Ken Loach discusses far-right politics in Britain
Political filmmaking is a difficult and inevitably controversial domain but British auteur Ken Loach is undoubtedly a master. While Loach was associated with the Kitchen Sink Realism movement when he was starting out as a director, his style has evolved and he has produced interesting films like I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You in recent years.
To the delight of cinephiles all over the world, Loach has finally returned with a new project which screened at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Titled The Old Oak, the film revolves around the complex sociopolitical conditions of a mining community in Durham. During a conversation with Variety, Loach opened up about the far-right political propaganda that has contributed to the deteriorating conditions in the rust-belt area.
Loach began: “We have endless programs about the Second World War, about the horrors of Nazism and fascism, about the racism, about the Holocaust. Quite properly, we have endless programs about that, but what they refuse to point out is that that arose from alienation, anger, feeling cheated, and finding scapegoats. And that’s how we ended up with Hitler, and that’s the ground in which the far right flourishes. One of the points of the film is to say: This is the cause of fascism. This is where it comes from. This is its seedbed, and it comes as an inevitable consequence of our economic system.”
The director added: “Because if the neoliberal agenda was an essential development for capitalism, to use the old-fashioned word, then that’s where fascism comes from. Implicit in that is that the far right will rise because that’s how people will be heading. And they know that and yet the mass media, the press, just turn their backs on that. They’ll tell us all about the horrors of Hitler. Sure. But they won’t tell us how he came to power. And that’s the huge lesson. And we see it in essence now all the time.”
According to Loach, many places have welcomed refugees thanks to the local councils that acknowledged the human issue. “But you’ve got some places where the far right has made inroads with their propaganda,” Loach continued. “So, there is resistance to these refugees, because you’ve heard it before: They’re taking whatever job we’ve got. They’re taking our services. You go to the doctors, they’re ahead of us in the queue, and no one can understand what they say. They’re in the schools. No one knows what the kids are saying.”
“The teachers aren’t teaching our kids, they are teaching the refugees,” the filmmaker declared. “And so, of course, resistance builds up, and it chimes with the press that says: We’ve allowed too many people to come into this country. It chimes with the government, who are saying that, and just this week, just yesterday, the Home Secretary, one of the most senior government ministers, is saying we can’t take these refugees. So, they’re blaming the most vulnerable people. So, bringing all this together is what we tried to do.”
Watch the trailer below.
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