ABSTRACT
The fabric of the British welfare state, woven in the twentieth century, has been picked apart, thread by thread. The sale of council houses, the cutting back of social security and the conversion of health and education into markets where provision is increasingly organised by private companies, have overturned the post-war settlement. In Spirit of 45, a film that appeared just before the April 2013 package of benefit reductions, health privatisation and tax cuts for millionaires that marked the latest phase of British austerity, Ken Loach captures the labour movement of the immediate post-war years in the act of creating a powerful, social state. Charting the development of a programme that aimed to put an end to the giant social evils of ‘Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness, Disease’, his tone is celebratory, militant, elegiac: this is the past we have lost, a loss that still haunts the politics of the left.
