for capitalism.”
He described British Government targets for ending child poverty – which have so far had little success – as divorced from reality. Political leaders, says the director, “create poverty or allow it to develop by market forces and then they’re surprised. They are so ideologically committed that they cannot see what is in front of them.”
Loach says that, after filming Sweet Sixteen in Greenock on the Clyde, in 2002, he was approached by Sarah Brown, wife of the future Prime Minister to contribute to a book for charity. The aim was to invite celebrities to write about what inspired them, so as to motivate young people.
“Greenock had been a shipbuilding town, but was suffering massive unemployment – the biggest industry was drugs. The bright kids left and the rest just stayed there and rotted. I wrote back and said look, I can’t help noticing where you are writing from. If your husband would invest some of our money into proper industries with apprenticeships, producing real things that people really need, with proper working conditions, proper trade unions, with security of employment, you would not need to pass the hat around. The idea that politicians pass the hat around when they are in charge of the mess is grotesque.”
Cutting poverty in Europe would need “a radical change of direction” by governments, he argues. “That change of direction has to be towards common ownership, democratic control, providing for need and not for profit, and protection of the environment.” But it will not happen, says Loach, who is bitterly critical of the EU itself for promoting neo-liberal economic policies.
“As I understand it, there are EU directives that insist that public services have to be open to private tender and that major industry cannot be supported by governments and the state cannot play a part in investing in industries and production. That means that it’s the private companies and big corporations that will determine economic activity. They have to be profitable; they have to get the cheapest labour they can, they have to get the cheapest raw materials, they have to maximise their market share.
“That is incompatible with providing security of employment, a decent health service and all the rest. Until we recognise that incompatibility we cannot move forwards. Profit has to be fought over so hard that there isn’t a space for long-term employment even. They’re driving down employment so much that its agency work, casual work, short-term contracts in place of the long-term careers that people used to have.
“My father worked in the same factory for 43 years. Nobody’s going to do that now. He was an apprentice. There are no apprenticeships now. There is 20 per cent unemployment amongst the kids in our country. If the economic system cannot provide the work, and we cannot do it collectively, how will it happen?”
Loach, who has just finished the filming of his latest work – looking at the Iraq war “from a different angle”, insists that restoring trade union rights should be the first step towards fighting poverty. “The anti-union laws of Margaret Thatcher should be repealed. If they want to do anything, then make the inhibitions on workers’ organisations, which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have maintained, out of order in the EU. Trade unions are there to defend jobs, workers and conditions, but at the moment we’ve got closures, redundancies, and cutbacks, all of which is producing unemployment and all of which is producing social exclusion.”
The unions themselves are not exempt from criticism. Loach claims union leaders prioritise company profits over jobs, “instead of starting from the independent interests of working people, which are job security, a good social wage, a pension, housing and so on. Employers’ interests are cheap labour – make it easy to sack – have no long-term commitment. The two are incompatible. They are based on conflict, and while the employers’ interests are prioritised and cast into law by the EU, how dare they discuss social exclusion? They are creating it.”
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/01/08/interview-ken-loach/
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