Ken Loach Quotes

Perdition was stopped because it criticised Zionist leaders in Budapest for co-operating with the Nazis in sending half a million Jews to the camps. Today, we are wary of criticising Israel, because of our feelings of horror and guilt at the atrocities committed against the Jews. If the Hungarian incident is examined, that inhibition may be lessened.
With a few honourable exceptions, the establishment liberals, who rightly support Salman Rushdie, ignored the political censorship on their own doorstep. Ken Loach. London

The Labour party is part of the problem, not the solution. The Greens have many admirable policies, but we look in vain for a thoroughgoing analysis for fundamental change. We need a new voice, a new movement – a new party.

[On politics in the 1960s] There was a feeling that there was a great possibility of political change. Obviously, no one knew in what form it would come, but there was a sense that the working class was getting politically conscious, particularly those involved in occupations and industrial disputes.
The quality of political discussion was higher. People understood die analysis even if they disagreed with it.

[On film executive Nat Cohen, then responsible (according to his rivals) for about 50% of film production in the UK] I found Nat very kind and helpful. [...] [A] lot of things went wrong in those films and I realise it now. I saw this but he didn't say a word and allowed me to finish.
That's on a personal level. On a different level I find Nat's position in the film industry very disturbing. He has too much control over it. Do you know how he works? Every morning he studies the box office receipts and sees which films are making money and concentrates on those. So, slowly, the spectrum is becoming narrower and narrower.

I'm a great friend of Ken's, and Perdition does not change that, [...] [b]ut when I think of the man who made Kes which tells us more movingly about the disinherited than any other film I've seen, I wonder what has happened. Poor Cow, Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home were all films of great humanity and were probably political films in their own way, but the compassion conquered all. He seems to be moving away from that and becoming more politically motivated and less interesting. It's a great pity.

I turned down the OBE because it's not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who've got it.

Kes is really about the colossal wastages of kids, whose lives and abilities are written off before they're even in their teens. We chose to make it in Barnsley, we chose a Secondary modern school on a new estate that's becoming shabby. But it could have been one of hundreds of schools or estates. We didn't happen to unearth one child star, there were several kids in that one school who could have done the main part, [Billy Casper].

[On where he fits on the left] I would have thought if you want to align yourself to any left current, the one to follow would be the one that fought Stalinism at the outset, and that was the left opposition and [Leon] Trotsky. So I think that socialist current is the one I care to be identified with.

You cannot work with people who have come to undermine the biggest challenge we've had - we've never had a leader like Corbyn before in the whole history of the Labour Party ... and that's why the dirty tricks are going to come out.

But Loach was not always a lefty – far from it. At school, he represented the Tories in a mock election. "I don’t think too much should be made of that," he says. I had assumed he was playing devil's advocate, or it was just a passing teenage whim, but no, he says: these were the values with which he was brought up. Loach's father was an electrician who became a foreman in his factory in Nuneaton – a classic working-class Tory, he says.

"The aim is to destabilise Jeremy's leadership," Loach said, apparently unaware that suggesting Jews make allegations about antisemitism for their political or personal benefit is, in fact, one of the oldest antisemitic tropes there is.

Jo Coburn: There was a fringe meeting yesterday that we talked about at the beginning of the show where there was a discussion about the Holocaust, did it happen or didn't it ... would you say that was unacceptable?
Loach: I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn't you?
Coburn: Say that again, sorry, I missed that.
Loach: History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss. The role of Israel now is there for us to discuss. So don't try to subvert that by false stories of anti-Semitism.

You can't treat mental health on an assembly line, which is the way it is now organised.

The family took the rightwing Daily Express, and Loach would read it cover to cover, never questioning its values. As far as he was concerned, it simply reflected the world. "I adopted the Tories like you adopt a team," he says, embarrassed. How long did he adopt them for? "Probably until I was 19, when I went into the RAF."

Labour's rhetoric may be softer than the Tories', but its fundamental stance is limited by the same imperative: profit comes before all else. Can the Labour party be reclaimed? Or, rather, made anew into one that will represent the interests of the people?
History suggests it cannot. The high-water mark of 1945 is long gone. The many great achievements of that government have largely been dismantled, either with the collusion of Labour or directly by the party when it has been in power.