Can we regain the spirit to succeed?

In 2016 the Ken Loach documentary ‘The Spirit of ’45 was screened at Newcastle’s Gosforth Civic Theatre. I hosted the post-screening Q&A with Ken.

- Jamie Driscoll

This week, nine years on, we showed it again at the same venue, at the Majority film club.

It's a powerful documentary. There's no narration. Just archive footage and interviews with GPs and nurses, railway workers and miners. Britain was bombed-out. The national debt-to-GDP ratio was 230%. It's 96% today. Three-quarters of industry produced munitions that were no longer needed.

One interviewee remembers a conversation on a troop ship on the way home. “In the 30s we had mass unemployment. If you can have full employment killing Germans, why can’t you have full employment building homes and hospitals and recruiting teachers and doctors?”