Which side are you on ?

Last Saturday I had the luck to attend a screening of the Ken Loach’s movie «  Which side are you on » which is about the minor’s strike that strucked Britain in 1984. The screening was in the director’s presence and the one of Paul Laverty, his scenarist.

It is hard to remember how brutal Margaret Thatcher's handling, or should I say manipulating, of the whole thing was, and twenty-five years on it is heartbraking to be reminded how that crisis marked the unraveling of the labour rights that had been bitterly fought over for more than a century.

The film focuses on the poems and songs composed by ordinary working people, the pitmen and their wives, singing of their struggles, their hopes and their pride. To think that many of those people lost their jobs and never found another, and that some families now have three generations on the dole, so that deregulated capital could take over the world and push it to the brink as we can see today...

Ken Loach looked sweet and utterly English, perched awkwardly on his chair.

He joked about how difficult it was to call himself a revolutionary on the way to the world's most glamorous film festival at Cannes, where he is showing his latest movie about and with Eric Cantona, a native of Marseilles.