1 - Politics on-screen

Summary

When you’re a worker it rains stones seven days a week.

Jimmy (Mike Fallon) in Raining Stones

Why can’t you leave us, just once, with a smile, Ken?

John Cooper Clarke

10 October 1975. Margaret Thatcher stands to address the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. From the platform, the newly elected party leader rails against the dangers of socialism, and vehemently critiques those who challenge ‘our heritage and great past’. Following applause from the party faithful, she continues, ‘There are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure. As days of hopelessness—not Days of Hope.’ In directly invoking the title of the four-part BBC Play for Today series which was directed by Loach and broadcast earlier that year, Thatcher’s speech indicates something of Loach’s work’s political content, and its capacity to unsettle the political representatives of the ruling class. Politics bookends the Certain Tendencies in Loach’s Cinema, which I outlined in the Introduction, and this chapter explores the first of these, on-screen political engagement. It opens with a plot synopsis of The Angels’ Share before moving to interrogate broader political concerns in Loach’s wider output and to consider how this film might fit within it.

The Angels’ Share plot synopsis

Subverting two of the standard touristic signifiers of Scotland – tartanry and whisky – and with the leftfield addition of Irn Bru in bountiful supply, The Angels’ Share (Loach, 2012) follows four young working-class Glaswegians, Robbie (Paul Brannigan), Mo (Jasmine Riggins), Albert (Gary Maitland) and Rhino (William Ruane), who receive community payback orders (Scottish legal terminology for non-custodial sentences which often involve unpaid work) for various criminal offences. Robbie has a particularly troubled past and criminal record, and narrowly avoids a lengthy prison sentence for a violent assault only because his partner, Leonie (Siobhan Reilly), is expecting a baby. The sentence is met with angry protests from members of a rival gang, led by Clancy (Scott Kyle), who attend court hoping to see their enemy sent down. Once the community payback programme commences, the supervisor, Harry (John Henshaw), takes a shine to Robbie and shares with him his love of whisky.