The Spirit of 45 - My kind of propaganda

Ok so this might be the first time I've ever posted 3 reviews in a day, but it's only the second day back in the office after Christmas and my boss isn't here - so I can really be expected to do any work can I?  The second film I watched at my parents' place over Christmas was The Spirit of 45.  It's a documentary directed by Ken Loach in which he uses primary source interviews to discuss the social changes that took place in Britain after the end of the Second World War.  He focusses on the election of Clement Atlee as British Prime Minister and the Labour government's programme to create a welfare state and nationalise all of Britain's infrastructure and industries.

The second world war was with the hindsight of history a terrifically strong driver of social and economic changes throughout the world.  In Britain the entire population was mobilised to defeat Fascism.  When that population returned from the war, people rightly thought to themselves - why can't we mobilise this strength to do something good at home?  When Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was voted out of office in a landslide less than 2 months after the end of hostilities in WW2, it was a seismic event in British politics that demonstrated the depth of feeling ordinary people had.  Truly it was Britain's working class speaking as one.

Unsurprisingly Loach's interviews conclude that the creation of the welfare state was one of the greatest things to have ever happened to the British nation.  The nationalisation of the industries was - though flawed - a programme that had the right intentions and was aimed at getting services and jobs to the people who needed them.  He finishes with a discussion of the dismantling of that programme from the 1980s onwards, and how the privatisation of Britain's infrastructure and industry has led to falling real-term wages and asset stripping of what should be national property.  As a film this is a little slow, but as a documentary it is very interesting.

Some might say that it's typical of someone with my attitude towards work to be in favour of social security, welfare and societal safety nets - I know that Bill O'Reilly would hate me.  What I know is that I can see plenty of people in the world with power and money who are working hard to gather more power and money for themselves and their friends.  So why would I want to work to help them do that?  Instead I think I'll sit on the fringes and quietly mess with their system in whatever small way I can.  And if that means writing blogs when I should be working, then so be it.