Mike Phipps reviews The Old Oak, directed by Ken Loach, in cinemas from today and below, Mark Perryman looks back on Ken’s career

The Old Oak, probably Ken Loach’s last ever film,  is a simple but compelling story of the arrival of Syrian refugees in a former pit village in northeast England and the impact this has on members of the local community. At the centre of events is the pub of the title, the last meeting place in a run-down village with high levels of deprivation, its xenophobic regulars and the depressive landlord who attempts to reach out to the new arrivals.

As with other recent Loach films, and particularly his previous two pictures set in the northeast, the director sought to cast local talent and new performers in key roles. Dave Turner, who also appeared in I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You puts in a towering performance as pub landlord TJ Ballantyne, and Ebla Mari who plays Syrian refugee Yara completes a picture of great emotional depth. As one review summarises: “The pair strike up an unlikely friendship, and through challenging circumstances recognise the power of solidarity, of breaking bread together.”

I read several reviews of this film before writing this one and couldn’t help feeling that many of the individuals who pen them might have become somewhat jaded and lazy as a result of over-exposure to the screen. The usual accusations hurled at Loach and Laverty’s work are recycled: “sloganeering”, “heavy-handed”, “preposterously bleak”, “sentimentality and wishful thinking”, even “meaningless trauma exploitation”.

More discerning critics found something deeper. Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, noted that “Loach does not attack the ’deplorables’ of the white working class… he treats them sympathetically; they are the same as their victims. Market forces and geopolitical interests have put them in the same position as the wretched Syrian incomers whom they have been encouraged to hate.” Loach, he concluded, uses “a film-making language utterly without the cynical twang that is de rigueur for everyone else.”

I agree. There is greater tension and sensibility is this film than anything else I have see lately. It’s beautifully shot, with a real sense of place and identity. It also raises interesting philosophical questions about the ethics of saying nothing when people around you are voicing intolerance, because a quiet life seems preferable to making a stand – the dilemma which pub landlord TJ wrestles with early on in the film.

Speaking at the film’s UK premiere in London this week, screenwriter Paul Laverty, who has made over a dozen works with Ken Loach over the last 25 years, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

Despite its challenging premise, this is a film full of hope about how things could be better. As such it is a fitting finale to Loach’s illustrious six-decade career.

If The Old Oak is Ken Loach’s last

An unrivalled legacy of films summed up by Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football

Ken Loach’s latest film The Old Oak, opens in cinemas this weekend. It is being widely reported that it will also be his last. At 87, if it really is time for Ken to hang up the clapper board and exit across the cutting room floor, there is little doubt that apart for his bitterest critics (see below), this is a moment to mark an unrivalled career in film.

Documentaries, thrillers, historical pieces Ken’s made the lot. But what makes most of his films which exist outside of these genres so special is their mix of comedic socialist-realism. An unashamed leftist, Ken Loach’s films always provide a compelling exposure of society’s failings while never omitting a lighter touch to lift spirits and aspirations. It was the critic David Widgery who first named a fundamental cultural failing of the left ‘miserabilism’. Without exception, Ken’s films, however depressing the circumstances they depict, always find the means to go above and beyond leaving his audience feeling miserable. That’s not to say he’s a hopeless romantic in the manner of many films that seek to portray the sunny side up of capitalism. Instead, his work is rooted in an unapologetic, some would say unreconstructed, class politics centred on the liberatory potential of collective action, in particular trade unionism.  At the same time, they are movies to sit back and enjoy in between the popcorn.

Compare and contrast with Richard Curtis, a latter-day contemporary. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003) are a trilogy it would be a tad miserabilist to deny chuckling along to, but this was a twee, middle-class version of England entirely uninterested in anything apart from its unchanging self.  The coincidence with the ascension of Tony Blair is surely not coincidental. And there’s been plenty more from where that ilk came from ever since.

Of course, there are films that share Ken Loach’s cinematic ambition.  Brassed Off (1996) and Pride (2007) are two obvious examples, both depicting the 1984-85 miners’ strike in a Loachian manner and along the way a counter-narrative to Blairism. But these were pretty much one-offs, fondly enjoyed because they were so rare. Steve McQueen’s extraordinary  Small Axe (2020) five-film anthology – each film revolving immigration, racism and resistance, the shared location London – is perhaps the closest thing yet to what Ken Loach has managed to achieve. Let’s hope so.

What, to date, makes Ken unique is the scope and longevity of his work. He has kept on keeping on, making films for the best part of sixty years. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and while the values he champions, and to some extent the subject matter, have remained unchanging, they are never samey.

The early days’ classics were Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966), and Kes (1969) In the 1990s he made Riff Raff (1991). His first Palme d’Or was for The Wind that Shake the Barley (2006).  Featuring Eric Cantona as himself, Looking for Eric  2009) was followed by the late flowering of I Daniel Blake (2016)  and Sorry We Missed You (2019), covering homelessness and poverty, the ‘gig economy’, Irish republicanism, modern football, the cruel indignities of the social security system.

What other film-maker can match Ken for this kind of subject matter and damn good films to boot? But don’t take my untutored word for it. Here’s a short selection from an impressively long list of awards Ken Loach has won: the 2006 Palme D’Or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and in the same year the accolade of a BAFTA Fellowship.  In 2012 he won the Cannes Jury Prize for The Angels’ Share.  In 2016 he became one of the few to win a second Palme D’Or, this time  for I Daniel Blake, the same film also landing the 2017 BAFTA for outstanding British film of the year.

And for the wider cinema-going public, film reviewers greet his films with near universal praise.  The Guardian has made The Old Oak its four star film of the week describing it as “a ringing statement of faith in compassion for the oppressed.” The Evening Standard  welcomed The Old Oak with this ringing endorsement: “we need someone with Loach’s righteous fury to make films about the deplorable treatment of Britain’s often invisible and maligned underclass.”

Not a single reviewer, not a single awards jury – his films have won an astonishing 117 awards in total – has ever cited Ken Loach for antisemitism.  And as a sometime filmgoer I can’t for the life of me remember a single antisemitic trope appearing in any of his many films I’ve seen. If anyone can, do please let me know. Which rather leaves the Labour Party expelling him and alleging antisemitism a tad out on a limb, does it not? And begs the question what does the Labour Party know that legions of film reviewers, film award panels, filmgoers don’t?

Endlessly repeated Labour figures claim Ken’s expulsion was for antisemitism. It wasn’t. Most recently Rachel Reeves made precisely this claim until, unlike most, she was corrected by her interviewer Simon Hattenstone, who happens to be Jewish. Yes, Ken signed a petition protesting against members, a high proportion whom are Jewish, being expelled under the charge of antisemitism.  That’s a protest not a trope. A celebrated former Director of Public Prosecutions is now presiding over the replacement of  this right to protest with guilt by association. And along the way, as under Sir Keir Labour expels more Jewish members than any other time in its history, the title of a much celebrated account of antisemitism Jews Don’t Count is reinvented by Labour as ‘ Some Jews count more than other Jews.’

Earlier this year Jamie Driscoll was banned from standing as a Labour candidate for North East Mayor for, checks notes, interviewing Ken Loach at one of Newcastle’s leading arts venue about the film, The Old Oak, and two previous films, I Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You which he’d made in Jamie’s patch… the North East. The reason for the ban? By appearing with Ken Loach he was allying himself with antisemitism.

Has Ken ever erred to such an extent to deserve being ostracised by Labour, and only by Labour, to such an extraordinary extent? In 1987 Ken directed the play Perdition written by his long-time collaborator Jim Allen, which was then withdrawn before opening at the Royal Court Theatre. The play centred on a much-contested suggestion that one branch of Zionism sought to negotiate with the Nazis free passage to enable some Jews to escape being sent to the concentration camps. In typing those words, the very obvious explosion of anger that giving any kind of platform to such a tale can act as a means to legitimise antisemitism is startlingly obvious. In my personal opinion Ken’s was a bad choice, but enough to disqualify his entire legacy of work? I don’t think so.

At the time, 1987, Neil Kinnocks’ Labour Party leadership, not exactly backward at expelling known Trotskyists and others, didn’t think so either, taking no action against Ken who’d been a party member since 1962. Is the suggestion therefore that Kinnock, was soft on antisemitism? Well if he was why does he continue to sit in the House of Lords as a Labour peer? Put simply, none of this adds up and,  outside the world of the current Labour leadership, few would countenance a blanket ban on Ken Loach or any kind of association with him.

So, this weekend as Ken’s film opens, what is it to be?

A Labour Party three-line whip barring the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and members from  a crafty looksie at The Old Oak accompanied by Constituency Labour Party picket lines (oh I forgot – Labour MPs are barred from those too) outside the flicks to collar any waverers. Because that is the logical conclusion of where Labour’s strictures on Ken Loach have ended up.  Anything less and we’re tempted to suspect all the huff and puff about Ken’s antisemitism is for show, surely not?

Or a celebration of a much-loved maker of films that fire up indignation and hope in equal measure – films that depend, not on a star-studded line-up, but jobbing actors we’ve never heard of, and for most parts those who’ve never ever even acted before.  The Old Oak follows this uniquely Ken Loach tradition and is none the poorer, quite the opposite, for it.  And Ken Loach is most certainly the only director who would choose (spoiler alert) as the happy ending to his final film Syrian refugees and a former mining community coming together to make a banner and then marching behind together at the Durham Miners Gala. The words they choose for their banner?  ‘ Strength, Solidarity, Resistance’ in English, and Arabic. What a way for Ken to close his final film. It makes a great banner, and a great T-shirt too, available from…

Exclusive, and strictly unofficial Philosophy Football Old Oak Banner T-shirt from here

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football. Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.