Page "Ken Loach" Paragraph 20

Throughout his career Loach's films have been shelved for political reasons.

In a 2011 interview with the Guardian newspaper he said " It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard.

When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous.

And you see it over and over again.

I mean, we heard very little from the kids in the riots.

You hear some people being inarticulate in a hood, but very few people were actually allowed to speak ".

In the same interview his focus on working people's lives is explained thus: " I think the underlying factors regarding the riots are plain for anyone with eyes to see … It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed.

Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills.

Well, they destroyed that.

Thatcher destroyed that.

She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.

" He argues that working people's struggles are inherently dramatic: " They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life.

Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war.

Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working.

And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below.

It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain.

" This explains how Loach regards politics and drama as intertwined, rather than existing in separate spheres.