The Spirit of ’45 Review: Ken Loach’s Partisan Paean to Britain’s Postwar Labour Program

With The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach sets out to resurrect, quaint as it may sound, the public spirit. For a filmmaker so steeped in the tradition of historical materialism, it’s an unusually metaphysical ambition, harkening back to Balzac’s fear that photography steals its subject’s soul. Loach, of course, sees this resurrection more in terms of preservation, as he tries to bottle the Keynesian Geist that birthed the welfare state in order to inspire future generations. And on the heels of yet another decade of continuous attack on social provisioning in the U.K. and around the world, we need all the inspiration that we can get, even more so than in 2013 when the film was made, unless we want the spirit of ’23 to be one of despair.

Despite the urgency of this almost necromantic project, Loach takes the expected approach of interspersing archival footage with interviews. He only departs from the conventional format of most historical documentaries by refraining from commentary besides the odd contextualizing subtitle (fellow documentarian Adam Curtis did the same in Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, to much more haunting effect). Crucially, this allows nurses, miners, steelworkers, politicians, railway workers, shop stewards, and others to speak for themselves. Collectively, they tell the story of the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the elections of ’45, the nationalization of health care, mass transit, water, electricity, the mining industry, and so forth, followed by the privatization ushered in by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and neoliberalism.

The most moving testimony tends to be that of workers who not only lived through but actively participated in these post-war transformations. What they have to say, as experts in their own lived experience, is just as important as anything a financial analysist or historian can offer. A lack of commentary doesn’t, obviously, result in pure objectivity, nor does The Spirit of ’45 pretend otherwise. The interviews and footage selected for inclusion here, edited together as they are, necessarily speak to Loach’s socialist sympathies. It’s surprising, then, that the documentary takes a stance—rebuild (or at least defend what remains of) the welfare state!—that feels much less radical than Loach’s reputation would suggest. This from the filmmaker who made Land and Freedom and The Wind that Shakes the Barley?

One interviewee describes how his generation realized that, if the collectivism forced on them by the state during World War II was powerful enough to defeat fascism abroad, voluntary collectivism should be able to defeat poverty at home. So they elected a Labour government with a proudly socialist platform, investing it with sufficient political will to turn a wartime economy to the crises of peacetime. The documentary doesn’t address the worrisome hypothesis that maybe it was precisely this fading habit of forced collectivization that was the substance of the spirit of ’45. Or that what this public-spiritedness served to further empower was the state, albeit in the interests of the people—a top-down, paternalistic implementation of socialism that stopped far short of workers taking democratic control of their own labor.

The film barely touches on the problem that arises with nationalization, where state bureaucrats simply replace corporate bureaucrats (often the very same individuals, as it happened). The film suggests, but never explicitly discusses, the limitations of democratic socialism in a bourgeois parliamentary framework, as opposed to, say, workers councils. Nor does it address the postcolonial situation that faced the all but collapsed British Empire after WWII.

The documentary also glosses over the possibility that the welfare state is in such dire need of defense because people don’t feel they have any direct democratic stake in it. The postwar generation transferred the means of production to the state and when the state came under Thatcher’s control, it promptly handed them back to corporations, without any real loss of power to itself. And now that the Labour Party is a working-class organization in name only, as more than one interviewee suggests, by what means can the welfare state be defended, let alone rebuilt? The film’s only response is frustratingly nebulous: public spirit is all it takes.

Most of the footage in The Spirit of ’45 is in black and white, whether it’s of demobilized soldiers returning home, striking miners on the picket line, or interviews with the pensioners who lived through such events. This pattern holds until the final minutes of the film, where we see some of the same footage again, this time in color. As is often the case with colorization, this has the surreal effect of stripping the patina of historical distance and making the images look as if they were shot only yesterday. This is as close as the film comes, visually, to reinvigorating the spirit of the age. Otherwise, the exercise comes off with the same drabness that we typically associate with the conformity of an era before the Swinging Sixties. Is there any reason why the public spirit we so desperately need can’t be reflected in a more revolutionary style?