Ken Loach: Still angry after all these years

It’s four decades since director Ken Loach’s tough portrayal of homelessness, ‘Cathy Come Home’, revolutionised the way social problems were tackled on TV – and he’s not given up trying to change the world. Andy McSmith hears why

Published: Independent 24 September 2007

Meeting Ken Loach is a shock. His reputation is fearsome, yet his manner is almost diffident. He works out of a sparse, two-room office above a spicy chicken café in Soho. He dresses plainly, speaks very quietly and listens carefully. Actually, he has to listen carefully, because, at the age of 71, he has a touch of deafness. His staff tease him about him without mercy. Yet this elderly man, who is hard of hearing and would not look out of place in a northern working men’s club, has lost none of his lifelong talent for provoking outrage. He may not look or act like anyone’s idea of a famous film director but he has been at the top of an ego-heavy profession for more than 40 years.

Loach rose to fame in 1966 as the young director of the seminal television play, Cathy Come Home – a cry of rage against homelessness. It was watched by 12 million people and added rocket fuel to the launch of the charity, Shelter, that month.

On Channel 4 tonight, there will be another disturbing Loach drama showing people with nowhere decent to live. The title, It’s A Free World, is ironic. The play, written by Loach’s long-term collaborator Paul Laverty, is an exposé of how the free market operates for East European migrants and illegal immigrants trying to survive in the sludge at the bottom of the job market.

It shows that, while Loach’s politics have not altered in four decades, his choice of subjects has moved with the times, to a subject that is now in the news almost daily. Since 2002, more than 2.5 million foreign workers, nearly a third of them Poles, have applied for national insurance numbers in Britain. Last week, the Chief Constable of Cambridge, Julie Spence, warned that the numbers were putting a strain on her officers.

Loach’s reply is not, of course, that the incomers should be sent home but that they should have exactly the same employment rights as British employees, so they cannot be used by employers to push down wages and working conditions. Unlike any other film Loach has directed, this story is not visualised through the eyes of the exploited. The main character, Angie – played by a relative newcomer, Kierston Wareing – runs a recruitment agency. The drama opens with her being sacked from her previous job after throwing drink in the face of the boss who tries to grope her. Anyone unfamiliar with Loach’s socialism might sit back expecting a conventional feminist drama about a put-upon single mother proving her mettle in a male world. But, although he likes tough women characters, feminism is not Loach’s top tune. “Through the 1980s, it was the soft option to take up this cause, particularly on Channel 4. They were very good at it.” he says.

Actually, as the story unfolds, Angie’s determination to succeed makes her more and more hard-bitten, callous and, finally, downright dishonest. It is the first time Loach has delved this far into the mindset of someone who makes money exploiting those who are worse off.

“What we wanted to do was take the audience on a journey, seeing the process through Angie’s eyes,” he says. “She starts as a woman who is sexually harassed at work and unfairly dismissed, so you are on her side. She’s a funny, smart, feisty, sexy woman who is great company and good fun. She is very likeable. Well, I hope she is.

“Then you follow the logic of what she has done within the environment in which she is working. The Sun had a big story in the last few days about immigrants taking our taxes and benefits. One line they used was that we have become a haven for scroungers from eastern Europe. Well, what a contemptible thing to write. But that’s the context in which Angie is working. In those lights, she is doing what society approves of. I hope, at the end, you think that is abhorrent and you can’t tolerate it.”

Born in Nuneaton, the son of a self-educated electrician, Loach consolidated his reputation in the 1960s and 1970s through a series of realistic, left-wing television dramas such as The Price Of Coal, about a mining accident in Yorkshire, and the six-part Days Of Hope, set in the 1920s. He also directed documentaries and films for cinema. His first successful foray into the cinema in 1969 was Kes the story of a boy from a mining village whose unhappy life is redeemed by his kestrel. His most recent film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, released in 2006, provoked a now famous outburst from one commentator who likened Loach to a Nazi. The film described an episode during the Irish War of Independence in which the role of the British Army fell somewhere short of glorious. Simon Heffer, writing in The Daily Telegraph was enraged when this “poisonous” work by a “bigoted Marxist” won the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes. “No, I haven’t seen it,” Heffer admitted, “any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.”

It has not always been the Tory right who were most offended by Loach’s work, however. The nadir of his career, which almost ended his connection with British television, came early in the Thatcher era, when he attempted to make a four-part documentary, Questions Of Leadership. He interviewed trade union activists eager to take on the Government but suspected that their own leaders and the Labour Party did not have the stomach for a fight. The project suffered what Loach calls “death by a thousand cuts” before being dropped, unshown. He named the people behind the ban. Most are dead and therefore cannot give their side of the story but the interesting point, politically, is that they were all luminaries of the Labour Party, such as the union leaders Terry Duffy and Frank Chapple, the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell and the former Attorney-General, Sam Silkin.

Loach was himself a Labour member back then. “Although, obviously, I hated everything that Kinnock and the rest of them stood for, there was still a left in the Labour Party in those years. Obviously, I was constantly debating whether I should actually be in it or not. And then they decided they were going to switch their method of collecting subscriptions – from someone who came round who you spoke to, to taking your Visa number without any human contact. I said to them ‘no, you’re not having my Visa number. I won’t subsidise you any longer’.” More recently, he took the unusual step of standing as a candidate for George Galloway’s Respect Party in the European elections, though he knew “there was never any danger of me being elected”.

The serious old Marxist film director and the exhibitionist politician do not sound like a natural combination, and Loach does not rush to defend the two notorious episodes in Galloway’s life – his homage to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and his cat impersonation on Celebrity Big Brother. Instead, he says: “Fair play to him. He is the only Labour MP who has left the party over the question of Iraq, and he is the first left of Labour MP to get into the House of Commons for many, many years. And he has been absolutely principled on the war and on privatisation. He deserves to be remembered for that.”

After the trough of the 1980s, Loach made a comeback with films like the Spanish civil war epic Land And Freedom (1995), Carla’s Song (1996) – about the impact of the Nicaraguan war – and Sweet Sixteen (2002), in which a teenager is drawn into a life of crime. His last television drama before tonight’s play was The Navigators (2001), about rail privatisation.

It may be six years since Loach qualified for a bus pass but he has no intention of hanging up his cloth cap. He plans to make a documentary and another film with Laverty but refuses to discuss either for fear that it might jeopardise the projects. Whatever the subject matter, you can be sure both will be true to Loach’s uncompromising socialism. With four decades at the top of his profession, Ken Loach is still very angry after all these years.

Life through a lens: the gritty vision of Ken Loach

Cathy Come Home (1966)

Perhaps the most celebrated one-off drama shown by the BBC in its ‘Wednesday Play’ slot during the 1960s. It attracted 12 million viewers and was an enormous boost to the homeless charity Shelter, launched 10 days later.

Poor Cow (1967)

Loach’s cinematic debut tells the story of an 18 year old who runs away from home to marry a thief, has his child, is abused and ends up working as a prostitute. It stars Terence Stamp. Malcolm McDowell is credited in the cast list but he is not seen on screen.

Kes (1969)

The film of a novel by Barry Hines, who wrote the screenplay, tells the story of a Barnsley lad who is doing badly at school and hates the prospect of becoming a miner. He finds solace by befriending and training a kestrel.

Days Of Hope (1975)

Four feature-length television plays charting the experiences of a mining family between the First World War the General Strike of 1926, written by a former miner, Jim Allen. The former Blairite Cabinet minister, Alan Milburn, once worked in a radical bookshop named after the series.

The Price Of Coal (1977)

Two linked dramas, written by Barry Hines, featuring the same characters. The first is a comedy, about a visit by Prince Charles to a Yorkshire coal pit. The second is a tragedy about a mine disaster.

Land And Freedom (1995)

Loach’s award-winning film about a jobless Liverpudlian who fights in the Spanish Civil War.

Carla’s Song (1996)

The story of a Glasgow bus driver (Robert Carlyle) and a Nicaraguan woman living in exile.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)

Loach’s controversial account of the Irish War of Independence in the 1920s won the Palme d’Or.

It’s a Free World (2007)

An unscrupulous female employment agency owner uses cheap labour from eastern Europe.

Published on Monday, September 17, 2007 by The Independent/UK

by Robert Fisk

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past - the very cradle of human civilisation - has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein’s regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which - if properly excavated - could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.”

Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.

“There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What’s new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.

“Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There’s been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It’s like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake.”

Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament - and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham - it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.

Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later - in what has become known as “the age of the deluge” - Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders - the world’s first cheques - the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.

US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this “beggars belief”. In an analysis of the city, she says: “The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region.”

Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: “The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.”

The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.

Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately - but vainly - tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent “the disaster we are all witnessing and observing”.

In 2006, he says: “We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.

“Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq.”

Last year, Dr Hamdani’s antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would “dig” the archaeological site, dissolve the “old mud brick” to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.

Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: “His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are ‘frozen projects’, but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects.”

Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested - with the help of Western troops - several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.

The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. “It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world,” Ms Farchakh says.

The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq’s historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.

The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists’ report says: “They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting.”

After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.

Ms Farchakh adds: “The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from.”

A land with fields of ancient pottery

By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist

Iraq’s rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the “cradle of civilisation” is nothing more than desert land with “fields” of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is “their land”. Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been “forgotten” by all the governments, their “revenge” for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that’s half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their “looting” activities to be part of a normal working day.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.

© 2007 The Independent

Jamal Ghosn, Electronic Lebanon, Sep 6, 2007

Victory celebrations are dominating the Lebanese airwaves for the foreseeable future and presidential election “campaigns” here are in full swing. The issue of reconstructing the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp will never see the light of day in any of the Lebanese media outlets, whether pro-government or opposition — just like the humanitarian crisis at Baddawi refugee camp has failed to capture any front page headlines over the past three months. The sole exception being when the disgruntled double-refugees attempted to return home, only to find themselves accused of attacking the Lebanese army. Shots from unidentified sources resulted in the death of three returning Palestinian refugees. Apparently human suffering with no potential political gain is not newsworthy.

Living conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps have never been easy. Lack of basic amenities, sub-par health care, and overcrowded schools are the common denominators between all the camps on Lebanese territory. None of the densely populated camps are in a condition to host a sudden influx of tens of thousands of twice-displaced refugees. Naturally, the overflowing Baddawi will not be a viable home for the Nahr al-Bared residents who will move back to their homes (reconstructed or not). The skeletons of buildings will be patched up, most likely by the refugees themselves with the help of the handful of activists that still care about the plight of Palestinians. These death-infested, bomb-riddled structures will make for a more dignified living than the pre-fabricated cardboard boxes, designed for nuclear families rather than traditional Palestinian extended ones, that have surfaced as alternative homes courtesy of some generous donors. Of course, the sea-front strip of the camp will be kept off-limits by the Lebanese army for questionable future development.

Hopes for real aid materializing from the Lebanese or other Arab governments for the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared are delusional. The precedent was set by the snail-paced reconstruction of south Lebanon following the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. And unlike the residents of south Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees do not enjoy the strong political backing of any major Lebanese or regional power. No propaganda machines will be mobilized for their sake. History shows that media coverage of the camps only occurs when it means casting Palestinians in a negative light. Never has a media campaign been dedicated to addressing the cyclical victimhood of the residents of the camps. They are on their own and at the mercy of often failed, albeit generous, promises.

Sadly, the repopulation without proper reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared would not lead to standards of living much different than those in Ein al-Hilwe or Sabra. The lack of utilities and infrastructure will not be missed much as the residents of Nahr al-Bared faced the same problems even before the birth of Fatah al-Islam and the destruction of the camp. Over the years, Palestinian refugee camps have been decked with a constant dose of heavy artillery of Lebanese government, Arab, and international neglect. Neglect as ravaging as the half-ton bombs airlifted from the US and other third-party allies like Jordan to be dropped on Nahr al-Bared. The attention given to Nahr al-Bared will rapidly wane, and as always none of the humanitarian or political issues associated with the Palestinian camps will be addressed. Meanwhile, a new generation of Palestinians can now claim their own painful memories of the ongoing struggle for existence. The refugees from Nahr al-Bared and elsewhere are left, until further notice, with only hopes and prayers that the next incident involving one of their camps will not be as bloody and devastating as previous episodes.

Jamal Ghosn is a 28-year-old strategy consultant from Beirut. He has covered Lebanese affairs on his blog (http://jamalghosn.blogspot.com) for over two years.