The Q&A
the welfare state and public ownership was being eroded, but the unions were growing more confident in claiming a fairer share of the wealth their members created. Rightwing economists promoted the idea that any intervention by the state was essentially destructive and ending that intervention became the project for Thatcher’s Tories. They promoted capitalism, red in tooth and claw.
Do you believe that the Thatcher era made British people more individualistic? I think inevitably that’s been the consciousness since the 1980s. You think of the consciousness after the war, which I dimly remember, in the 40s and early 50s. It was [a sense of ] what we do together. People won the war together. Maybe that was a false optimistic view, but that was the feeling and [the population] knew Churchill was identified with the Tories and the exploitation and the Hungry Thirties, they wanted a clean sweep from him. They got rid of him as prime minister. The Labour government promised to be radical – and, despite many flaws, they established a welfare state and the health service. Then over the decades, yes, the idea of our collective strength has waned.
In “The Old Oak” you show how simple acts like a community cooking and eating together can have profound effects. Why are these stories important? Human values have political implications. If someone falls down in your street, you would help. It’s who we are. We have that innate kindness and mutual support. And yet we elect people to represent us who do the opposite. People who come in small boats, [these politicians say] to turn the boats around. It was even said, “Shoot them.” [An activist for the Reform party was filmed saying, “get the young recruits there ... fucking just shoot them” in the run up to the general elections.]
They [these politicians] manipulate consciousness, manipulate instinctive generosity and kindness to support a system in which a very few get wealthy while many are forced to rely on foodbanks.
A L A M Y ST O C K P HO T O
The community in the film is resurrecting the tradition of “eat together to stick together” from the miners’ strike, 40 years ago. That’s one of the key functions of the left – to keep that sense [of solidarity] alive. The tradition the left inherits is centuries old and it goes back to the peasants’ revolt [of 1381] where John Ball [one of the leaders] said, “Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will until all things shall be held in common.” Extraordinary. And here we are again saying the same thing. And Gerrard Winstanley,
the leader of the Diggers [who promoted agrarian socialism] in the civil war, saying that the Earth is “a common treasury”. If we’d done that ever since, we wouldn’t have a climate disaster now.
That’s our inheritance, politically. And the Chartists, of course – and don’t forget Marx, there’s a lot to learn from him.
Are there any directors you’re feeling excited about? I don’t go to the cinema as much as I should. I also think directors are overvalued and writers are undervalued in films. I worked with Paul Laverty [who wrote I, Daniel Blake, Sorry We Missed You and The Old Oak], for 30 years, and if the films belong to anyone, they belong to the writer. Directing is very simple, really. Film is not complicated – it’s not like drawing or playing the cello, or something. A film director says, “I know what I want to see, let’s see how to get it.”
What were your more general inspirations? I was born in the 30s, I grew up in that wartime period and the postwar period and those are the influences that stay with you. That’s when you’re impressionable.
I was influenced by photographers, writers, East European films, films like The Battle of Algiers – European films, almost entirely, American films I didn’t care for. And theatre. I saw the great classics. We lived in the Midlands, but I was 30 miles from Southam, so I used to cycle over there as a teenager. A rather arcane thing for a teenager to do, but it was different then.
Do you still believe that the Church of England props up the established order? At the top, it does, I think. But [with religion more generally] there is the tradition of liberation theology in Latin America. And of course, the pope comes from Latin America, and he is more radical than pretty well any politician, certainly in the west, and it’s extraordinary. And there will be individual priests or individual vicars who are genuinely progressive. But in the current Church of England, the archbishop of Canterbury is not one of them.
Religion has been referred to as the “opium of the people”. I’m an agnostic. I can’t comprehend infinity, and so long as I can’t do that, I have to admit the limits of what the human mind, at least my mind, can imagine. So who am I to say? But the stories that religions tell, they seem to me to be fairy stories. The danger is that if we are concerned about an afterlife, we do not engage fully in the struggle to make this a better, safer, more just world for everyone. l Interview by Niki Seth-Smith
New Humanist | Autumn 2024
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