Halcyon days

As a pensioner in his early-seventies, I spend a lot of time, when not doing crosswords, watching TV.

It's a harmless enough occupation I suppose and can be quite diverting, offering a (not invariably but mostly) welcome window on the world. Channel 4 News, my go-to intelligencer, is becoming an increasingly depressing watch I must say (not its fault) and I have exercised the off-option on several occasions recently - a cowardly act I know - as watching the unfolding horror becomes almost voyeuristic, akin to disaster porn. Then I feel guilty because, unlike millions of starving, brutalised, displaced victims of conflict, genocide, starvation and climate collapse I can switch off, or over, and go and make a cup of tea. Life just isn't fair.

And that, in a way, was a shared theme of two watches recently which brought this home powerfully: Channel 4's two-part docu-drama Brian and Maggie and Apple TV's screening of Ken Loach's 2023 film The Old Oak. The former recreated Brian Walden's devastating 1989 LWT interview with Margaret Thatcher, credited with leading to her eventual downfall. The latter charted the impact on a Co Durham former pit village, still suffering the catastrophic legacy of Thatcher's pit closures, of the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees. Coincidentally, my viewing of both followed a visit in January to Tate Britain's sprawling photographic exhibition The Eighties: Photographing Britain, charting precisely this era. The power of photography is a central theme of Loach's film.

I lived in the North during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 but had moved to London by the time of the Walden interview, the Poll Tax riots of 1990 and the consequent fall of Thatcher. One thing I remember vividly about the strike itself was the solidarity of the Women Against Pit Closures movement and their social support campaigns, especially the soup kitchens. Something of this spirit is echoed in Loach's film, with the semi-derelict backroom of the eponymous pub being pressed into service once more to provide meals and cultural events for indigenous residents and refugees alike.

It might be thought that the mutual support shown in The Old Oak is exaggerated, if not downright implausible. I disagree. While it may be somewhat sentimentalised, one only has to think of the residents of Southport turning out to repair the local mosque vandalised by rightwing thugs, an Imam bringing out food to protesters, or the Glasgow neighbourhood blocking a Home Office van seeking to deport Indian immigrants, to realise that, unlike much of the photo-journalism, the reality is not black-and-white.

Loach doesn't shy away from portraying the negative reactions of some ex-miners to their new Syrian neighbours but his tone is generally upbeat and positive and, at the end, elegiac. One line from an angry resident really struck a chord: "Why don't they send them to Chelsea?", a fair point, I thought. The alacrity with which governments impose refugees on already poor and struggling communities, without any prior consultation or providing any meaningful support, is deeply unfair on both indigenous and migrant communities. NIMBYism and an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality, seems to be the prevailing rationale. 

In such circumstances it is perhaps surprising that there is not more antagonism, racism and xenophobia than there is. The fact that communities do somehow seem to manage to overcome the odds stacked against them and achieve some sort of cohesion, or grudging tolerance, is a testament to the triumph of common humanity over bureaucratic neglect and media hostility.

The 88 year-old Loach dares to dream of a kindlier socialist alternative.

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