Ken Loach in Battersea

By Bob Ede

Ken Loach and his film Sorry We Missed You was part of a sell-out audience of 450 attending South West London Law Centres’ (SWLLC) 45th Anniversary celebration at the Battersea Arts Centre last week. Guest speakers including Lord Alf Dubs, a former Battersea Labour MP and Marsha de Cordova, the current Battersea MP and Labour Shadow Minister for Disabilities; Ken Loach took questions on the film from an audience that was left stunned by the dramatic content.

Filmed in Newcastle and the surrounding area, Sorry We Missed You was released last year to critical acclaim. It was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year and it won the Belgian Margritte Award for Best Foreign Film in Coproduction.

I had planned to do a film review but should have taken heed of the woman who preceded me into the gents to gather tissues for her forthcoming tears.

All the dialogue was Geordie. The first half described the stress to a well-knit couple and their two children by zero-hours and austerity.

Attracted by the allure of delivering parcels, not as an employee but as a self-employed franchisee, he persuaded his NHS wife to sell their car so that he could lease a van.

He was then bullied into exhausting hours under a harsh sanctions regime, whilst his wife was equally exhausted travelling to those in need of care.

Their neglected teenage son was excluded from school and received a caution for shop-lifting. It was clearly not going to end well.

The screening was in celebration of SWLLC’s 45th anniversary. When I worked for them, cuts in legal aid had left them precariously financed. Much less so now, due mainly to the commitment of staff, volunteers and trustees.

Both Lord Dubs and Marsha de Cordova spoke passionately of their work helping refugees and people with disabilities. Lord Dubs described the callous ministerial undermining of his efforts since 2016 to relocate and support unaccompanied refugee children from Europe, giving them safe passage to the UK. Both of them praised SWLLC's 'We Unlock Justice' work, giving legal help to those unable to afford lawyers' fees. Last year, free or low-cost legal advice helped over 8,000 people to stay in their homes, clear debts, resolve employment and immigration problems, and access social security payments. When I was there, SWLLC's chief executive often asserted that no client had lost a case. What does that say about the millions who cannot unlock justice?

Better Angels at the Chinese Embassy

By New Worker correspondent

People’s China and the USA are locked into a trade war that effects the day-to-day lives of millions of Chinese and American workers. Nobody knows how it will all end but a mutually beneficial way forward is charted out in a documentary that was shown last week at the Chinese embassy in London.

The thaw in Sino-American relations began during the ‘ping-pong’ diplomacy of the Nixon era. The US leader would end decades of confrontation when he met Mao Zedong in 1972.

The film begins with a warning from Richard Nixon’s foreign secretary, the now 95-year-old Henry Kissinger, declaring: “If we are to clash, it would be a disaster for the whole world.”

Better Angels is a documentary focusing on Sino-American relations seen through the eyes of major players and ordinary people on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Nearly 100 people from all walks of life joined Chinese diplomats at the screening of Better Angels and the reception, jointly organised with the Asia House business forum. They included Chinese diplomats Chen Wen and Ma Hui from the Chinese Embassy in London, along with the film’s director, British born film-maker and two-time Oscar winner Malcolm Clarke.

Chen said in her speech that Better Angels, which was filmed over five years across four continents, touched the audience with stories of ordinary Chinese and Americans, and revealed the wisdom and hope for Sino–US relations. She shared her views on how to achieve understanding and trust between big countries. First, “we should bridge over mysteries between cultures” she said. "We could bring our people together and cement public support for our bilateral relations."

Second, we should tear down the wall of prejudice and misgivings, and engage in consultation and cooperation in the spirit of mutual respect, openness and friendship.

Third, guided by Xi Jinping ‘Thought on Diplomacy’, we should build a community with a shared future for humankind and blaze a new path of state-to-state relations by building a new type of international relationship featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win–win co-operation.

Forty years have passed since China and the USA established their diplomatic relations. The past experience and enlightenment of Sino–US relations show that the co-operation between the two countries will benefit not only the two nations but also the whole world.

After the screening, Director Malcolm Clarke answered questions from the audience. He said that China has a long history and a splendid civilisation. In its 40 years of reform and opening up, China has created a “miracle of development”. There is always an "information deficit" between China and the West however.

Not everyone can appreciate China’s development, and the extraordinary and far-reaching significance of the “Chinese miracle”. He hoped that this film would reduce the misunderstanding of China, and that more good films showing the true Chinese image and the story of ordinary Chinese people would appear in the future.

The audience, marvelling at China’s achievements, said that the world now needs to know more about China.

Down House: A unique place in the history of science and evolution

by Carole Barclay
 

The works of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx shook and shocked Victorian Britain. Although they lived less than 20 miles apart from each other they never met. But Marx genuinely admired Darwin's On The Origin of the Species despite its “crude English style” and even sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of the recently published second edition of Das Kapital in 1873.

            Down House was Darwin’s home for 40 years until his death in 1882. Darwin and his wife Emma remodelled the house and its extensive gardens, which Darwin used as an open-air laboratory. Here Darwin worked on his theory of evolution that was first published in 1859.

In Darwin’s day the house was in the village of Downe, a parish in Kent. It later became a girls’ school and the home of the Darwin Museum. Now part of Bromley in Greater London, the house, gardens and grounds is run by English Heritage and open to the public throughout the year.

            There’s plenty to see. Anyone interested in the life and times of Darwin will be fascinated by the gardens and the exhibits in the museum as well as rooms that have been restored to appear as they would have looked in Darwin’s day. There’s the inevitable visitors’ shop for books and souvenirs, and a very welcome café in the courtyard.

But beware – plan your journey unless you’re driving because it’s not easily served by public transport. Although you can get trains from central London to Bromley South or Orpington you’ve then got to get a bus for the rest of the journey.

Down House is in Luxted Road, Downe, Kent, BR6 7JT. The house, garden and grounds are open to the public at the usual English Heritage rates. There’s free parking and Down House opens daily from April to the end of October, and on weekends only from November until the end of March.

The Crucible – a new look at a Miller classic

 By Andy Brooks

Back in the 17^th century a wave of hysteria swept a small town in what was then the English colony of Massachusetts in New England. Based on the accusations of children, the largely Puritan settlers of Salem started an enquiry that turned into a frenzied witch-hunt that was used to settle old scores between rival factions in the town. Twenty people, 14 of them women, were executed and five others, including two infants, died in prison before the whole process was halted by broader public opinion.

Salem became such a by-word for superstition, bigotry and persecution that it inspired Arthur Miller to write this play during the notorious anti-communist “witch-hunts” of the early 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the notorious House of Un-American Activities Committee.

The Crucible is a dramatic interpretation of the Salem witch trials of 1692 but it is clearly an analogy of McCarthyism, which hounded communists and those whom the rabid Senator deemed to be ‘fellow-travellers’ out of their jobs. Those that refused to become turncoat informers were often forced to go into voluntary exile. Some were even jailed on trumped charges of conspiracy, subversion or being agents of the Soviet Union.

Miller himself said that the Crucible was “by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there – it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.”

The current production by the Sell A Door Theatre Company and the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch began in February at the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, another part of Essex now in Greater London, and will now tour the country.

It stars Charlie Condou, best known for playing Marcus Dent in Coronation Street, as the witch-hunter Reverend Hale, and Victoria Yeates of BBC’s Call the Midwife fame. It is directed by the Queen’s Theatre’s Artistic Director, Douglas Rintoul.

It’s currently on in Dartford and moves to Cheltenham next week. Check out the full details of the Crucible UK Tour on the web to see if it’s coming anywhere near you. It’s well worth a visit.