Ken Loach’s documentary “The Spirit of ’45” is stylistically a conventional compilation of archival footage and newly recorded interviews with elderly socialist workers and Left-Labor politicians like Tony Benn, who remember the 1930s and ’40s, as well as younger leftwing academics of today. Loach refrains from commentary, but there are titles that provide some historical exposition. It’s less provocative and emotionally affecting than Loach’s fictional films like “Riff-Raff,” “Land and Freedom,” and “I, Daniel Blake” — more of a homage to the old Labor Party, in its grandest moment, than an angry screed against capitalism and impersonal bureaucracy. Though, Loach’s anti-Thatcher and pro welfare-state sympathies are made too relentlessly clear in every scene in the film.
What the film succeeds in doing is reminding us how the 1945 landslide triumph of Labor with the Social Democrat Clement Atlee becoming Prime Minister broke from the years where the British working class lived in Dickensian squalor, where poorly fed children played in filthy yards and streets. The workers had returned from winning the war, unwilling to return to the ’30s when the moneyed (“them and us”) ran everything. Labor’s victory resolved to create a new Great Britain, including the nationalization of health care, mass transit, water, electricity, the mining industry, and building public housing, 200,000 units a year for a large number of people who had been bombed out or who lived in substandard buildings.
The workers interviewed are all sympathetic to Labor (many of them thoughtful, articulate, and moving), and its commitment to alleviate the abuses of the past. Labor’s most profound accomplishment was realized by Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health in the Atlee government, and one of the chief architects of the National Health Service—the NHS being one of the few enduring changes of Labor’s postwar ascent to power. Still, the film would have gained an added dimension if Loach had provided some sense of Labor’s difficulties in bringing a new world into fruition. Loach does mention that Labor’s rule meant control by bureaucrats not the people’s participation in ruling. But that remark barely touches the surface of the problems Labor faced. In 1951, Churchill and the Tories came back to power gaining many more male working-class voters than in the elections of 1945 or 1950. Clearly, though Labor may have brought great and necessary changes, dissatisfaction existed.
The last part of the film deals with Thatcher’s coming to office in 1979 and her dismantling the welfare state and ushering in a state dominated by the market, privatization, and entrepreneurial culture. Thatcher helped create an England where the rich got richer while the poor became more impoverished (20 percent of the people living under the poverty line), reversing a 40-year pattern where incomes were gradually growing more equal. By 1988, the best-off 10 percent of the population enjoyed nearly nine times more income than the worst-off 10 percent, though real wages did go up for the majority of those who worked. Loach has no use for a Thatcher, whose time in power was characterized by her contempt for unions, and working class communities becoming marginalized. Loach himself is scathing about the role unions played in acquiescing to Thatcher. The film ends on a pessimistic note, but it does ably—if not imaginatively—convey an exhilarating moment in British history, when a true transformation of a class-dominated society seemed possible.
Ken Loach’s “The Spirit of ’45” plays at The Film Forum in New York City through March 30.
