UK Labour Party kicks out veteran filmmaker Ken Loach

Pity, the Corbynites were the best thing that ever happened for the Tory party!

Corbyn was the gift that kept on giving for the Tory party, ensuring that Brexit would happen.

Labour largely vanished as an opposition force during the pandemic and now come across as obsolete and politically irrelevant. Not as unelectable as they were under Corbyn, but devoid of character, personality, policy or purpose. It's pitiful how comprehensively they collapsed, just when they were needed.

As things turned out, the Tories nicked half their policies, part-nationalising the railways, nationalising British Steel, paying companies to function in the UK after Brexit and handing out financial support during the pandemic. Johnson is astonishingly lucky at how things have turned out, the impact of Brexit being laid at the door of the pandemic and a nervous BBC playing ball.

Loach has more chance of winning a film award than Labour do an election. Maybe they ejected him to grab a headline, so folk know that they still exist.

Like him or hate him, Tony Blair understood how to make Labour both attractive and viable, and it was by brining the party closer to the centre and either getting rid of the uber-socialist fruitcakes or marginalising them so much that they were essentially neutralised and could exist in their own little bubble, wearing pastel jumpers and stroking their beards thoughtfully.

Reading posts on this subject on Facebook and so on, it's like reading badly written protests by sixth form students. "Our comrade Ken Loach has been expelled by the backstabbing leader of the so-called Labour party!" It's like a bad version of Animal Farm without the literary merit.

Poll a hundred Labour voters under the age of 40 and see how many have even heard of Ken Loach.

Looks like a party schism is in effect here. Just like a GOP scism is developing after Trump.

BigYenToday  10:01 am JST

There’s a schism alright, and it just leaves the field free for the loathsome Johnson and his Tory born-to-rule chums.

I'm not a Brit but if this leads the way for Bozo to throw his weight around some more, that doesn't look good at all.

*I'm not a Brit but if this leads the way for Bozo to throw his weight around some more, *that doesn't look good at all.

Part of the problem is that Johnson is a very smart man who plays the role of the village idiot. That makes him exceptionally dangerous. The leader of the Labour party, Keir Starmer, is an experienced lawyer who has been knighted for his services to the legal profession. In other words, he's easily an intellectual match for Johnson, but he doesn't know how to play the voters like Johnson does.

Modern politics is a game of perception and image, and right now neither party is playing the game well, but the conservatives are slightly less awful at it.

Pity, the Corbynites were the best thing that ever happened for the Tory party!

Yeah, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality.", a conservative poet once famously opined, and one corollary following from that is the bitter truth that every people, "the crooked timber of humanity", always gets the leaders and politics they deserve. Ken Loach is a British "National Treasure", ironically more honored and feted in Japan (since he's a foreigner of the left?) than in his class-ridden home country where the Establishment and the screeching gutter press have decreed that the default position of political correctness must always reside on the right. But Starmer's purge and expulsion of Loach can only burnish the latter's image as an artist and man with principles and integrity while reflecting poorly on the Machiavellian PLP and the hapless nonentity that presently leads it and who seems determined to run it into the swamp. Starmer himself is heading for the fate predicted by the unlamented right-wing Tory, Enoch Powell, who warned, "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." No such fate awaits Ken Loach who has already written a glorious chapter in the annals of British film. As the late, great Albert Finney, in the British film classic, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" spoke for posterity, "Don't let the bast**ds grind you down", Ken.

*Ken Loach is a British "National Treasure", ironically more honored and feted in Japan (since he's a foreigner of the left?) than in his class-ridden home country where the Establishment and the screeching gutter press have decreed that the default position of political correctness must always reside on the right.*

UK socialism lost its greatest treasure with the passing of Iain Banks .

Dont think there will be much difference between Tory and Labour going forward on economics, relying on a lot of government intervention. The Tories will have to be, what was traditionally seen as left wing on economics to push the country forward in important sectors.

But certainly when it comes to the culture war, there is significant difference and also the military.

Modern politics is a game of perception and image, and right now neither party is playing the game well, but the conservatives are slightly less awful at it.

The Tories have been sinking in the polls but with the majority of Scottish seats going SNP, the maths are very difficult for Labour. The northern seats which went Tory basically over Brexit will very probably turn red again, but I don’t think it will be enough.

The Tory south and shires are the problem. They drag us down.

Stefan Tony Blair was and still is a war criminal. The stuff he did whilst in power is still causing trouble now. So many of his policies were badly thought through and in the end the country came out of the labour years in massive debt and very much worse off.

An example was the badly written pollicy that allowed universities to charge up to 9 grand for teaching. They thought that only the top-notch ones would charge full wack but in reality even the low grade (what were once only tech schools) charged it. If you take the fact that during the last couple of years the students have been paying this for online, low quality courses then that is the Blair legacy.

Having been on the dole ( I never qualified for a penny) during the Thatcher Years and the Blair Years I can say I was treated with a lot more respect under the Tories. Once labour got in it was tick-box-slavery.

If my politics has a lable then it is Anarchist and I do not think ether of the big parties are worth the 80 grand per MP and I have spoilt my ballot paper in every election. However the Labour party of today is so defunct it has lost the will to have any polices and employs some of the worst examples of humans possible. Boris could literally sell your children to Biden and he would shine compared to his opposition.

As for Loach those who have watched his films will know that they are hard to get through. They are not realism. They are a false portrait of life or maybe a futuristic version of what would happen if socilism was allowed to happen. Although Boris is trying his hardest to make that a reality.

Stefan Tony Blair was and still is a war criminal. The stuff he did whilst in power is still causing trouble now.

I can agree with that at least in part. I thought that he was actually a pretty decent PM until he went along with Bush on Iraq, and that didn't just blot his copybook, it spilled an entire bottle of indelible ink over it.

If my politics has a lable then it is Anarchist and I do not think ether of the big parties are worth the 80 grand per MP and I have spoilt my ballot paper in every election

I lived just outside Brighton and voted Green every time - one of the few places where it's actually really worth doing so.

As for Loach those who have watched his films will know that they are hard to get through. 

I had to sit through "Kes" at school. I don't think I've ever been closer to death through boredom.

Sometimes the labour parties around the world need to be reminded that they are the political wing of the union movement. Ken Roach stands up for the working class. A damn good man.

As for Loach those who have watched his films will know that they are hard to get through.

Riff Raff is excellent. Kes is very good too.

His work is usually a welcome change to the appalling trash coming from the Phoebe Waller-Branagh-Thompson-Bonham-Carter-Cumberbatch-Grant-Redmayne luvvie brigade.

As for Downtown Abbey....

The UK now has 2 real political choices in an election. The conservative party or the "Champagne socialist" conservatives now running the Labour party. Its sad that the "third party no hope" Liberals are now the most radical left party in UK general elections.

One of our greatest ever film directors, a true humanist. His 1966 drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, resulted in a change in UK law and is frequently cited as the best single televison drama ever made in the UK.

Shame on the idiot Stormer and the Blairite lickspittles responsible for this travesty.

Kes is very good too.

An old friend of mine did his PE teacher training at the school where Kes was filmed. He said it was exactly the same as in the movie.

As for Downtown Abbey....

Don't even start on that.

Corbyn was the gift that kept on giving for the Tory party

The gift that keeps giving is foreign-based billionaires controlling the press. A Tory donor-owned production company also makes "Question Time", the UK's principle "voice of the public" political discourse show, which is why Nigel Farage was always on. The press is why PM Johnson gets to do the "Boris" upper-class twit shtick while lieing and messing things up as much as Trump. The press are why anti-semitism in the Labour party is front page news and reports into Islamophobia in the Conservative Party are killed. People are told what to think. Hermann and Chomsky described it all years ago.

It will have been under Blair, but like the Daniel Blake character in Loach's film, my father was told by doctors to stop working but was unable to get disability benefit. They expected a sixty-year-old with a bad back and bad knees to walk up and down ladders carrying a toolbox.

Corbyn was the gift that kept on giving for the Tory party

@kohakuebisu

You nailed it all in a nutshell, but, as Mark Twain explained, “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”, because for many folk staring the truth in the face is scarier than beholding the head of a Gorgon.

The Labour party hasn't actually been the Labour party since Blair the Multi-millionaire took it over and hoodwinked an entire country. And Corbyn and Abbott took the party so far down that even the most Trotskyist fools knew not to vote for them.

The UK electorate votes left wing but gets the Tories because of FPTPost. The closest we came to electoral reform was the Tory/Lib Dem coalition, but it never caught the public's imagination. The rise of the SNP, however good or bad that is for Scotland, further cripples the chances of a non-Tory UK govt.

I have seen signs of a progressive alliance in English local elections, at least. Could work on a more national scale, similar to what's happening with opposition parties in these isles.

Loach has made some great films, but his anti-Semitism means he should not be welcome in the Labour Party.