As socialists we have known for sometime the way capitalists evade tax and make billions a year but tonight BBC panorama exposed some of the shadiest of dealings that goes on with the likes of Vodafone and Glaxo Smith Klein.
A special nod has to go to the PCS union who have been tirelessly campaigning against tax evasion for years now. Only now is it becoming a big big issue that polititians can no longer pretend doesn’t exist if nothing else they are forced to pay lip service to trying to tackle tax evasion by rich corporations.
The Tory party and even new labour would never seriously go after rich tax evaders as their interests lie with them they are and have been governments for the 1% the very wealthiest in society.
The BBC panorama episode if you can catch it is fascinating and is a real eye opener to the way the super rich capitalists work and get around their own influenced laws. As we all know the law is not neutral it is heavily stacked against workers and ordinary people if you tried to evade a bit of tax the tax man will come down on you like a tonne of bricks but if your Vodafone or Glaxo’s or the like different story entirely …
This programme showed that if these tax loop holes were properly closed and all the evaded tax properly collected there would be no need for any cuts at all to public services. But as we know this wont happen and we will be instead made to pay for a crisis in capitalism that is not of our making as ordinary working people.
An estimated 120 billion goes evaded every year by big rich corporations that would more than cover the entire deficit for this year and a little bit more. But who is putting this case forward? Only left unions with fighting traditions like the PCS and the RMT for as far as I can tell. The labour party which has no leg to stand on on this allowed this to go on on its watch too so they cannot be trusted to put forward a programme of nationalisation to bring these big corporations into public democratic ownership to prevent them evading tax and stashing millions and billions in offshore tax havens such as Luxembourg which was shown on tonight’s episode.
A true workers government would be looking to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy and gradually look to plan the economy by using the profits from these big multi nationals which will mean other nations having to follow a similar idea to close of loop holes which means capital can be controlled going in and out of the country.
These sorts of measures which would be transitional measures in the transition to a socialist planned economy with a society based on everybody’s needs not just the needs of a few very very rich people who can employ the best accountants to get around any laws that may or may not stand in their way.
So next time you are told the cuts are nessesary just ask them to take a watch of tonights episode of panorama and tell them there is the money out there if it was taxed and collected properly.
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Showing posts with label documentaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label documentaries. Show all posts
Monday, 14 May 2012
Monday, 29 August 2011
The brilliant work and thoughts of Ken Loach
Ken Loach is a well known left wing film director and has produced many great well made films on some very tough subjects. Ken dares to go where no one else does. Ken highlights working class struggles in his films and really gets his audience thinking. There is a recent article in the Guardian with a interview from him. I thought i'd share parts of it here. Ken talks on the recent riots in the UK and the political situation in this country too. He speaks so much sense and raises some excellent points that we can all take on board i feel.
The leftwing film director talks about the riots, his early work on television and the documentary he made for Save the Children 40 years that is about to be screened for the first time
About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist. The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation.
Save The Children Fund Film
Production year: 1969Country: UKRuntime: 50 minsDirectors: Ken Loach.
Actors don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner. I ask Loach which surprise was most memorable, and he laughs incongruously through a few examples. He talks about an incident when an actor walked through a door, on-set, to discover his co-star in a bath, her wrists apparently slashed. "Surprise is the hardest thing to act," says Loach, "and his response was just very true." On another occasion an actor only found out during the filming of a battle scene that her character was to be shot and killed. She was not especially pleased.
Most surprisingly of all, Crissy Rock, the lead in Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) – a brilliant, devastating gut-wrencher of a film – was convinced she was starring in a happy, upbeat, redemptive story. "She thought it would turn out to be about a couple successfully raising children together," says Loach, smiling. It is actually about a woman's kids being taken, one by one, by the social services. In the scene where they come for the final child, Rock "couldn't believe it," says Loach. "She was just wrecked."
It's at this point I laugh and call Loach a sadist. But it's probably more accurate to call him uncompromising, with both his actors and his leftwing politics. Loach turned 75 in June, and next month the BFI is showing a retrospective that will take viewers from his early television work Рincluding the harsh, effective, 1966 expos̩ of homelessness Cathy Come Home Рto his most recent film, Route Irish, about the experiences of private security contractors in Iraq. I ask which of his films he's most proud of, and he can't choose. "There's quite a few I cocked up, but that's another matter."
His documentary The Save the Children Film, part-funded by the charity, is being shown for the first time; made in 1969 for TV, it was never broadcast. The film was commissioned for the charity's 50th anniversary, and it's easy to imagine what they might have been expecting: a gauzy portrait, light on analysis, strong on praise.
Loach took a different tack. The documentary looks at the potential problems of aid, the ways those in a position to be charitable are often patronising and paternalistic. He took his cameras to a school run by Save the Children in Kenya, for homeless boys from Nairobi, for instance, that was set up along the lines of a British public school; the children are shown blowing bugles, marching, reading books including The Inimitable Jeeves and Tom Brown's Schooldays. A group of young Kenyan activists appear in the film, one of whom notes he can't think of another school in the world where the mother tongue isn't allowed.
The documentary moves beyond the charity's work to show British expatriates in Kenya; one stompingly posh woman remarks they have "a wildly gay time" there, and she feels that "even in their poverty, [the Kenyan people] are basically happy". Raising their living standards might just upset things, she adds. The film is full of issues that remain pressing: the limits of philanthropy, the patronage relationships fostered by aid, the subtle and not-so-subtle problems of colonialism. It ends with the comment that we "must change the property relationships of society, and then we change man. That's the only real solution, and all the rest is propaganda."
The documentary was made for LWT and only one-third funded by the charity, so Loach thought he and his crew could "take an independent view, and the TV company would support us. But they didn't." There are moments when he seems to have the naivety that derives from an inflexible moral backbone. "When the people that ran the Save the Children Fund said they would sue us, the television company wrote off their investment, and didn't back us at all."
It isn't the only one of his documentaries to have been pulled; Questions of Leadership, a TV series critiquing the response of the trade union top brass to Thatcherism, made in the early 1980s, was never shown – apparently for political reasons. I ask whether it upsets him when his films are censored or withdrawn, and he says: "It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous. And you see it over and over again. I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots. You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak."
Loach's films are often either a call to arms (a reminder of the rotten, vicious circumstances many people face) or portraits of specific political movements. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish war of independence, Bread and Roses was about a group of office cleaners in Los Angeles campaigning for just wages, Land and Freedom was about a young, unemployed Liverpudlian man, a member of the Communist party, who heads to Spain to fight in a militia against Franco.
Land and Freedom has all the obvious elements of a great film: a passionate protagonist, beautiful heroine, a romantic relationship, battle scenes. And yet its most gripping moments involve an extensive conversation between a communist militia and the people of a Spanish town about the merits of collectivism. Should the town's land be carved up and shared among the people? Should some remain private? All of it? When I ask whether Loach would describe his politics as socialist, he says it's a difficult word, because it's much devalued, and you can't "make sense of it without Marx – but if you say you're a Marxist, then the rightwing press just uses it as a brick to hang around your neck." He is the rare film-maker who brings questions of political structure flamingly alive.
Loach is a quiet, gentle man – that streak of sadism aside – who seems entirely without vanity; he comes across like the most caring teacher in school. We talk more about the riots, and the subsequent heavy-handedness of the courts. "They'll shoot people for stealing sheep next, won't they?" he says. "But, in a way, whenever something dramatic happens, you know that everybody retreats to their comfort zone – so the Tories retreat to cutting benefits, pulling people out of their houses, savage prison sentences. They want that anyway. So whatever happens is an excuse for them to do what they want to do."
I mention the two young men put away for four years each, after trying to provoke rioting through their Facebook pages. Loach notes, with a shrug, that their cases will probably go to appeal, then adds: "It's the ruling class cracking the whip, isn't it? It's disgusting. We've got to organise. In the words of the old American trade unionist Joe Hill: don't mourn, organise."
He continues, apologising occasionally for "lecturing" me. "I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.
"I don't recall the nihilism among kids now, 40 or 50 years ago," he says. "Now there is no place for kids, period. So I think despite the material advances, we're worse off." We also don't seem to have a political class that understands, on any level, what it's like to face unemployment. "No, the Bullingdon boys have never had to confront that," says Loach. "The Bullingdon boys will wreck restaurants and …" he pauses. "Just throw some money at it?" I say. "Yes, or their parents will throw money at it."
I ask whether he aims to provoke political change with his films, and he says he hopes they make people "see things in a different way. That they see there were possibilities for change in Spain, for instance, and one of the things that destroyed it was sectarianism on the left. That you can organise trade unions, we do have strength, things can be different, and here are stories from the past that show it."
It's difficult to imagine young people risking their lives for leftwing ideals now as they once did in Spain though, isn't it? Loach disagrees. "You get the international volunteers who go and put themselves in Gaza … Those are the sort of people who would have gone to Spain. People will resist, and they will fight back, and they do feel solidarity."
Does he think there's a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? "It just needs leadership," he says. "It's like a head of steam. The steam won't drive anything unless there's an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around." The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.
"At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here's a pen, give us your name, we're anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it's Lenin's bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you'll be organised and it'll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed."
As a child growing up in the industrial town of Nuneaton, his paternal grandfather a miner, his father a foreman in a machine tool factory, Loach had little interest in politics. His father read the Daily Express, and was a working-class Tory, and Loach, an only child ("not because they didn't want more children, but because it wasn't possible for some reason"), fell in love with the theatre. They lived 30 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, "so once I got the bug, aged about 12 or 13, I used to go there and see plays". He fainted once, standing at the back watching Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. "She has her tongue cut out, and she came on with streams of red, and I'd had this long cycle ride, so I fell over."
Loach went to the local grammar school, which took in "60 boys each year, out of a town population of about 70,000. It was very lucky to go, because it was good, but it was at the expense of hundreds of boys the same age who, from the age of 11, would have no way into higher education." If you didn't get into the grammar school, your academic career would almost certainly fade fast. Loach wanted to be a lawyer; I ask if this was out of a striving for justice, and he laughs. "By no means. I just fancied the frocks really. I was really stage-struck, but I thought that going into the theatre would be unrealistic."
After a couple of years of national service with the RAF, he studied law at Oxford, and spent all his time performing. "I didn't go to a lecture for over a year. It was an absolute disgrace. I got an actor's degree – I swotted for six weeks at the end." He and a friend came close to starting a theatre afterwards, but when their funding fell through, he ended up understudying a comedian who was playing opposite Kenneth Williams. "I was totally incompetent, so thank God I never had to go on." Williams "was quite friendly", says Loach, "but if he was not in a good frame of mind, he could destroy you, and I was a young innocent abroad."
He emphasises that he was a poor actor ("I wouldn't have employed me") and so became an assistant director at Northampton Rep for a year, then in 1963 landed a job as a trainee director at the BBC. "It was a huge stroke of luck to be there, because the BBC was in quite a liberal mood, with Hugh Carleton Greene as the director general." Loach was soon influenced by the political passion of those around him, and began reading widely about leftwing ideas.
He started off directing Z Cars, and was then asked to join the Wednesday Play; in his first year he directed about six films, "original scripts, going out at peak viewing, straight after the news, when there were only two and a half channels. So everybody watched it. It was an incredible opportunity." He worked with strong writers, including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford and David Mercer; Jimmy O'Connor wrote a film about capital punishment, Three Clear Sundays. "He himself had been arrested and convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, and was reprieved with days to go. He was a very good writer."
Over four or five years, he made such classics as Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, and his first feature film, Poor Cow, all stories of working-class life. He and his peers gravitated to these stories for a number of reasons. "One is that the drama is most intense among people who have got little to lose," he says. "They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life. Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war. Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working. And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below. It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain." He pauses, and smiles. "They also have the best jokes."
Loach says that period at the BBC was "hugely intoxicating" not just because of the enormous audiences, but because the directors had to defend their work, and politics. "Not only did you get reviews, but if you had a play on, you'd go on a programme called Late Night Line-Up, and there would be a critic, and a discussion, and you'd be torn to shreds, so you had to know your stuff. We always felt we were in politics, even though we were doing drama. A lot of directors now, I notice, when people take issue with them, they say: 'Oh no, it's not political, we didn't mean that, and they back off.' Well, we never backed off, you know, and why would you?"
The BFI's Ken Loach retrospective launches at BFI Southbank on 1 September with the premiere of The Save the Children film and continues until 12 October. Ken Loach at the BBC is available on DVD from 5 September.
The leftwing film director talks about the riots, his early work on television and the documentary he made for Save the Children 40 years that is about to be screened for the first time
About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist. The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation.
Save The Children Fund Film
Production year: 1969Country: UKRuntime: 50 minsDirectors: Ken Loach.
Actors don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner. I ask Loach which surprise was most memorable, and he laughs incongruously through a few examples. He talks about an incident when an actor walked through a door, on-set, to discover his co-star in a bath, her wrists apparently slashed. "Surprise is the hardest thing to act," says Loach, "and his response was just very true." On another occasion an actor only found out during the filming of a battle scene that her character was to be shot and killed. She was not especially pleased.
Most surprisingly of all, Crissy Rock, the lead in Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) – a brilliant, devastating gut-wrencher of a film – was convinced she was starring in a happy, upbeat, redemptive story. "She thought it would turn out to be about a couple successfully raising children together," says Loach, smiling. It is actually about a woman's kids being taken, one by one, by the social services. In the scene where they come for the final child, Rock "couldn't believe it," says Loach. "She was just wrecked."
It's at this point I laugh and call Loach a sadist. But it's probably more accurate to call him uncompromising, with both his actors and his leftwing politics. Loach turned 75 in June, and next month the BFI is showing a retrospective that will take viewers from his early television work Рincluding the harsh, effective, 1966 expos̩ of homelessness Cathy Come Home Рto his most recent film, Route Irish, about the experiences of private security contractors in Iraq. I ask which of his films he's most proud of, and he can't choose. "There's quite a few I cocked up, but that's another matter."
His documentary The Save the Children Film, part-funded by the charity, is being shown for the first time; made in 1969 for TV, it was never broadcast. The film was commissioned for the charity's 50th anniversary, and it's easy to imagine what they might have been expecting: a gauzy portrait, light on analysis, strong on praise.
Loach took a different tack. The documentary looks at the potential problems of aid, the ways those in a position to be charitable are often patronising and paternalistic. He took his cameras to a school run by Save the Children in Kenya, for homeless boys from Nairobi, for instance, that was set up along the lines of a British public school; the children are shown blowing bugles, marching, reading books including The Inimitable Jeeves and Tom Brown's Schooldays. A group of young Kenyan activists appear in the film, one of whom notes he can't think of another school in the world where the mother tongue isn't allowed.
The documentary moves beyond the charity's work to show British expatriates in Kenya; one stompingly posh woman remarks they have "a wildly gay time" there, and she feels that "even in their poverty, [the Kenyan people] are basically happy". Raising their living standards might just upset things, she adds. The film is full of issues that remain pressing: the limits of philanthropy, the patronage relationships fostered by aid, the subtle and not-so-subtle problems of colonialism. It ends with the comment that we "must change the property relationships of society, and then we change man. That's the only real solution, and all the rest is propaganda."
The documentary was made for LWT and only one-third funded by the charity, so Loach thought he and his crew could "take an independent view, and the TV company would support us. But they didn't." There are moments when he seems to have the naivety that derives from an inflexible moral backbone. "When the people that ran the Save the Children Fund said they would sue us, the television company wrote off their investment, and didn't back us at all."
It isn't the only one of his documentaries to have been pulled; Questions of Leadership, a TV series critiquing the response of the trade union top brass to Thatcherism, made in the early 1980s, was never shown – apparently for political reasons. I ask whether it upsets him when his films are censored or withdrawn, and he says: "It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous. And you see it over and over again. I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots. You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak."
Loach's films are often either a call to arms (a reminder of the rotten, vicious circumstances many people face) or portraits of specific political movements. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish war of independence, Bread and Roses was about a group of office cleaners in Los Angeles campaigning for just wages, Land and Freedom was about a young, unemployed Liverpudlian man, a member of the Communist party, who heads to Spain to fight in a militia against Franco.
Land and Freedom has all the obvious elements of a great film: a passionate protagonist, beautiful heroine, a romantic relationship, battle scenes. And yet its most gripping moments involve an extensive conversation between a communist militia and the people of a Spanish town about the merits of collectivism. Should the town's land be carved up and shared among the people? Should some remain private? All of it? When I ask whether Loach would describe his politics as socialist, he says it's a difficult word, because it's much devalued, and you can't "make sense of it without Marx – but if you say you're a Marxist, then the rightwing press just uses it as a brick to hang around your neck." He is the rare film-maker who brings questions of political structure flamingly alive.
Loach is a quiet, gentle man – that streak of sadism aside – who seems entirely without vanity; he comes across like the most caring teacher in school. We talk more about the riots, and the subsequent heavy-handedness of the courts. "They'll shoot people for stealing sheep next, won't they?" he says. "But, in a way, whenever something dramatic happens, you know that everybody retreats to their comfort zone – so the Tories retreat to cutting benefits, pulling people out of their houses, savage prison sentences. They want that anyway. So whatever happens is an excuse for them to do what they want to do."
I mention the two young men put away for four years each, after trying to provoke rioting through their Facebook pages. Loach notes, with a shrug, that their cases will probably go to appeal, then adds: "It's the ruling class cracking the whip, isn't it? It's disgusting. We've got to organise. In the words of the old American trade unionist Joe Hill: don't mourn, organise."
He continues, apologising occasionally for "lecturing" me. "I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.
"I don't recall the nihilism among kids now, 40 or 50 years ago," he says. "Now there is no place for kids, period. So I think despite the material advances, we're worse off." We also don't seem to have a political class that understands, on any level, what it's like to face unemployment. "No, the Bullingdon boys have never had to confront that," says Loach. "The Bullingdon boys will wreck restaurants and …" he pauses. "Just throw some money at it?" I say. "Yes, or their parents will throw money at it."
I ask whether he aims to provoke political change with his films, and he says he hopes they make people "see things in a different way. That they see there were possibilities for change in Spain, for instance, and one of the things that destroyed it was sectarianism on the left. That you can organise trade unions, we do have strength, things can be different, and here are stories from the past that show it."
It's difficult to imagine young people risking their lives for leftwing ideals now as they once did in Spain though, isn't it? Loach disagrees. "You get the international volunteers who go and put themselves in Gaza … Those are the sort of people who would have gone to Spain. People will resist, and they will fight back, and they do feel solidarity."
Does he think there's a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? "It just needs leadership," he says. "It's like a head of steam. The steam won't drive anything unless there's an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around." The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.
"At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here's a pen, give us your name, we're anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it's Lenin's bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you'll be organised and it'll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed."
As a child growing up in the industrial town of Nuneaton, his paternal grandfather a miner, his father a foreman in a machine tool factory, Loach had little interest in politics. His father read the Daily Express, and was a working-class Tory, and Loach, an only child ("not because they didn't want more children, but because it wasn't possible for some reason"), fell in love with the theatre. They lived 30 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, "so once I got the bug, aged about 12 or 13, I used to go there and see plays". He fainted once, standing at the back watching Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. "She has her tongue cut out, and she came on with streams of red, and I'd had this long cycle ride, so I fell over."
Loach went to the local grammar school, which took in "60 boys each year, out of a town population of about 70,000. It was very lucky to go, because it was good, but it was at the expense of hundreds of boys the same age who, from the age of 11, would have no way into higher education." If you didn't get into the grammar school, your academic career would almost certainly fade fast. Loach wanted to be a lawyer; I ask if this was out of a striving for justice, and he laughs. "By no means. I just fancied the frocks really. I was really stage-struck, but I thought that going into the theatre would be unrealistic."
After a couple of years of national service with the RAF, he studied law at Oxford, and spent all his time performing. "I didn't go to a lecture for over a year. It was an absolute disgrace. I got an actor's degree – I swotted for six weeks at the end." He and a friend came close to starting a theatre afterwards, but when their funding fell through, he ended up understudying a comedian who was playing opposite Kenneth Williams. "I was totally incompetent, so thank God I never had to go on." Williams "was quite friendly", says Loach, "but if he was not in a good frame of mind, he could destroy you, and I was a young innocent abroad."
He emphasises that he was a poor actor ("I wouldn't have employed me") and so became an assistant director at Northampton Rep for a year, then in 1963 landed a job as a trainee director at the BBC. "It was a huge stroke of luck to be there, because the BBC was in quite a liberal mood, with Hugh Carleton Greene as the director general." Loach was soon influenced by the political passion of those around him, and began reading widely about leftwing ideas.
He started off directing Z Cars, and was then asked to join the Wednesday Play; in his first year he directed about six films, "original scripts, going out at peak viewing, straight after the news, when there were only two and a half channels. So everybody watched it. It was an incredible opportunity." He worked with strong writers, including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford and David Mercer; Jimmy O'Connor wrote a film about capital punishment, Three Clear Sundays. "He himself had been arrested and convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, and was reprieved with days to go. He was a very good writer."
Over four or five years, he made such classics as Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, and his first feature film, Poor Cow, all stories of working-class life. He and his peers gravitated to these stories for a number of reasons. "One is that the drama is most intense among people who have got little to lose," he says. "They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life. Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war. Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working. And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below. It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain." He pauses, and smiles. "They also have the best jokes."
Loach says that period at the BBC was "hugely intoxicating" not just because of the enormous audiences, but because the directors had to defend their work, and politics. "Not only did you get reviews, but if you had a play on, you'd go on a programme called Late Night Line-Up, and there would be a critic, and a discussion, and you'd be torn to shreds, so you had to know your stuff. We always felt we were in politics, even though we were doing drama. A lot of directors now, I notice, when people take issue with them, they say: 'Oh no, it's not political, we didn't mean that, and they back off.' Well, we never backed off, you know, and why would you?"
The BFI's Ken Loach retrospective launches at BFI Southbank on 1 September with the premiere of The Save the Children film and continues until 12 October. Ken Loach at the BBC is available on DVD from 5 September.
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Child povety in Condem Britain as cuts begin to hit
Last Monday on BBc 1 there was a documentary shown called Poor Kids. these documentaries dont come on that often as we are distracted from the real reallities of what really goes on in parts of Britain today as the working class people realise the tories are back at the helm. Documentaries like this one shown last week are shown not because the ruling class wants the mass's to see such things but they are obliged to keep their state funding to show these sorts of programmes to remain somewhat balanced.
The programme was good and underneath i've placed the review of the documantary from our paper this week- the socialist which you can read more at www.socialistparty.org.uk
Three and a half million children in Britain live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater. BBC One's "Poor Kids" filmed children in their homes and neighbourhoods and let them talk. What a sad, sickening picture of life in one of the richest countries in the world.
We're told we all have to tighten our belts; that we've all been profligate and now wasteful public spending has to be reined in.
We saw a boy who was bullied for wearing hand-me-down school clothes from his older sister, and a girl who had never had a holiday apart from a school trip to Scarborough. All the children filmed occasionally went without meals, and all of them were cold in the winter because their parents couldn't afford to properly heat their homes.
I normally hate programmes like this. we are very aware that our own children and many of their friends are in the poverty statistics, and I dread programmes that claim to show what it's really like. Aside from the fact that inevitably editorial decisions distort what we see, they also lift people out of their context. With very little commentary we are largely left to draw our own conclusions, and it would be very easy for some viewers to see these children's lives as the product of individual problem parents.
But that is clearly not the case. The statistics injected at various points in the programme showed that these children simply illustrate general conditions. When children talked about their asthma and eczema problems, we were told that poor children are two and a half times more likely to suffer chronic illnesses and 85% of children living in damp conditions suffer breathing problems.
What linked all the families shown was long-term unemployment. One was a single father, struggling to find work that would fit around childcare, while in his city five people chase every job. Officially, the poverty line for a family his size is £1,000 a month after housing costs. This family lived on £420 a month. The father explained that when he was in work their income was that amount a week.
Massive public sector cuts are going to make these conditions far worse. If the government realises its plans, job prospects are going to get much worse, benefits will fall, housing conditions worsen and access to decent children's services, limited as it already is, will be slashed. The happy ending for one child in the programme, when her damp block of flats was knocked down and her family was rehoused, is unlikely to be repeated for many children in this age of austerity.
In fact the people in the programme are the target of Con-Dem attacks. These are the 'scroungers' allegedly living in luxury at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.
The final statistics in the programme were probably the most devastating. On measures of child poverty, Britain comes 18 out of 22 European countries, with only Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Italy worse. And child poverty is set to rise 11% over the next three years.
Of course the programme offered no solutions. It is up to the Socialist to provide that - to end the horrors of child poverty we must organise to defeat the cuts, and fight for a programme of full employment, and investment in decent housing and public services.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this issue
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fighting the cuts
Strike 30 June
Workers tur
The programme was good and underneath i've placed the review of the documantary from our paper this week- the socialist which you can read more at www.socialistparty.org.uk
Three and a half million children in Britain live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater. BBC One's "Poor Kids" filmed children in their homes and neighbourhoods and let them talk. What a sad, sickening picture of life in one of the richest countries in the world.
We're told we all have to tighten our belts; that we've all been profligate and now wasteful public spending has to be reined in.
We saw a boy who was bullied for wearing hand-me-down school clothes from his older sister, and a girl who had never had a holiday apart from a school trip to Scarborough. All the children filmed occasionally went without meals, and all of them were cold in the winter because their parents couldn't afford to properly heat their homes.
I normally hate programmes like this. we are very aware that our own children and many of their friends are in the poverty statistics, and I dread programmes that claim to show what it's really like. Aside from the fact that inevitably editorial decisions distort what we see, they also lift people out of their context. With very little commentary we are largely left to draw our own conclusions, and it would be very easy for some viewers to see these children's lives as the product of individual problem parents.
But that is clearly not the case. The statistics injected at various points in the programme showed that these children simply illustrate general conditions. When children talked about their asthma and eczema problems, we were told that poor children are two and a half times more likely to suffer chronic illnesses and 85% of children living in damp conditions suffer breathing problems.
What linked all the families shown was long-term unemployment. One was a single father, struggling to find work that would fit around childcare, while in his city five people chase every job. Officially, the poverty line for a family his size is £1,000 a month after housing costs. This family lived on £420 a month. The father explained that when he was in work their income was that amount a week.
Massive public sector cuts are going to make these conditions far worse. If the government realises its plans, job prospects are going to get much worse, benefits will fall, housing conditions worsen and access to decent children's services, limited as it already is, will be slashed. The happy ending for one child in the programme, when her damp block of flats was knocked down and her family was rehoused, is unlikely to be repeated for many children in this age of austerity.
In fact the people in the programme are the target of Con-Dem attacks. These are the 'scroungers' allegedly living in luxury at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.
The final statistics in the programme were probably the most devastating. On measures of child poverty, Britain comes 18 out of 22 European countries, with only Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Italy worse. And child poverty is set to rise 11% over the next three years.
Of course the programme offered no solutions. It is up to the Socialist to provide that - to end the horrors of child poverty we must organise to defeat the cuts, and fight for a programme of full employment, and investment in decent housing and public services.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this issue
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fighting the cuts
Strike 30 June
Workers tur
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
China's influences around the world today
After just watching this excellent documentary on bbc 2 called the chinese are coming
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ykxg9/The_Chinese_Are_Coming_Episode_1/
i thought i'd do a blog about it.
What i witnessed in the documentary was very worrying i thought. From a human perspective the amount of human exploitation going on was scarey. Millions of Chinese capitalists/entrepreneurs are moving to the continent of Africa and the documentary visits Brazil next week where we get to find out waht the chinese influence is having there.
From the documentary they took you to places and examples of chinese involvement. From the chicken farmers in Zambia and the chinese chickens being sold incrediably cheap and mass produced virtually smashing the market for Zambians to even compete to the copper mines up in the Democratic Republic of Congo where there is terrible working conditions for workers there, African workers who work 11 + hours a day there in poor, cramped and often deadly conditions.
There has been protests about pay and conditions for working like anywhere around the world would have. But you hear on the documentary that chinese managers have ended up shooting protesters due to their refusal to work and get on with their jobs in awful conditions.
Right throughout the programme we are reminded how much power and buying power the new China has. What used to be a very insular so called commonist state is now becoming one of the biggest if not the biggest capitalist exploitators in the world.
China is fast over taking the USA and the rest of the world put together.
I havent read Gordon Browns the crash book at all yet but one of the best lines from it i have heard is that he estimates Chinas consumer power once at full capacity will be the equilavent to two United States of America's.
If we stop to think about that for one second, that is scarey and beyond comprehension. The damage that consumtion will have on the planet as a whole will surely drive it to its eventual destruction unless this is curbed.
But what can we do ? there is very little i feel now, China is growing at such a alarming rate and with other big developing countries such as India too the west is going to struggle to compete and keep its power in the global stage.
The documentary continueing next week will be visiting America to find out how scared they are that they will be over taken and pale into the distance with a ever growing China. This will be interesting to hear i think.
As a socialist i am appauled at the rate and extent of China's exploitation around the world and in such poor continents like Africa. They do not see a chance to change Africa for the better they only see it as a vast market and a vast potential profit for their huge business's back home in China.
This in my view is capitalism at its very worst. Wher ea global super power is exploiting the poor in another continent and several countries for their own personal gain.
Sure dont get me wrong local Africans may have benifitted a little from the jobs the chinese have created. But alot of the jobs have gone to chinese workers who have been shipped over from mainland China as they are quicker and more efficient workers apparently. This again is not helping African countries at all. All of the profits and tax is going back to China. Some of the tax will be paid to the local governments in those countries of course but as we well know in this country tax avoidance is something the capitailists specialise in it seems.
Lastly waht also worried me a lot too was the fact that China is very closely linked now to Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe who as we well know has a awful record on human rights and has had sanctions leveled at him by the west for decades.
Yet China feels it can do business with him and his awful regieme. One of the most corrupt and torrturers and awful dictators on the planet is cuddling up to one of the worlds super powers in the face of western condemnation is a very worrying thing indeed.
So i do reccomend if you can watch this documentary which is also on next week as it is a very interesting outlook of things to come for Africa, China and the rest of the world. Which will in turn affect all of us.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ykxg9/The_Chinese_Are_Coming_Episode_1/
i thought i'd do a blog about it.
What i witnessed in the documentary was very worrying i thought. From a human perspective the amount of human exploitation going on was scarey. Millions of Chinese capitalists/entrepreneurs are moving to the continent of Africa and the documentary visits Brazil next week where we get to find out waht the chinese influence is having there.
From the documentary they took you to places and examples of chinese involvement. From the chicken farmers in Zambia and the chinese chickens being sold incrediably cheap and mass produced virtually smashing the market for Zambians to even compete to the copper mines up in the Democratic Republic of Congo where there is terrible working conditions for workers there, African workers who work 11 + hours a day there in poor, cramped and often deadly conditions.
There has been protests about pay and conditions for working like anywhere around the world would have. But you hear on the documentary that chinese managers have ended up shooting protesters due to their refusal to work and get on with their jobs in awful conditions.
Right throughout the programme we are reminded how much power and buying power the new China has. What used to be a very insular so called commonist state is now becoming one of the biggest if not the biggest capitalist exploitators in the world.
China is fast over taking the USA and the rest of the world put together.
I havent read Gordon Browns the crash book at all yet but one of the best lines from it i have heard is that he estimates Chinas consumer power once at full capacity will be the equilavent to two United States of America's.
If we stop to think about that for one second, that is scarey and beyond comprehension. The damage that consumtion will have on the planet as a whole will surely drive it to its eventual destruction unless this is curbed.
But what can we do ? there is very little i feel now, China is growing at such a alarming rate and with other big developing countries such as India too the west is going to struggle to compete and keep its power in the global stage.
The documentary continueing next week will be visiting America to find out how scared they are that they will be over taken and pale into the distance with a ever growing China. This will be interesting to hear i think.
As a socialist i am appauled at the rate and extent of China's exploitation around the world and in such poor continents like Africa. They do not see a chance to change Africa for the better they only see it as a vast market and a vast potential profit for their huge business's back home in China.
This in my view is capitalism at its very worst. Wher ea global super power is exploiting the poor in another continent and several countries for their own personal gain.
Sure dont get me wrong local Africans may have benifitted a little from the jobs the chinese have created. But alot of the jobs have gone to chinese workers who have been shipped over from mainland China as they are quicker and more efficient workers apparently. This again is not helping African countries at all. All of the profits and tax is going back to China. Some of the tax will be paid to the local governments in those countries of course but as we well know in this country tax avoidance is something the capitailists specialise in it seems.
Lastly waht also worried me a lot too was the fact that China is very closely linked now to Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe who as we well know has a awful record on human rights and has had sanctions leveled at him by the west for decades.
Yet China feels it can do business with him and his awful regieme. One of the most corrupt and torrturers and awful dictators on the planet is cuddling up to one of the worlds super powers in the face of western condemnation is a very worrying thing indeed.
So i do reccomend if you can watch this documentary which is also on next week as it is a very interesting outlook of things to come for Africa, China and the rest of the world. Which will in turn affect all of us.
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