Source: ROAR

Following allegations made against him by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian and Howard Jacobson in the New York Times, and the refusal of these same newspapers to give him any opportunity to provide an adequate response, film director Ken Loach talks to Frank Barat of the Transnational Institute about Palestine and the ongoing attacks faced by anyone taking a stand for social justice.

Frank Barat: You have been attacked in the last few days for taking a stand on the Palestinian issue. In fact, you have been attacked ever since your play Perdition in the late 1980s. Do you think it has become harder today to take a stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people?

Ken Loach: I think things move on. The play you talk about, Perdition, was written by Jim Allen, a wonderful socialist and great writer from Manchester — a working class man. He wrote this play about events that had happened in Hungary just before the end of World War II, when the Zionist Rudolph Kastner did a deal whereby some Jews would be allowed to escape and go on trains to settle in Palestine, and the others — hundreds of thousands in number — would be told to get on trains to the death camps, not knowing their final destination. The play was a discussion of that.

We were attacked for even approaching this subject. We were attacked for being anti-semitic, racist and endorsing blood libels that went back centuries. The play was censored by the Royal Court, which had a great reputation as the writers’ theater. Of course the people who came to our defense were Jews, as always. The people who saw the truth of what the play was about were Jews. They defended the play magnificently. Since then I have been in the firing line. And it seems now that anyone who stands up for the Palestinians will get abused — even though I think all people are doing is defending human rights, saying they apply to everyone and that the Palestinians are entitled to live in peace and security in their homes as much as anyone else.

It has gotten much tougher, and I think the problem has been that our governments collectively — the US, Britain and across Europe as well — have colluded in the oppression of the Palestinians by doing deals with Israel. Trade deals, of course, are the biggest issue. Cultural and sporting affairs as well. Israel even plays in European football contests! That’s bizarre. Egypt does not; Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco do not. Israel is in the Middle East. What is it doing in the European football competition, not to mention the European song contest? Many countries would pay a lot of money not to be in this contest. But the clue is in the name, European. Why is Israel there? We know the answer: it is part of cultural offensive to say that Israel really is a Western democracy.

Of course we know that Israel is breaking international law, the Geneva Conventions, stealing land that belongs to another people and making the lives of the Palestinians intolerable. But because the campaign against the Israeli illegality has gathered strength and because the boycott movement has done so too, there is now an offensive by Israel and its supporters in the West to outlaw discussions of a boycott, to vilify anyone who stands up for the Palestinians. So yes, it has gotten more difficult.

Right now, you have BDS activists being criminalized for supporting the boycott, you’ve got people like Moshe Machover being kicked out of the Labour Party for writing about anti-Zionism, you’ve got Roger Waters and yourself being accused of being anti-semites, and Tony Blair talking about alliances between the left and Islamists. Do you see a pattern here? Can you connect the dots?

Well, I think they are all part of this concerted campaign to make it unacceptable to criticize Israel. To draw a veil over Israel’s breaches of international law and to see criticism of Israel and Zionism as anti-semitic. The expulsion of Moshe Machover, a man of great integrity, an academic, from the Labour Party, the idea that he is anti-semitic is bizarre.

There is a pattern, though. You will often find that a liberal newspaper will fire the first shot, in quite moderate language, and then they open the door for the extremists to use the term anti-semitic. In this case, I was accused by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian of giving “spurious legitimacy” to Holocaust denial. Of course I did not do anything of the kind. Somebody quoted another interview that somebody else had done; I didn’t know what had been said, I didn’t know what I was asked to defend or condemn, and I just made a generalization. And these words were twisted to suggest that I tolerated Holocaust denial. Of course I don’t. The Holocaust is a real historical event of World War II. But the idea that history cannot be discussed is wrong. The Holocaust is discussed at length continuously, and rightly so. Through museums, films, papers, books. As is the war, as is the rise of fascism and who supported fascism, which is discussed a bit less, because that implies talking about big businesses…

So the first shot is fired in quite moderate language, and then you get a piece which I have just discovered today, written by a Howard Jacobson, a British author, who wrote in the New York Times, that there is a “whiff of blood lust,” even from the Labour Party conference in Brighton. Phrases like blood lust are meant to be incendiary, provocative and bring rage against anybody who is nominated in these attacks. The most serious bit comes at the end, when this man says that “what needs to be insisted on is that Zionism — the idea, not the political events to which it has given rise — is integral to the Jewish mind and imagination. Those who say they are against Zionism but not Jews are speaking in riddles.” In other words: if you criticize Zionism, you are criticizing Jews and you are anti-semitic. Well, that is the most dangerous notion of all, and that’s chilling. Zionism was a nineteenth-century ideology as far as I know. But there were Jews before then, before Zionism. Did they not have a presence?

All of this is dangerous because Zionism leads to Israel, and criticizing Israel — not only its present policies but its very founding — then becomes anti-semitic. But of course many Jews in Israel and outside of Israel actually oppose Zionism, oppose what Israel is doing, and support the Palestinians. Jacobson writes that within such an ambience that is critical of Israel, “an anti-Zionist Israeli is a hero.” He is saying this ironically, of course. So he is trying to undermine even those brave people in Israel and outside of it who, from a Jewish background, are brave enough to speak out — they are to be condemned as well. This is how it moves forward a notch: first a moderate attack, and then a vicious attack.

How should we respond to what is going on? If this is an attack on solidarity, how do we rebuild and re-assert that solidarity?

You just have to tell the truth. Just tell the truth. A friend of yours and someone I have huge respect for is the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. He describes in exact details, with great academic rigor, the removal of Palestinians in their hundreds of thousands from their own land and calls it the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This is an historic event. When you look at the evidence it cannot be challenged. Next year, it will be 70 years since the founding of Israel. We have to assert that truth: Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing. We have to assert the reality of how Israel was founded and the consequences of these policies, which have continued ever since. We need to demand the rule of international law, of the Geneva Conventions. Just tell the truth.

In the end people will come to realize that support for the Palestinians is support for justice and for human rights. We have to organize, we have to demand that people support it, people who would consider themselves generally supportive of people living together in peace. We need to tell them that, now that they have the facts, how can they not support the Palestinians?

Join the demonstration on 4 November 2017 to demand justice and equal rights for Palestinians now.

Justice Now: Make It Right For Palestine – National March & Rally
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On 27 September 2017, The Guardian published an article by its most senior columnist Jonathan Freedland under the title Labour’s denial of antisemitism in its ranks leaves the party in a dark place. Film director Ken Loach wrote a reply for its Comment is Free section, which the Guardian has refused to print. We print it in full below.

What is his evidence? Len and I were welcomed at the packed first meeting of ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’. Strangely, Freedland ignored this progressive new group, which has published its own response to his attacks on us. The founding document says: ‘we stand for rights and justice for Jewish people everywhere and against wrongs and injustices to Palestinians and other oppressed people anywhere’. We support that.

But Freedland disputes our right to contribute. We are ‘not Jewish – a fact that might limit their authority to speak on the matter’. The matter in question is antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Many Jewish comrades say that they know the Labour Party to be a welcoming environment and have not experienced hostility as Jews. This chimes with my fifty years of involvement with the labour movement. But, for Freedland, this is a discussion to which only one group – Jews who share his political perspective – can contribute. It is exclusive – no place for solidarity or collective support. This goes against all traditions of the left where we stand alongside each other to oppose injustice.

People join left organisations to fight racism and fascism, intolerance and colonial oppression. Throughout history, it is the left that has led this fight. Racism including antisemitism is real enough and will emerge in all political parties. The Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG) acknowledges this in relation to allegations about the Labour Party: ‘a very small number of cases seem to be real instances of antisemitism’. I trust their judgement.

This present campaign about antisemitism surfaced when Jeremy Corbyn became leader and drew on a number of cases that pre-dated his leadership. It has been led by his political opponents inside and outside the Labour Party, seeming in part to be aimed at undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and therefore his leadership. JSG wrote ‘accusations of antisemitism are being weaponised to attack the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party’.

Corbyn has always opposed racism and defended human rights wherever they have been attacked, which includes the plight of the Palestinians. This will alarm apologists for Israeli occupation and expansion. Further, he stands on a socialist programme which has disturbed the right of the party.

There is a further, more serious allegation, that I gave ‘spurious legitimacy’ to Holocaust denial. In a BBC interview I was asked about a speech I had not heard and of which I knew nothing. My reply has been twisted to suggest that I think it is acceptable to question the reality of the Holocaust. I do not. The Holocaust is as real a historical event as the World War itself and not to be challenged. In Primo Levi’s words: ‘Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.’ The first terrible pictures I saw as a nine-year old are ingrained on my memory as they are for all my generation.

Like readers of this paper, I know the history of Holocaust denial, its place in far right politics and the role of people like David Irving. To imply that I would have anything in common with them is contemptible. The consequences of such a smear are obvious to all: let the poison escape and it will be picked up on social media and reputations may be tarnished for ever. A brief phone call would have clarified my position.

One thing Freedland has got right – the ages of Len McCluskey, Ken Livingstone and me (he wittily makes a rhyme of our names). Freedland is happy to embrace one prejudice – ageism.

Exaggerated or false claims of antisemitism can create a climate of fear in which legitimate discussion about the state of Israel and its actions are stifled. Antisemitism and debate about Israel should be separate issues. Once again it is the Palestinians who are marginalised or ignored. Freedland writes frequently about Israel, yet his concern for the Palestinians takes second place. So while we are clarifying our position, could he make clear whether, for example, he accepts:

• that land stolen from the Palestinians should be returned to them and all illegal settlements removed, as UN Resolutions demand.
• that Israel is breaking the Fourth Geneva Convention by transporting Palestinian children to Israeli prisons without access to lawyers or their families.
• and that the deliberate destruction of civilian life, hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge were war crimes.

And will he endorse the distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe when he writes about the founding of Israel: ‘The ethnic cleansing of Palestine (is) a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget’?

So many questions, so many injustices. Labour has much to do in developing an ethical foreign policy and social and economic justice at home. It now has principled leaders and a growing, enthusiastic membership. Let the party not throw away this great opportunity. We have a world to win.

Source: The Guardian

I went to Stoke and Whitehaven, in Cumbria, a few days before polling. Momentum arranged screenings of Daniel Blake. We went to Labour clubs in neglected areas, old estates away from the centre. At one club I was asked: “Why have you come here? No one comes here.”

Joe Bradley and Georgie Robertson, the organisers, were a model of how Labour activists should work: full of energy, hard-working and brilliantly efficient. They had a warm greeting for everyone, checked the screening facilities, made space for local contributors so people from that community felt it was their event and that they were being heard. This is how Labour can reconnect.

Both screenings were packed. The discussions were passionate, informed and invigorating, a world away from the tired cliches of the public discourse. This was not a marketing exercise but a real engagement with people and their concerns.

The failure of Labour governments – and, importantly, Labour councillors – was a common theme. It is not hard to see the neglect around Stoke. Solid Labour, for sure, but what good has it done them? A 2015 report into the area found 60,000 people in poverty, 3,000 households dependent on charity food, and £25m in council tax arrears. The presence of the BNP, now replaced by Ukip, shows how Labour’s failure left space for the far right.

It was a similar story in Copeland. Industries have been lost – steel, mines, a chemical factory – without any plan to replace them. Labour is seen to be as culpable as the Tories. Someone said that in Copeland it was an anti-establishment vote, and Labour is the local establishment. It was a vote against Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and previous MPs Jack Cunningham and Jamie Reed.

In both constituencies the Labour candidates, neither from the left of the party, were invited, but both candidates ignored the meetings. With coverage on television, radio and the press, this is bizarre. Could it be because Momentum were the organisers? We were there to support Labour. There was not even the courtesy of a reply.

Now let’s ask the real questions. What are the big problems people face? What is the Labour leadership’s analysis and programme? Why is Labour apparently unpopular? Who is responsible for the party’s divisions?

The problems are well rehearsed but rarely related to the leadership question. A vulnerable working class that knows job insecurity, low wages, bogus “self-employment”, poverty for many including those in work, whole regions left to rot: these are the consequences of both Tory and New Labour’s free market economics. Employers’ “flexibility” is workers’ exploitation. Public services are being dismembered, outsourced, closed down, the source of profit for a few and an impoverished society for the many. The central fact is blindingly obvious: the Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson years were central to this degeneration. That is why Labour members voted for Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, make a different analysis, and are proposing different policies. The market will never provide a secure, dignified life for the vast majority. If there is a need but no profit, the need goes unanswered. Collectively we can plan a secure future, use new technology to benefit everyone, ensure that all regions are regenerated with real industries, and rebuild our public services and the quality of our civic life. It is a vision of a world transformed and a rejection of the bitter, divided and impoverished society we see around us.

Corbyn’s policies would make a start. First, public investment in the neglected regions to provide properly paid jobs; a health service that is fully funded, with everyone from cleaners to consultants employed directly and the private contractors kicked out; resolving the PFI disaster so beloved of New Labour; council housing to resolve the crisis of homelessness, with planned and sustainable communities; and transport restored to public ownership to end the chaos of privatisation. There is an understanding of the problems and ideas to begin reconstruction. How to pay? Redress inequality through taxing great wealth and profits. I would also add that the economy needs fundamental change so that all “receive the full fruits of their labour”, as my old Labour party card says.

The irony is that these policies are popular. In a recent poll, carried out by the Media Reform Coalition, 58% oppose private involvement in the NHS, 51% support public ownership of the railways, and 45% favour increased public spending and raising taxes for the wealthiest. Why don’t we hear Labour MPs promoting this programme? Why the silence from the grandees who refuse to serve in the shadow cabinet? Do they reject the policies, preferring the New Labour politics of privatisation and austerity, or do they remain silent to isolate Corbyn and his supporters?

Corbyn and his small group fight the Tories in front and deal with the silent mutiny behind them. Yet the MPs, unrepresentative of the members, are doing immense damage. How come the media don’t put them in the dock? It is they and their backers in the party bureaucracy who have been rejected.

It was their Labour party, not Corbyn’s, that lost Scotland, lost two elections and has seen Labour’s vote shrink inexorably. Yet they retain a sense of entitlement to lead. They have tolerated or endorsed the erosion of the welfare state, the dereliction of the old industrial areas, public services cut back and privatised, and the illegal war that caused a million or more deaths and terrorised and destabilised Iraq and its neighbours. If Corbyn can be removed, it will be business as usual, with scant difference between Labour and the Tories. If it is to transform society, the party itself must be transformed.

And what of the press? The abuse of the right wing is as crude as we could have expected. But the papers that present themselves as radical have been revealed to be nothing of the sort. The Guardian and Mirror have become cheerleaders for the old Labour establishment. Column after column demands that Corbyn should go. Extinct volcanoes from New Labour are quoted with glee. A big headline for Mandelson: “I work every single day to oust Corbyn.” Mandelson had to resign twice from the cabinet in disgrace. Why give him such prominence, except to add to the anti-Corbyn mood music?

Broadcasters take their cue from the press. A report found that during the campaign for Corbyn’s re-election the BBC chose twice as many interviewees who were hostile to Corbyn as were supportive. The critique is personal and as vicious as that waged against Arthur Scargill. If evidence were needed of Corbyn’s strength, it is his ability to withstand this onslaught.

Why this attack? Why are the abstentionists in his party exonerated, and he is held personally responsible for Labour’s prolonged decline? Could it be fear that Corbyn and McDonnell mean what they say? If they had a powerful movement to sustain them, Labour under their leadership would start to cut back the power of capital, remove multinationals from public services, restore workers’ rights, and begin the process of creating a secure and sustainable society in which all could share. That is a prize worth fighting for. It would be a start, just a start, on a long journey.

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“…the most vulnerable and poorest are treated by the government with a callous brutality that’s disgraceful, a brutality that extends to keeping out refugee children we promised to help and that’s a disgrace too.”

Source: The Guardian

Loach has spent the past half-century making films that shake with anger, and is just about to release his angriest yet. I, Daniel Blake, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes film festival, is about a man broken by the British benefits system. His doctor says he is too sick to work after a near-fatal heart attack, but the Department for Work and Pensions decides he is not entitled to sickness benefit. Blake finds himself trapped in a downward spiral after his jobseeker’s allowance is suspended, because he is thought not to be trying hard enough to find the work he is unfit to do. The film is so spare and spartan, it could be a parable. It is also immensely moving – particularly a scene in a food bank, when a young mother Blake has befriended breaks down in a manner that borders on the feral.

“Angry? Mmmmmmm,” Loach says so quietly it barely registers. He talks about the people he and his regular writer Paul Laverty met while doing their research: the young lad with nothing in his fridge who hadn’t eaten properly for three days; the woman ashamed of attending food banks; the man told to queue for a casual shift at 5.30am, then sent home an hour later because he wasn’t needed. “That constant humiliation to survive. If you’re not angry about it, what kind of person are you?”

We are in a cafe close to his office in Soho, London. Loach orders coffee and croissants. Meekly, of course, but his meekness is deceptive: even when ordering coffee, he knows exactly what he wants. “I’ll have a little glass of tap water, please, and a tiny drop of cold milk, thank you. Yes,” he continues, “we met so many people who had been humiliated and destroyed and lost all sense of being able to hold their own in the world.”

In many ways, I, Daniel Blake can be seen as a companion piece to Cathy Come Home, Loach’s seminal 1966 film about a young family’s descent into homelessness, which resulted in a parliamentary debate and raised public awareness of homelessness. But while Cathy led to real social change, Loach predicts people will not be outraged by Daniel: they will accept it as normal that a man should be cheated out of benefits by the state, or a young single mother has to move from London to Newcastle to find herself a scrap of a home.

Whose world would he rather share: Cathy’s or Daniel’s? “That’s a complicated question. In the world of Cathy, we still had the main elements of the welfare state in place, even though they were being eroded. People were still employed directly by the health service. We still owned the gas, the electric, the water, the railways. As a world to live in, Cathy’s was more congenial, with a stronger sense of social responsibility. When she was shown as homeless, people were angry about it. Now society is nowhere near as cohesive. The consequences of Thatcher and Blair have eroded the sense that we are responsible for each other, that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. So in that sense I prefer the days of Cathy.”

In the 60s and 70s, Loach belonged to small leftist groups: the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party), the International Socialists, the International Marxist Group, all critical of both western capitalism and the Stalinism of the Soviet Union. They’d swot up on Marxism, debate it intensely and tell anybody who’d listen that capitalism was unsustainable: it would devour itself, and the working classes in the process. But it was all guesswork. At the time, the ready availability of jobs and a relatively well-funded welfare state suggested capitalism was actually doing just dandy.

It’s only now, Loach says, that the collapse they predicted is coming to pass. “We said that every crisis means more demands on the working class, more exploitation, but we were saying it in the abstract. People weren’t imagining zero-hours contracts, agency work, food banks. Who would have thought in the 60s that it would be acceptable and normal to starve unless you got charity food? It’s grotesque that we now accept this.”

He gives a brilliantly simple explanation as to why capitalism will ultimately fail society, particularly in a globalised world: “Each corporation is trying to get more sales through lower prices, therefore profits reduce, therefore they have to find the cheapest labour wherever it is, therefore capital can never be stable.”

Despite everything, Loach is an optimist. “I think people are getting the sense that the world cannot be sustained like this,” he says. “The impulse behind Syriza, Podemos, Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn is that another world is possible. There is a sense that we really have to change things now.”

I first interviewed Loach 23 years ago, soon after he made the film Raining Stones, written by Jim Allen (with whom he collaborated until he died in 1999), about a man who cannot afford to buy his daughter a communion dress and involves himself disastrously with loan sharks. It was classic Loach territory: exploitation, the indignity of unemployment, the resilience and humour of working-class people. I remember walking through Soho and Loach stopping to buy us a punnet of strawberries from a market stall, while telling me pity was a rightwing construct: the answer to all setbacks, as the great American trade unionist Joe Hill said, is, “Don’t mourn, organise!”

I recently watched The Big Flame, Loach’s 1969 TV film about 10,000 Liverpool dockers staging a work-in. In the film, one docker strums the song Joe Hill on his guitar, while another explains that Hill’s famous line was delivered when he was facing the firing squad after being framed for murder. Today, Loach argues that the struggle to organise is made tougher by the fact that so many workers are technically self-employed and not part of a collective. Again, he quotes Joe Hill at me.

Critics say Loach’s weakness is that he has never changed: he is still delivering the same Marxist sermon he was half a century ago. His fans argue that this is his strength. Loach himself, now an unlikely 80 years old, would ask why on earth he should change when the system remains the same.

But Loach was not always a lefty – far from it. At school, he represented the Tories in a mock election. “I don’t think too much should be made of that,” he says. I had assumed he was playing devil’s advocate, or it was just a passing teenage whim, but no, he says: these were the values with which he was brought up. Loach’s father was an electrician who became a foreman in his factory in Nuneaton – a classic working-class Tory, he says. His mother was a hairdresser. When Loach’s father was asked to join the staff and become a manager, he refused, because it would mean a monthly payment into the bank rather than weekly cash in a brown envelope. (He hated the idea of being in debt, and always wanted money to hand.) He was a bright, shrewd man who had passed the grammar school exam but didn’t go, because his mother couldn’t afford the uniform. He read books about the great barristers and dreamed of a future in law for his son.

Young Kenneth was clever and ambitious. He went to grammar school (a form of education he despises because it plucks a few working-class kids out of their lives to “succeed”, leaving the others to fail) and had a voracious appetite for learning. He would sneak-read Shakespeare under the sheets when the bedroom light was supposed to be out. The family took the rightwing Daily Express, and Loach would read it cover to cover, never questioning its values. As far as he was concerned, it simply reflected the world. “I adopted the Tories like you adopt a team,” he says, embarrassed. How long did he adopt them for? “Probably until I was 19, when I went into the RAF.”

After the air force, he went to Oxford University to study law. He became active in the drama society, performed sketches with Dudley Moore, started to direct, slacked on the academic front, graduated with a third and decided his future lay in the theatre. His father was devastated.

Loach had always wanted to act. “I had that bee in my bonnet since I was 15.” Did he have a role model? “I remember seeing an old actor called Marius Goring play Richard III, and thinking that was the bee’s knees. There were probably echoes of that in what I tried to do.” Was he any good? He giggles. “I couldn’t possibly say. Well, I got away with it.” Even today, you sense he believes he could have been a contender. His wife Lesley, usually loyal beyond the call of duty, has told me he was a hopeless ham, the kind of actor he would be least likely to cast in his own films. Is there a bit of him that prickles at this? “Of course. But who knows?”

He got a job as assistant director at Northampton rep. “I thought I could still play a part or two, but the director obviously had no confidence in me. I didn’t even get a part in the pantomime, so I thought maybe I’d better stick to directing.”

In 1963, he moved to the BBC as a trainee director and before long was directing the police drama Z-Cars. There, he met a group of young socialist writers – Troy Kennedy Martin, Roger Smith, Nell Dunn, Barry Hines, Jeremy Sandford – who fed him their best work and politicised him.

Did he discuss his evolving politics with his father? “No, because he didn’t like the idea of his son challenging him. I think he thought I didn’t know what I was talking about. To know what you were talking about, you had to work where he had, and have dealt with the people he dealt with, and faced the rigours of just not seeing the sunlight.”

Who took most pride in his achievements, his mother or father? “I think they shared a pride. He wouldn’t go in for praise, but he’d acknowledge it had happened. He’s a working man from the West Midlands. People are quite reserved. There were no metropolitan hugs in the 1950s, I’ll tell you!”

Although his work on Z-Cars was praised for its new dirty realism (accepting that the police could be prejudiced or even corrupt), Loach didn’t feel it was real enough, so he went back to first principles and analysed the films he most admired: the Czech new wave and the Italian neorealists. “In these films, people are just being, not performing. And what I was doing was getting performances I didn’t believe. So I learned from my mistakes.”

He took his craft to pieces and rebuilt it, borrowing some techniques (using natural light whenever possible and casting nonprofessional actors alongside professionals) and establishing new ones of his own (shooting chronologically; feeding the storyline to actors bit by bit, so their reactions are real; combining improvised shots with closely scripted ones). It is perhaps this level of realism that distinguishes his films more than anything: Cathy, wonderfully played by Carol White, looks shocked when her child is taken away because the actor was; ditto the boy who cries in Kes when he is caned on the hand.

From the mid-60s to the end of that decade, everything Loach did created headlines and set agendas. It wasn’t just that the films looked and felt different; the subject matter was radical, too. Up The Junction started a debate about backstreet abortions, The Big Flame about workers’ rights and Three Clear Sundays about the death penalty. This run culminated in 1969 with Kes, the film based on the Hines novel about a working-class boy whose love for a kestrel brings him out of his shell. Loach’s film is as unsentimental as it is heartwrenching, as brutal as it is beautiful, and features one of the funniest football scenes in the history of cinema when the games teacher, played by Brian Glover and kitted out in a Bobby Charlton top, insists on taking a penalty that never was.

But in 1971 Loach’s world collapsed. He was driving on the outside lane of the M1 when a car on the inside lane lost a wheel, crashed into Loach and pushed his car into the upright of a bridge. His five-year-old son Nicholas was killed, Lesley’s grandmother also died, and Lesley was left fighting for her life. Loach didn’t work again for more than a year. “We lost a child, and then your whole personal… Everything you have about you is concentrated on that loss. So you don’t have the emotional space or strength to do anything other than just grieve, and that’s a long process.”

His sentences become stubbly and broken when he talks about it. Loach will refer to his son or his child, but tends not to use his name. Does he find it difficult to say? “Well, I always have, yes… Nicholas.” He says the name so quickly, you could miss it. “Because the wound is so deep. And I think that’s part of the problem. We probably have never been able to grieve and resolve things. I think now there are processes that would encourage you to express your grief and to reach some reconciliation with it. At the time we didn’t, despite trying to be clever about other people’s situations. At one level we were conscious that it had to happen, and at another we were too wounded to begin it.”

When he returned to work, it was in an unlikely way, adapting Chekhov’s short story A Misfortune for television. He went on to make the epic TV series Days Of Hope, covering the period between the first world war and the national strike of 1926, and The Price Of Coal, about a mining disaster; but his film career floundered. Even the most devoted fan found 1981’s Looks & Smiles painfully miserable, and Loach says he made a mess of the only other film he made in the 80s, Fatherland.

As well as a loss of confidence, there was another problem: Loach kept getting banned. In 1983 he made Questions Of Leadership, a series that asked whether workers were being betrayed by trade union officials, but Channel 4, which had commissioned it, refused to broadcast it, saying it was unbalanced. His 1984 film Which Side Are You On?, about striking miners’ songs and poems, made for Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show, was shelved by London Weekend Television for being too political. In 1987, his production of Jim Allen’s play Perdition, which examined an alleged collaboration between Zionist leaders and the Nazis, was cancelled by Max Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court theatre just 36 hours before opening night. By the late 80s, he couldn’t get anything commissioned, let alone shown, for love nor money. To his eternal shame, he made a commercial for McDonald’s.

In the recent television documentary Versus: The Life And Films Of Ken Loach, the film-maker comes across as mild and lovable – until he talks about those who betrayed him. On screen, he describes Stafford-Clark as a coward, and the ferocity of the attack is shocking.

You’re not afraid of making enemies, are you, I ask. It depends, he says. “My mum was a peacemaker, and in personal things I tend to do that, because I can’t deal with personal conflict. I find that horrible.” Loach and Lesley have four surviving children, two of whom – Jim and Emma – are also film-makers. “I couldn’t argue with the people you rely on and trust, and care for, and cherish, because the cost would be too great. But step outside that and face the world, come on!”

I rephrase my earlier question: is he afraid of making enemies in public life and politics? “No, because they are enemies. When we did those films back in the 80s, the rightwing trade unionists and the rightwing Labourites and the people who joined them were out to destroy what I’d done. They did destroy what I’d done.”

Does he ever feel he’s too unforgiving? “No, because you’ve got to be clear it’s not personal, but if somebody consciously sabotages something because they are afraid of the consequences, that is unforgivable. And particularly in our business. If you’re a politician, you can see there might be times when, to secure the greater good, you have to take a backwards step. That is a matter of tactics. But for people who make films or who are journalists, our function is to say these are the underlying ideas and principles. And this is what people have got to be judged on. That is at the heart of the play that Max Stafford-Clark killed, and was at the heart of the documentaries that the Labourite rightwingers censored.”

Did he ever think his career was over? “Yes. Towards the end of the 80s, I started to think about going back to the law, even though I had no qualifications and a very bad degree. I just didn’t know what to do. Teaching film, I suppose. We had to take out loans, living a bit hand-to-mouth.” He stops, apologetically. “I mean, it was middle-class poverty! We were still in a house. But I couldn’t see where I fitted in.”

Next day, we meet again, this time at Loach’s office. At the top of the narrow stairs is a framed poster for Hidden Agenda, the 1990 film about state terrorism in Northern Ireland that heralded his comeback. Naturally, it caused a stink. Loach was accused of being an IRA propagandist and a British traitor by the film critic Alexander Walker. It was also the first Loach film produced by Rebecca O’Brien, and the two have worked together ever since.

He has continued to make film after film since then, winning award after award. At the heart of every movie, all made on small budgets and drawing on a hotchpotch of British and European money, there has been a cause; from the Spanish civil war (Land And Freedom) to the Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (Carla’s Song), from trade union rights in the US (Bread And Roses: the only film he has made in North America) to Ireland’s war of independence (The Wind That Shakes The Barley) and, most of all, the struggle for work, dignity and justice (Raining Stones, Sweet Sixteen, It’s A Free World, My Name Is Joe, The Angels’ Share – basically all of them). Loach has made stars of some actors (Ian Hart, Peter Mullan, Cillian Murphy), but rarely uses them more than once. He prefers his actors to come with no baggage: the less familiar the face, the more believable the story. The one celebrity he has cast is Eric Cantona, the eponymous hero of Looking For Eric, but Loach made the exception because Cantona plays himself in a one-off foray into magic realism.

Since Jim Allen’s death, most of Loach’s films have been written by Paul Laverty. At the occasional parties Loach reluctantly hosts (his 70th birthday, his 80th earlier this year), old collaborators such as producer Tony Garnett and writer Roger Smith mingle with newer ones. As he says, he doesn’t fall out with friends and family easily.

On the mantelpiece in the office is a monobrowed mask of Cantona, a picture of the three-legged dog that features in I, Daniel Blake, and the two Palme d’Ors he has won (the first was for The Wind That Shakes The Barley). Above one is a red dog collar. I ask what it is. Loach giggles: “That’s the Palme Dog, an award given to the most impressive dog in a film. We were given a lifetime achievement award for three-legged dogs.”

Now I’m staring at a photograph of a naked Ricky Tomlinson in Riff-Raff, playing a builder who has just treated himself to a shower in a posh apartment block he is working on. There always seems to come a point in a Loach film where a character sticks two fingers up at authority – whether in the form of Tomlinson’s bottom or Daniel Blake graffiti-ing his name on the jobcentre wall. “It’s a toss-up which is the more potent symbol of resistance,” Loach says. “Ricky Tomlinson’s backside or Daniel’s graffiti? People fight back. People are not docile victims. In rightwing art, films, books, whatever, they like the poor as victims, because that is the politics of charity – the lady of the manor going around on Christmas. ‘The poor are always with us, the order of society is fixed and we have to be kind to the poor.’ Leftwing politics argues that poverty is a by-product of class society, and that people will resist it, and it is that resistance we want to value, to show, to celebrate. So Daniel Blake is not a supplicant, he’s a man of dignity.”

He smiles mischievously. “If you read the Morning Star as opposed to the Guardian, you’d see story after story, day after day, about people who are actually taking action. There’s the Durham teaching assistants, for example – it took you ages to cover it. They are saying, we are not putting up with having our wages cut and being put out of work.”

In recent years, Loach has been active in political parties such as Respect and Left Unity that have presented themselves as an alternative to Labour. (After 30 years as a Labour party member, he left in disgust at Tony Blair.) When deputy Labour leader Tom Watson recently complained that his party was being infiltrated by Trotskyists, was he talking about people like Loach? “Well, I’m not in the Labour party yet!” He is still a member of Left Unity. “But since Jeremy Corbyn took over as leader, it hasn’t stood in elections. It is not standing in opposition to Labour.” Would he consider leaving Left Unity and rejoining Labour? “It’s a possibility, because that’s where the big discussion will be happening. And Jeremy Corbyn stands for things that I’ve supported for 50-odd years.”

A common criticism of Corbyn, I say, is that he is more interested in growing the movement than in winning power. “I think that is nonsense,” Loach says: the stronger the movement, the greater the chance of winning an election. “It has to be a movement, in that it isn’t just an electoral machine. That’s what Blair and his acolytes never understood or never wanted. They just wanted the machine that would give them power as a clique. What the Labour movement is about is a broad mass of people actively engaged in a democratic process.” Back in the 60s, he says, it was just those small groups talking to themselves; he loves the fact that there are now so many people engaged in the debate.

The political climate seems to have given him a renewed appetite for work. In 2013, Rebecca O’Brien suggested that he had made his last feature film; that he would focus on documentaries. Three years on, all talk of retirement has been banished. “It was only a casual remark,” Loach gulps. “It got rather spread abroad too much.”

Why do so many directors have such staying power, I ask. “It’s a great privilege to make a film, to have it shown, and for people to see it.” He’s not going to do a Sinatra, constantly announcing his retirement and making a comeback. “Nononono, let’s not even talk of this.”

Eighty is a perfectly sensible age, and as long as he’s physically capable, he will keep making films. Does he never feel his age? “First thing in the morning, I feel about 85.” He grins. “But after a good coffee, I feel 79. People go on a long time now, don’t they? It’s not something you want to think about much. Just keep pedalling.”

Daniel Blake, 59, is a skilled craftsman. He has assets, but not the kind that the market rates highly since they have little monetary value: qualities such as integrity, honesty and compassion. In Ken Loach’s new film, I, Daniel Blake, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, Blake’s attributes carry little weight in a system designed to pitch one human being (the bureaucrat) against another (the citizen temporarily in need of state support) at a time of “necessary” austerity.

In a meticulously researched script written by Paul Laverty, Loach’s collaborator for 20 years, Blake, a widower, has had a serious heart attack. What follows are his struggles with the benefits system and his growing friendship with a single parent, Katie, and her two children. After two years in a London hostel, Katie has been moved 300 miles to Newcastle because, allegedly, there is no housing in the capital – a city with 10,000 empty homes.

Katie has her benefits frozen, leaving her penniless, while Daniel, a man whose doctor says he is too ill to work, has to spend 35 hours a week applying for jobs he can’t take, on the orders of the jobcentre “work coach”. It is a surreal, dehumanised world in which empathy has little place and no allowance is made for the chaos of everyday life.

I watched the film with Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group and Marissa, a single mother with an autistic daughter of three, who has been on benefits since leaving an abusive partner. Marissa was in tears for much of the film; humiliation revisited. Each one of us has heard identical testimonies to those on the screen many times: not fiction, but painfully true stories.

Fifty years ago, Ken Loach was the young director of Cathy Come Home, a BBC1 Play for Today, filmed in documentary style and watched by 12 million. Cathy, her lorry driver husband, and two children, live happily in a flat. He has an accident and loses his job, so they move to lodgings, a caravan, a hostel. Cathy becomes a single parent and her children become homeless. Social workers finally take the children into care. The public were moved and enraged.

It was a time of job security, reciprocity and solidarity; the working class received accolades, rather than insults, as the source of much of the talent that propelled the swinging 60s. In 1965, sociologists Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend published an unexpected bestseller, The Poor and the Poorest. One historian commented: “The poor family and the poor working family were about to be reborn as a political issue.” The year of Cathy Come Home also saw the launches of the campaigning housing charity Shelter and the Child Poverty Action Group.

The difference between now and then? A greater understanding that poverty is systemic, not down to character failure, as many politicians imply. A factory closing, a spell of illness and life unravels when income is modest, a theme often explored by Loach, who is now 80. His work, including 19 feature films, plays and documentaries, has at times been banned, censored and derided – as well as feted by international prize juries. However, more recently, his ability to capture the demolition of the soul of decent people, as the social contract between citizen and government is ripped apart by the rapacity of neoliberalism, has hit a wider target.

In 2012, the poorest 10% of Britons, many in work, spent 47% of their income on debt repayments. A single person like Daniel, on jobseeker’s allowance, is eligible for £73.10 a week in a system that gives childcare tax breaks to couples on £300,000. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says government policy is both increasing and reshaping poverty, dragging in even those on moderate incomes. This is a political choice, not the outcome of a feckless sub-stratum of society. The facts ought to speak for themselves. But such is the toxicity of the shirkers-versus-strivers message, delivered by all the leading political parties, that facts are no longer believed. That’s why we need the visceral emotion of Loach.

His work is frequently dismissed as “didactic”, shorthand for leftwing, biased propaganda. Yet, the stream of films and media that casually endorse the avaricious and the talentless rich, the exploitative and the violent are viewed as entertainment. But they, too, in their own way, are didactic. They send a message that greed is good; the individual comes first.

Loach’s films are often about the ordinary man and woman, eventually pushed to take direct action because they have nothing left to lose but their self-respect. Designer Agnès B rightly says: “There’s Balzac, Dickens, Zola and Loach.” Each is a master at turning the abstract concepts of inequality and social justice into lives that matter. But how much do we care now?

Daniel Mays, actor: ‘I’ve not cried this much during a film in a long time’

I think this film is up there with Ken Loach’s best. It’s powerful and raw, and of all his work I don’t know if I’ve watched something with such an emotional punch. It’s a searingly honest and brutal portrayal of ordinary people living on the breadline. I really admire how un-showy it is: it’s very simplistic in its storytelling and I think that’s the film’s power. I think no other film-maker would want to make a film about these characters. You’d pass Daniel Blake in the street and not notice him, and yet Ken Loach has turned the camera round and moved me to tears with it, and made me angry.

It’s about a man who is widowed and pretty much goes to war against the state, and the unwavering level of red tape he has to go through for his jobseeker’s allowance. The characters’ descent into desperation just to make ends meet is heartbreaking. I thought the relationship between the two central characters was beautifully realised: it was completely truthful and the performances were pitch perfect. I don’t think I’ve cried this much for a film in a long time.

You can sense the overwhelming research that has gone into it: all the form-filling in the jobcentre and that hypocrisy is brilliantly realised. It’s a shocking and important film, because this is the state that a lot of people in the country are in. With everything that’s gone on with Brexit, a lot of that was a protest vote. The world of this film is connected to that – it’s a film about austerity. It wears you down as a viewer: you feel like you’re on that journey with Daniel, and you feel an overwhelming frustration about his plight. There’s a beautiful line in it that says, “When you lose your self-respect, what have you got?”, and I think that’s really what the film is about – identity. And about how no matter who you are or where you come from or how much you earn, that you need to have recognition and a place within this world.

There seems to be a lack of films that want to address difficult subjects like this. Shane Meadows has taken on the baton from the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, but there’s definitely room for more. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as politicised as I am at the moment; I feel desperately frustrated and unhappy that we voted out. We should never flinch from asking difficult questions in culture, and it would give us an increased identity as a UK film industry as well. The power of film can really highlight these predicaments and drive the message home.

For more comments about I, Daniel Blake , see The Guardian…