Responding to the death of Margaret Thatcher earlier this week, film director Ken Loach told The Guardian: “Mass unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed — this is her legacy. She was a fighter, and her enemy was the British working class.”
Loach speaks from experience: He began his tireless chronicling of the plight of Britain’s underclass long before Thatcher came to power, and he didn’t go much easier on Labour governments before or after her tenure as a Tory prime minister. He might, in fact, have thanked the Iron Lady for providing him with several decades’ worth of material for the social-realist dramas that have won him prize after prize in Europe.
Loach has never made a secret of his view that Thatcher’s methodical gutting of welfare-state provisions and union protections have brought successive generations of workers to their knees. And in the United States, the proudly socialist filmmaker has his admirers among critics.
But American moviegoers — many of whom are made nervous by the very mention of the word “class” — have mostly greeted his films with indifference or incomprehension, compounded by frustration at not being able to decode the pungent regional dialects spoken by his defiantly lumpen heroes (and, less often, heroines).
These are not the steadily employed working stiffs of Mike Leigh’s movies. Loach speaks for the chronically unemployed, the desperately poor and crime-prone. Left behind in the rush to a high-tech economy and cast adrift by escalating cuts to social services, these are the men and women who were derided by conservatives as “benefits claimants.”