Film review: Sorry We Missed You
Philip Roddis
Image source here.
“I never thought it would be this hard”, says Rickie Turner to Abby his wife, holding her tight in a brief moment of intimacy before sleep overtakes them. Rickie is working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Abby is a zero hours carer, one of tens of thousands of casualised front line outsourcees in Britain’s creepingly privatised welfare state.
In an era of slick euphemism, Rickie is technically self-employed. There was a time when wage labourers dreamed of self-employment as a path to betterment; risky, yes, but full of promise.
Now it’s likely to mean all the disadvantages of working for others – and none of the benefits.
Welcome to gig economy Britain where, as Rickie and Abby discover, flexibility is a decidedly one way street.
Rickie, a delivery driver in the age of online shopping, ‘owns’ his van. That’s an investment with adverse consequences for Abby. They could only raise the deposit on this £14k millstone by her selling the car which took her from one ‘client’ to the next.
Now she buses it – environmentally better, of course, but that’s small consolation when you’re on the minimum wage and juggling the demands of making ends meet with those of raising two kids.
Abby is not paid for time spent, or expenses incurred, between ‘clients’. This is Britain today for its growing precariat. (I should know. Though my circumstances were vastly better than Abby’s, I too had a zero hours contract at Sheffield Hallam University.
And I too would bus from class to class, the gaps a downtime to be minimised, if possible, by negotiation with managers often sympathetic and doing what they could to give me a degree of contiguity.)
One scene is especially illuminating.
At a windswept bus stop on a bleak estate Abby conducts a futile cell phone argument with her manager. She’s gone over her allotted hour with a ‘client’, said ‘client’ having shat himself as Abby was about to leave. What was she to do?
What indeed? Abby does the right thing as a human being – and the wrong thing as a human labour unit. Her manager is sympathetic but powerless. She’ll be paid for the hour and nothing but the hour.
Even Rickie’s boss client representative is powerless. This is important because he is not only a little tyrant but fully aware of the fact. That’s useful, cinematically, in allowing the depot despot to set out his flawless reasoning as to why he is a heartless bastard.
Ken Loach is too much the master craftsman to use easy targets. In refusing to demonise Rickie’s boss client rep he goes no small way to mitigating a weakness of social realism, its often klunkily empiricist approach to abstract and systemic forces. (For fuller discussion, see my review of Mike Leigh’s Peterloo.)
This is not a feel-good film. With the partial exception of Looking For Eric, that’s not what Ken Loach does. Ever since Cathy Come Home in 1966, he’s been holding a mirror to all that’s ugly – and that’s a lot – in class rotten Britain. With Sorry We Missed You he excels again.
Will it change anything? I doubt it. But there’s a lot to be said for telling the truth, for striving after authenticity in a world bent on depicting, if not the very opposite, at best highly confined and weirdly selective samples of the stuff.
Most heartrending of all is the watching as good people go under – and let me say the acting, children’s included, is utterly convincing. Ditto the screenplay as each disaster is compounded by the previous one, and in turn compounds the next. You won’t be doing much laughing over the hundred and one minutes of your life given over to this piercing glimpse of Britain today.
But don’t even think of giving it a miss.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
The Earth: Sorry We Missed You.
Of course I empathise with your travails with Sheffield Hallam (as previously communicated): and I’m sure it is a very good film …but as to its relative importance in the most important general election ever held: that to me remains highly questionable.
I Like Mike Leigh: but his politics and films hold onto a rather quaint arthouse version of a sentimentalised victim politics …one that is no longer relevant to the ecology of the modern world. I’m sure it was pretty shit to be at Peterloo: and the gig economy sucks too. But this has to be addressed in the modern ecological paradigm. We are the highest per capita consumer/polluters of the biosphere – bar none. If everyone had our standard of living: the ecosystems would immediately collapse.
This comes straight from the horses mouth on the LabourGND.uk website. They also explain that to address this: we can only have a relatively small part of the allocated carbon budget: due to our historic emissions which are six time the global average. So we are going to have to rebuild our society with less: a lot less. But, instead of rapid and radical degrowth and massive resource redistribution to counter the social iniquities and inequalities highlighted – what is on offer is the one to one isomorphy of our current iniquitous resource consumption and distribution …in a ‘just transition’ to democratisation and decarbonisation …in 5 or possibly 10 years (the former is the promise of the LabourGND: the latter is the Conference adopted scenario).
It does not matter which is adopted in the Manifesto on Thursday. Both are physically impossible and contra the Laws of Nature. Even the more sedate carbon ‘net zero’ (LabourGND promise the even more unachievable ‘actual zero’ of ‘no carbon’ antirealism) is highly questionable by 2050. In fact: it is impossible and contra physics. Unless we complete three nuclear power stations every two days until 2050. That came from Forbes: but it confirms the SRI introduction of the ‘Cubic Mile of Oil’ which would take a similarly impossible amount of ‘just transition’.
Depending on ones confirmation bias: the impossibility of replacing FFs and NE with renewables on a one to one basis have been apparent for decades. On the virtual eve of the most important election ever – the one that will decide the planets future (Labour GND propagandeering slogan) …the plausibility of the continuation of our global consumption/pollution bourgeois lifestyle is purely a socially agreed political constructivism. One that has no basis in reality. Such political constructivist antirealism means that the most important election ever will be fought only on socially agreed political opinion to extend and pretend …that we can decarbonise and democratise the most polluting of all global lifestyles (as LabourGND themselves attest). This makes Labour and LabourGND a existential real and present danger to all life on earth. And to the continued viability of all life.
For which no brutally honest critical appraisal is allowed. The biosphere integrity and ecological health is not even an election issues for most people: despite Corbyn saying “This election is our last chance to tackle the climate emergency” on numerous occasions. It is a political assumption the earth system will survive our choices and keep supporting our profligate lifestyle choices: but will it?
If you look at the 9 concrete proposals of the GND and listen to the hollow ecological promises of 320,000 climate apprenticeships to ‘upskill’ the green industrial revolution: you may think this is the action we need …at last we are doing something. What use is that if it is the wrong something?
Economies scale at one to one with the biophysical and bioenergetic source to sink mass flow throughputs. Decarbonisation is NOT de-energisation and decoupling is impossible [see Hickel: 2019 and Parrique et al 2019]. For reasons I have tried to highlight, and are generally well understood – such as energy density, intermittancy, battery storage, and resource density (simply: renewables require MORE resources) – we will have to INCREASE our already exorbitant global consumption/pollution profligacy. If this was not already immoral and globally unethical: under capitalism we will have to increase our current consumption/pollution dominance over biocapacity exponentially. Which involves exponential doubling rates (@3% doubling every 23 years; then doubling the doubling …). Each doubling requires the required amount of resources be found again. And again (x2). And again (x4). And…
The Earth: Sorry We Missed You.
There existentially important issues here that make Mike Leigh’s ‘social realism’ all but irrelevant. Except as a quaint stylised historical distraction. It is not the iniquities of McBullshit gig economy jobs are not iniquitous: they are. It is that unless there is a sudden awakening of the ecological interconnected spiritual consciousness: the most important election in history will continue to be fought on completely spurious antirealist grounds. The GND is a clear and present existential danger to all life on earth. The consequences of which will be the biggest humanitarian and ecological disaster yet to happen. I thought everyone knew that everyone knew that the GND was a green finance capitalism front? No?
Nevermind: get some popcorn; share some socialist bonhomie; chant “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”; and let the Mike Leigh school of ecology inform the election result. The green bond financialisation of nature under the direction of the City of London and WEF/BIS is bound to bring the inclusive benefits of socialism to all: isn’t it? After all: capitalist environmental stewardship has been working so well up to now. Under LabourGND: the ‘just transition’ from unsustainable to sustainable capitalism is assured. This is sarcasm, Phil, in case you are not sure. Sorry to disconcert: but unless there is radical ecological critique of politics about to explode: we are about to elect finance capitalism as custodians of ecology of the biosphere. I seem to be one of a very few in mortal terror of this unconscionable prospect on the basis of a pantomime personality contest and Mike Leigh’s popcorn socialism.
To be continued: when the actual policies are announced on Thursday.
Ooh get you.
Getting at the attention given to the greatest rip-off and some of the lowest standards in the private care industry.
I have personal experience of the cowboy set up companies;
totally inexperienced and untrained staff;
the lack of time allocated;
the hotrendous pressure on the care givers;
the distances between care needers;
The massive churn of staffing and lack of back up, reasonable pay, reasonable hours, lack of support, training, sick or holiday pay…
The failures of the under resourced firms.
I know of sick individuals who were forced to provide the 24/7 care for parents who could not afford to get sufficent care because they were stupid enough to have bought their house!
Go on BB tell us it is nothing compared to your regular stock answer to EVERY subject.
Got you there Dungroanin. Both my wife and myself work in what is optimistically called the care sector. We also have a disabled kid – now a man – so we can see it from both sides. I have been fortunate enough to have held my current post for 24 years but in that time I have seen relentless cutbacks and the gradual intrusion of sinister dodgy third sector entities allied to an endless barrage of training courses with that snappy business speak angle (“modernising the service”, “thinking outside the box”, “maximising independence” etc etc) – all of this seems to be based on the supposition that the average or ideal citizen wants to invade Poland.
A couple of decades ago you’d never have believed it – that we seem to be heading back to Dickensian workhouse conditions – without an actual workhouse and therefore without a chance for establishing solidarity.
The thing is DG, BigB is 100% wholly correct . . .
And unless we all start to get real serious with computing & algorithms, in Real Time, the appliance of science will become very soon meaningless. as societal evolution of consciousness and the conscious awareness of the need to CONSUME LESS & LESS will be simply to damn late in the day, as others wish to follow the wrong suit . . .
Have you any idea how many Bulgarians, (including from my own family, sadly) have gone to the UK to work for pathetically low wages in the gig economy, only to realise that they truly wish to return home, if they could only afford to do so ? The cost of living there in the UK is such, that they save next to nothing and just get suckered into the consumer society & the easy credit mentality of ‘Wonga’, therein, abdicating any future planning for life, living from day to day and hoping for change, rather than determining their own change.
Tim,
The temperature in parts of London is suddenly going to drop below freezing tonight without a lead in.
Many a young rose is going to die.
I have been rushing around the garden trying to cover as much as i can with anything i can find.
I mention that only to put some perspective on BB’s endless loop crie de cour goes to philosophise for the minority of euro centric cultural population of the planet.
Yes i have an idea of the eastern european auf widdershenian reverse diasporas.
I could tell you stories of gangs of Romanians travelling by van to work on network rail maintenance projects every night.
They speak in their own language and work orders are in that – which makes it difficult for the British man on the shift.
They are on contracts. Self employed. That means sometimes there are diffetent gangs turning up to to work on the same job. So instead of getting 6 hours work they may only get a fraction. Never mind the 4-6 hours unpaid travelling time.
I used to employ eastern europeans 15 years ago and paid them £10 per hour take home, and would have happily put them on the books. But they couldn’t legally get it. Till they could. They were worth it.
So were the aussies i employed.
You are right about the hand to mouth, wonga, existence.
It is the new normal for the poor working class Brits. That and the nasty money converter shops – the new pawn brokers.
I’m sorry Tim. I’ve seen the shit going down over 40 years.
I was a entrepreneur and businessman. I have set up and crashed with numerous businesses. That’s the way it goes. I also succeeded and employed dozens – hundred plus.
I am telling you and anyone without an agenda, that is willing to listen, THIS is the best chance to hit the decrepit empire at it’s centre. A country of a mere 60 odd million can choose to change the course of history.
Who is brave enough? Maybe this guy shines a path.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/18/boris-johnson-lying-media
Onivar. No pasaran. Vote Labour.
The “conscious awareness of the need to CONSUME LESS & LESS” is never going to come in a society totally dominated by capitalist advertising and propaganda. I suppose you can appeal to a few noble souls to tread the saintly path but the great maw will churn on and on. Until, of course, everything collapses – which I am guessing is the scenario that BB is painting.
George Mc:
Exponential life-blind accumulation on a finite planet (accumulation that serves no socially useful purpose other than as a ground for more accumulation) …only has one outcome. It only ever did. This was obvious 5,000 years ago (see Hudson’s “Forgive Them Their Debts”). And yet in blind-obedience to the ‘money multiplier cancer’ – as McMurtry terms it – which is the root pathology of all social and ecological pathologies …and yet we are all off to the polls to give legal-rational legitimacy to the next – and perhaps penultimate, if not ultimate – round of life-negating accumulation.
There is something very, very, wrong with this. And I feel it should not be trivialised. At the end of the day – if you disregard the constitutions and institutions that concretise it – the state is only a shared set of beliefs. Beliefs that are devastatingly and demonstrably wrong. Unequivocally and emphatically wrong. But never open to brutally honest review.
If a society wanted to have an uncompromisingly frank and brutally honest debate about its shared life-blind value system – and about biophysical resources and energy – we can target and fund all the actual life-generating and ecologically life-coherent values (targeted life-needs in a way that does not negatively impact or unnecessarily deplete the biosphere) …by switching surplus value production away from metastatic exponential accumulation (from OTC derivatives for instance; which are never discussed – that is conservatively $595tn that is set to collapse the global financial market that served no life-beneficial or socially good purpose at all) …we can have REAL socialism. Focused on the nitty-gritty realism DG is addressing.
If we enter into yet another round of legitimated life-blind accumulation – as we will, because this conversation should have taken place decades ago – and expect these things on a trickle down basis …we cannot guarantee the same results.
BTW: my Mum was there at the start of the NHS: and dedicated her life to it. With no implied disrespect: she perhaps gave more to the NHS than she gave to us (she died of pre-senile dementia aged 64: brought on perhaps by doing her administrative work at home so she could dedicate herself to nursing on duty). I had a serious accident six weeks ago. The NHS where there in 20 minutes (to an inaccessible remote rural location). They saved my life: free at the point of service. My partner works in the care industry. I have a 90 year old Dad who is cared for at home. So no one has to tell me about the nitty-gritty of social realism.
But if we want to preserve – and perhaps extend these necessary social welfare and community life-building values – we cannot pretend it will happen under capitalism. Put most basically: we have to break the bonds of obedience and decide what values we want for ourselves. Capitalisms ‘pseudo-socialisms’ are contingent on quasi-eternalised capitalist expansionism. And that is an unconscionable compromise of the life-ground. What point is socialism if it costs the Earth?
https://bsahely.com/2018/06/09/what-is-good-what-is-bad-the-value-of-all-values-through-time-place-and-theories-by-prof-john-mcmurtry/
Well precisely i.e. “if you disregard the constitutions and institutions that concretise it” i.e. disregard the state as it actually exists. Indeed – even the beliefs are irrelevant. They will shovel out any shit that serves. They employ the hired prize-fighters of capital. And such employees have no interest in brutally honest reviews.
And so it goes e.g.
It would be great – and indeed perhaps it might even be the case – that “society”, as in most people, would like to have this frank debate. But we’re back to those concrete institutions and their hired prize-fighters who have no intention of having such a debate and even less intention of alerting the population to the notion that such a debate is needed.
They’ll get it anyway. But they’re unlikely to know who to blame.
postultimate.
I noticed a few funny things too. Like this:
“only ever did”? How many planets has BigB visited?
This is a trivial detail, but you keep addressing Mike Leigh’s work in a review of a Ken Loach film (with a picture of a poster showing his name as well as one of Ken himself) that mentions Mike Leigh only in passing, as a reference to a fuller discussion of the “often klunkily empiricist approach [of “social realism”] to abstract and systemic forces”.
Don’t you like Ken’s films, or don’t they show up in a cinema near you?
Oh well the likes of our knowledgeable Chris Rogers has the answer to this, it’s all the fault of the EU, I’m surprised nobody’s cottoned on to it , everything is the fault of the EU hers some examples : Telegraph
Straight cucumbers – The Sun
Curved bananas banned by Brussels bureaucrats – The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express
Brussels bans barmaids from showing cleavage – The Sun, Daily Telegraph
Rumpole’s wig to scrapped by EU – Mail on Sunday
Church bells silenced by fear of EU law – Daily Telegraph
Motorists to be charged to drive in city centres under EU plans – Daily Telegraph
EU to stop binge drinking by slapping extra tax on our booze – The Sun
Brandy butter to be renamed ‘brandy spreadable fat’ – The European
British loaf of bread under threat from EU – Daily Mail
Truckers face EU ban on fry-ups – The Sun
EU to ban Union Flag from British meat packs – Daily Express
EU seeks to outlaw 60 dog breeds – Europa News Agency
Double-decker buses to be banned – Daily Telegraph
EU bans eating competition cakes – Timesonline
Now EU officials want control of your CANDLES – Daily Express
21-gun salutes are just too loud, Brussels tells the Royal Artillery – Mail on Sunday
Brussels threatens charity shops and car boot sales – Daily Mail
Plot to axe British number plates for standardised EU design – Daily Express
Women to be asked intimate details about sex lives in planned EU census – Daily Express
British cheese faces extinction under EU rules – PA News
EU meddlers ban kids on milk rounds – The Sun, The Telegraph
British chocolate to be renamed ‘vegelate’ under EU rules – Daily Mail
EU to ban church bells – Daily Telegraph
British film producers warn of new EU threat to industry – The Independent
Kilts to be branded womenswear by EU – Daily Record
EU to ban double decker buses – Daily Mail
Cod to be renamed ‘Gadus’ thanks to EU – Daily Mail
Brussels to restrict drinking habits of Britain’s coffee lovers – Daily Express
EU responsible for your hay fever – Daily Mail, The Times
Condom dimensions to be harmonised – Independent on Sunday
EU wants to BAN your photos of the London Eye – Daily Express
Geoff: have you ever lived in either the EU or an EFTA nation ?
I have, (in both), since 1990 !
All your comment says to me is that you are clueless about European Political realities and you need to do something about UK Media & Communications Laws, URGENTLY !
Grow up, man and then I’ll tell you why the EU WILL FAIL and it why it was always destined to fail >>> I’ll give you a clue, mind you: it has to do with A&A,
Autobahns & Antennas. Something Hitler understood from the ‘Getgo’ !
I wonder what it was you likes to make you live there ? probably defending the country from those nasty Germans and French parading round in a silly khaki army suit protecting the riches ill gotten gains
Answer the question & get real !
Come on son, I’m waiting for what must be a very simple answer, surely !
Otherwise, I won’t waste my time educating you on political, scientific & media realities that you clearly know nothing about, nor care about in your ignorance: so, other than that, to answer your dumbfuk question, in the most simple manner, rather than get all technical, scientific & legal, The short answer is, >>>
“PEOPLE LIKE YOU !” 🙂
Language Timothy .
Which European Languages do you speak: I’ve mastered a more than a few, speak a few more and been drawn into many of the cultures, now approaching 30 working years on the continental mainland. The only countries I’ve not worked in are Finland, Sweden & Norway …
How about you ?
Are you always incapable of answering eine EINFACHE firkin’ FRAGE ?
Or, are you just trolling, like most new names here@Offg ?
I don’t wish to engage with you sonny, you’re a know all, i can imagine when you walk into the pub you’re mates saying ay up here is is ,I’m going, what’s it like to be a bore?
Stand by your bed Timothy , make sure your boot are polished. and after breakfast be prepared to put your own life at risk for the sake of the bankers ( you’ll be told it’s for the good of the country) 2000 ex soldiers die every month in warmongering USA , but what the hell we’ve got to make sure those nasty Russians aren’t going to sneak over in the middle of the night eh Tim but dim? funny thing Tim but dim, is I don’t see Belgium, Holland,Germany,Italy hooking themselves on the the shirt tails of the warmongering yanks I wonder how we can do it on our own considering the EU tell us what to do, strange that, Tim but
dim
I don’t see Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, hooking themselves on the shirt tails of the warmongering Yanks.
Except in Syria, Afghanistan, and a few other places.
France you mean?
No.
Look at the casualty lists for Iraq and Afghanistan.
iraqcoalitioncasualties
Broken down by nationality.
They’re all there.
And countries like Italy, the former colonial power in the Libya genocide, which was bombing Libya back to the Stone Age again in 2011. With Denmark. And the others.
I’m surprised Tim but dim, if you’re having a lie in , you should be up at six as you’ve been ordered to do get you silly khaki uniforms on and salute another human being, and if the people in this county decide they’ve had enough Tim but dim and decide, you will be ordered to do what’s needed , and if that means taking aim at civilians Tim but dim , I’m sure you would willingly oblige , ‘JUST OBEYING ORDERS eh Tim but dim?
Are you finished ? yawn, the kids employed by the 77th, today. . . thanks for confirming all that I suspected. Is that you crispy geoff scratchings ? Clearly a troll, & ta for the confirmation: patience pays off, let the punk hang himself & I Love Clarity 🙂 worthy of Rant, & this rant, from someone that sets wild horses free & loose on the public & pastures forgotten, this rant is gonna’ ‘GET WILD’ >>> I know, unlike you, what Genocide looks like, twice witnessed and have seen enough dead bodies to know that the aftermath & stench is far worse than any initial moment of impact. Clearly you don’t know anything about me, or much about life yet, you complete wimp, let me explain … 🙂 (Oh, but, others in these columns do know me 🙂 back to the point answer the damn question: Where have you lived in Europe and any language & cultural knowledge you may have acquired, could be your starter for 10 (and then you can excuse your blatant ignorance, at leisure 😉 ) >>> just for starters,
Q: Who sold out UK Futures Bright & WISE, Scientifically Speaking ?
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
A: Open this link & Part 2, importantly & get informed about what really fucked UK futures: it was Thatcher’s plan to sell off the real Crown jewels of any UK future ! UDipstick: this is urgent that you and your generation get real about what was stolen and what you need back, immediately under societal control ! In LAW! & “The History of the National Security State” & Assange, be you Brit. or Yank or any 5iFUKUS NATO Nation ! (and then after reading said links, if you want, I’ll tell you how cheap it was for an unlimited internet connection in Hong Kong in 1995, to local servers, 24/7/ hours/days, if you didn’t break/lose that first connection. The essence of wisdom, is to know…
that you know nothing & keep learning.
After Thatcher sold a united family crown jewels of scientific designs, from pre-WW2 Radar days to culminating in Fibre Optic Cable, which BoJo the clown, now sells in his manifesto and opening statement as PM, just a whole 30 fuckin’ years TOO LATE 1) A Bulgarian Heretic (Odhams 1946) (Yawn, lol, bedtime here in Bulgaria, on the EU frontline to Asia, in a Dreiländereck, with NATO Greece Jokers to the South of me, NATO Turk Jokers to the East, and NATO Bulgarian Jokers to the North . . .), & soon I’ll have NATZO Republic of North Macedonian Jokers to the West of me and here I am @OffG, stuck in the middle with you, LOL, all in walking distance from my house, (Except you, thank god & allah, in the highest EU per capita Muslim population) 🙂 :, since 2004 onwards, observing NATO activities and strategic methods of depopulation for profiting from natural & political resources, as in human, better said,
besser gesagt >>> INHUMAN !
Like you care ! That, We have Dundee Precious Metals now here, VERY near why I live >>> it’s the fuckin’ new Klondike, mate, the Wild East, not for wimps & chimps or chumps or pederasts, in Cyrillic … Like you’ve ever seen the aftermath of Genocide & the lies that have been told in the West, about events here on the Balkans, all part of NATZO Strategy, innit, so, don’t come crying to me, with your British 77th Brigade BS, which so ignominiously began, by bombing the Bulgarians with GAS ATTACKS & Rollling Barrages for 2 days, at the Battle of Doiran, in 1918, ffs:- & coz’ you all lost at that Battle, Inc. the Brits. French, Greeks & Republicans of Northern Macedonia, combined, massively outnumbering the Bulgarians, yer’ still gassing us now. Don’t you fuckers ever give up sticking your nose for profit from others resources ? and meanwhile, the EU polluting our BG. air quality, thanks to the EU shit Regs. & Corruption, now we get Italian Boat loads of RUBBISH from NAPOLI, SEE ! ? If I were you, I’d wise up to just how fuk’d up & corrupted the EU Politicians truly are, from A-Z BBoykoBorisov, Merkel, Macron, May, Verhofstadt, Van der Leyen, Juncker & Tusk: And as for Moritz Leuenberger, just mention WTC7 and say, Dr. Dan Ganser & Tim jenkins would like to ask you some questions, live recording, no prep, freedom of information on Terror Matters & Banking. 🙂 I must say, i’m enjoying this rant, with a fine glass of highest quality, home made Red, on top of a single fine fresh Staropramen Tymno/Dark 🙂 great grapes this year, (the wife’s brothers, better than Rothschild’s), I reckon.
Food for thought 😉
Greetings,
(Damn, you should taste these grapes, so damn fine 🙂
P.s. If you need a cheap (high quality Thracian steel, mind you) Bg. second hand AK47, let me know . . . no charge, I’ll just point you in the right direction 😉 and if you get a chance, can you research Dilyana Gaytandzhieva & then tell NATO to stop practising rolling bombing barrages, today @ KRIVO POLE and the bloody Greeks to the South should STFU intimidating Erdogan, daily, as well !!! >>> NATZO Dundee Precious Metals Golden Wars for Golden Years Wa Wa Wa, who sang that, on the Silk Road ? ! Damnit, it was Bowie, me & NATO Dundee; do you remember Carlos Alamar on that recording … & Earl Slick, on ‘StationtoStation’ goddamn, you have to respect Bowie all those years telling Queeny to fuck off with her knighthoodlums & TV soap operas. Anyone one for an en’ masse visiting of the Pizza Express in Woking: a brother of mine is hanging out nearby, ready for backup . . . Maybe we can hire sone Girl Guides in prep. for a Right Royal Visit, of Andrew with that awful BBC woman 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApHM1ct4tdM
Sense the contempt ?
Given my training as child, in Military Intelligence & micro-radio-waves and subsequent training in corporate intelligence, media research & analysis & the Physics of HAARP, long ago, consider yourself a fucking JOKE kiddo, and thanks for the excuse to rant, be you crispy fried Geoff or colonel fucking sanders, who gives a TOSS WHAT GEOFF SAYS > ? When he can’t even answer a simple firkin’ question honestly, the case is clear: another trolling no-neck ignorant 77th Brigade keyboard warrior, with no testicles and likely a poor relationship with his mother 😉
YOU do know what a Bulgarian Heretic is called in English (Odhams 1946), don’t you ?
A BUGGER ! >>> look it up, sucker 🙂
I’m really not interested in engaging with self important people as yourself , I couldn’t give four kind of shite where you lived, but what I do know is what’s going to happen to this shithole because of people like you, no doubt a reader of the other prick fredrick forsyth, yes Johnson , Raab, Lord Snooty, Ugly Patel to name just a couple, are going to make this country a really good place to live eh? thanks to the likes of you
Geoff: You are clearly well out of touch with what is urgently ‘called for’ . . .
particularly, scientifically speaking, stop thinking in such limited terms.
“?In a field?
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.”
Mark Strand
Try considering just 3 questions, constantly, from now on:-
1) Who am i . . . ?
2) What do i desire . . . ?
3) What do i know . . . ?
Simple: Easy, see ?
make yer’ own rules,
JUST like Julian Assange has !
Jivi Strav,
Tim
Well that was a mistake. They should have been scrapping John Mortimer. Or, at the very least, Leo McKern.
Too late. Mother Superior beat them to it. Lights out at nine, candles out at ten.
Will it make a difference?
It should act as a reminder to many left leaning progressives living a comfortable existence in Austerity Britain of the harsh reality of economic class in an unravelling capitalism. For those Labour Party activists pounding the streets in the run up to the general election it should re-inforce commitment in the face of winter weather and the unrelenting disparagement by the mainstream media. For those party members yet to engage it should serve as encouragement to do so.
Ken Loach was out canvassing for the Labour Party last week. He reminded us that Labour has a clear commitment to tackle the zero hours scourge and that Jeremy Corbyn was the only Labour MP to regularly stand on the picket line during the Miners’ Strike.
Thank you Phil for the review and Ken for the film.
Good point Bryan. I did consider making a similar response to my own rhetorical question – ie that on the eve of the most important general election since at least 1979, this film and its timely release might actually make a difference.
I decided against because it would have taken me into the nature of the Labour Party and of parliamentarianism. That would complicate what I wanted to be a simple and short review. But I’m very glad you raise this aspect of the matter. Do I want JC to win? You bet! Do I think this film can help? As a matter of fact I do.
Does anyone remember that scene in Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell’s character has his eyes clamped open and is forced to watch ‘retraining’ videos?
The psychopaths currently in charge could do with some Ken Loach ‘retraining’
Not that it would do any good.
Psychopaths die psychopathic.
It all started in 1979/80- Thatcher / Reagan, and now even die-hard capitalists, like Max Keiser, Peter Schiff, and (academic) Prof. Michael Hudson etc., are saying ‘times up’ on this obscenity of price of everything, value of nothing.
Problem is, even if Corbyn by divine intervention wins on the 12th, he will be shackled to the corpse of the EU…
Corbyn will be well and truly pushing sh.. uphill. It is almost impossible to get a fair suck-of-the-sav with Rupert Murdoch and the majority of the Zio-media brainwashing the unwashed.
A-l-m-o-s-t impossible.
Just look at what happened in Australia … a bombastic dunderhead was ‘elected,’ PM courtesy of ‘uncle’ Rupert, the most powerful man in politics, who is not a politician.
That is why he doesn’t like the EU in his own words , when he speaks the UK government jumps, when he speaks in the EU they take no notice.
It would be divine intervention to win on the 12th – but the landslide will actually come when the votes are mostly counted FRIDAY the 13th.
Unlucky for a FEW – a happier xmas and new year full of hope instead of fear for the MANY.
How do you post video here – I have a film clip of Ken speaking
I probably bore people by saying that I traveled through most of the eastern block countries in the old days of communism, so let’s instead have a bit of music. This is half way accurate when it comes to Poland in the mid 80s…
Dear Philip,
Sorry to hear of your experiences with Sheffield Hallam University. I can’t believe that universities in Britain would treat academic staff in this way.
On the other hand I can well believe that a local Sydney university would abolish an entire faculty that has nearly 6,000 students enrolled.
Jen the parlous state of academia brought me back into leftwing politics after a long slumber in peti-bourgeois lifestye land.
Keen not to personalise my own experience, or feel sorry for myself, I sought to understand my casualisation (and a few other aspects of academia’s degradation).
Sheffield Hallam had – in a 2013 response to my Freedom of Info request – over 800 zero hour academics of a total academic workforce of 2000. I began to study the political economy of academia (Andrew McGettigan has done outstanding empirical work in the UK) and soon saw it as inseparable from its marketisation.
That led me to study privatisation more generally. At first that was in the UK but the penny dropped that the fall of the USSR, and wars on the middle east , are all aspects of capital’s same movement to privatise the world.
That said, I repeat that my situation – now about to enter its ninth year as one of the longest running employment tribunal cases ever – was incomparably better than the very real plights of those so ably depicted by Debbie Honeywood as Abby.
That’s a mechanism so clearly understood by Marx i.e. that it’s so easy to coast along when your own circumstances are good – or at least tolerable. But the more people who sink down into hopelessness and poverty, the more “radicalised” they become. And since the system itself inevitably creates more and more paupers, the shrinking ruling class become increasingly nervous about that expanding rabble hovering on the horizon. Thus they resort to increasingly desperate and violent tactics to exert control.
Believe it.
Loach’s films do not reflect ‘a broader reality’ according to arch-tory, Kwasi Kwarteng.
For him, and neoliberal head-bangers like IDS, JRM and Priti ‘no, you can’t fucking come into our country’ Patel, Britains Orwellian benefits system is the envy of the civilised world, while low paid workers in the gig economy prefer the ‘flexibility’ of not having any sick pay, union representation, or holiday entitlement.
Basically Kwasi thinks he and his mates are doing a wonderful job and left-wing film makers like Loach are simply over-egging the pudding.
Bizarrely a sizeable proportion of those being screwed by the system agree with Kwasi’s point of view, rather than Ken’s – go figure!
Well whether people except it or not, those that voted leave , have indirectly put these right wing pigs in office. and no doubt be there for another five years, well done.
Whether indirectly or not, those peop,e who voted have indjrectly encouraged the return of absolute monarchy. May husband and ay thank you
Correct, but what can one do when you have people like Tim, nice but dim, and Mark who think they are the only ones with an opinion, I got it right with Tim, nice but dim regards him being in the military, there’s not a cat in hells chance of him ever voting Labour, his brain has been programmed , anyone who is prepared to put their own life on the table for the sake of the rich elite thinking they are saving us from the nasty Russian communists , are, in my opinion idiots and nothing else, I ‘m not talking about the ones who had no choice, but the fools who sign up to do it, who would shoot their own parents if ordered to do so.I wonder what Tim nice but dim would think if as threatened there would be riots on the street if we didn’t leave, he would find himself firing rubber bullets at the people who are on the same side as himself,and for some reason called ‘heroes ha ha haha ha ‘
BWAHAHAHAHA, I reckoned with riots on the streets in the end, somewhen, back in 2003/ 2004 and told all my family and especially a daughter, that she might want to give France a wide birth right now, in many areas, (only a few years ago, now) coz’ it will all start there >>> & look, Les Gilets Jaunes: one of the advantages of speaking languages and listening to their culture & philosophy, it makes events easy to predict, just like trolls & Swiss Bankers, geoff, yer’ so way off the mark & tim’s level of thoughts, I’d find a girl, if I were you …
Much appreciate this review Philip. Ken Loach is both an artist and a storyteller railing against the injustices of capitalism and the class system.
He is probably my favourite director.
I saw his previous film I, Daniel Blake, where I found myself wanting to yell at the screen, along with numerous others like the deeply poignant My Name Is Joe, Land & Freedom, and Riff Raff.
Ken Loach portrays real people in their own environments.
A gritty slice of life far far removed from the banal bumfluff emanating from Hollywood.
I know all about the ‘gig economy’ first hand, having sold The Big Issue street mag for years now.
At 57, I’ve pretty much given up on finding paid work again. You’re solely reliant on other people’s goodwill and generosity, even tho the mag content greatly annoys me.
Recently they had an edition on homelessness in Australia. Over several stories, the words Neoliberalism or Capitalism or Structural unemployment were not used once.
It was like homelessness happened in a complete vacuum. Nothing to do with the actual economic system.
Band aid solutions that did nothing to challenge Neoliberalism were offered.
Often they quote news stories from The Guardian or The Huffington Post.
Will definately be seeing this, thanks Philip.
In the UK, there is a firm called B and Q, which isn’t that bad as employers go.
It sells building materials, tools, paint and that kind of thing.
They have a preference for taking on older people, who are more reliable and better with customers and know more about the products.
Cheers Mark, there’s a similar company here in Aussie called Bunnings that has a reputation for hiring older workers, applied for 4-5 jobs with them, no reply. Applied for lots of jobs with Aldi and other supermarkets here, plus retail, hospitality, warehouse, car wash, about 180 factory jobs, even charity fundraising.
The only ones that replied were Aldi and a couple warehouse places.
Some days are really good with the mag, and you can stick a bit of money away, or go see a film like Sorry We Missed You. Other days are like a snail crawling thru mud, and it’s baked beans and bit of cheap ham on toast for dinner.
Millions have ended up doing this sort of thing – all the Uber delivery people for example. And how much profit does Uber make?
All this is the logical outcome of nearly 40 years of ‘let it rip’ Neoliberalism. You touched on that also with your comment about Walmart jobs and the new feudalism. Which it is.
It’s all the fault of the EU, oh, wait a minute.
A friend of mine was left unemployed at 56 and had trouble getting anything.
I found him a job (which on the face of it might not sound very nice) working for a firm doing repossessions for banks and building societies. But it was dealing with empty properties that people had usually just abandoned, not evicting anybody. He worked from home and went round to properties with a locksmith and a plumber. They drilled out and changed the locks (the occupants had usually decamped taking the keys with them), drained down the heating system, cleared out the junk mail and put in a short report on the place. There was a firm here which had a contract to work for different mortgage people, called PHH. All the properties he dealt with were empty. The money was reasonable and it kept him going for 2 years.
Then he gradually went over to running his own little business with his son and a friend. They did property maintenance and decorating, changed locks, and did some gardening work. They got a contract to cut the grass for a chain of petrol stations. He said if he wanted to he could have worked seven days a week
Of course that’s not feasible for everybody.
I was working 40 hours a week when I was eleven, but like Mark Twain said, if work was any good the rich people would keep it all for themselves.
Thanks again Mark. As a last resort, there’s always the job agencies (tho have had pretty crap experiences with them in the past).
*** News just in. The United States Of Evil has just recognised illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank as…. legal. So much for international law. It dosn’t exist. Therefore Fat Pompeo and Trump will be formally supporting the settlement process in support of the apartheid Zionist regime and helping out their buddy Bibi. Who gives a fig about the Palestinians, aye? Golan Heights, Jerusalem, now this.
Trump is planning to give them the rest of the solar system next. The Moon and Mars are all part of the historic Promised Land claimed by Nuttyyahoo. The Martians will just have to go somewhere else.
So the Martians will be stateless as well? It’s all so fecken predictable Mark. Saw a clip of Pompous announcing this earlier and the look on this creatures face. He could barely contain his delight. Bibi will probably be breaking out the Bollinger, and ordering whole village’s ethnically cleansed.
Thanks for proving to be the greatest and most biased nut around….
Trump is very successfully putting in the charges that will blow their World Trade Cartel into vertical freefall. Don’t knock it.
Never has in any meaningful sense. It’s primary use is as a catch phrase to register indolent outrage without serious intent to act.
Except against people from Serbia, Liberia, Cote D’voire, Syria, Russia, you know, people from countries that aren’t in the ‘International Community’ aka the Anglo Zionist Empire aka The Hegemon. They’re all immune from prosecution under ‘international law’ as we all know. Do I even need to say…. Tony Blair.
Be careful in B & Q mark. I was in my local store the other day when this bloke in black and orange came up to ask if I wanted decking. Luckily I got the first punch in, but I wanted to warn readers to be on their guard
Ah yes, B and Q. I have often wondered how they train all those orange and black clad employees to somehow teleport out of sight at the precise moment when you need a bit of information
Walmart no longer have employees, just “associates.”
Forget a living wage, forget holiday and sick pay, forget benefits, forget pensions.
I know someone who came up to retirement and found that a Maxwell/ Philip Green type had stolen his pension.
Scrub the plans for a retirement in France.
So he carries on cycling to a manual job in his late 60s, and plans carrying on indefinitely till his health gives out, in the absence of any other options.
Welcome to the new feudalism.
This is how crapitalism works for 99% of the population.
Working at Wal*Mart is a bit of a cliche but its actually not as bad as people might think. I’ve got a friend who’s worked there for quite a few years after retiring; he’s quick to rush to its defense when someone runs it down. What it gives him is part time income and freedom from the layoff lottery — he’s worked in electronics for many years and got both used to and tired of the endless layoff cycles. (The irony now is that his skill set is now in demand…..you keep laying staff off during business down cycles then eventually you run out of people.) Working at WalMart isn’t sexy but at least its steady.
Our local WalMart has to compete with other retailer chains for staff. Since at least two of them are highly respected with much sought after jobs they have to at least try to match the best that’s on offer. Other outlets in other parts of the country (US) may be very different but experience shows that the savings from screwing your staff over are easily offset by losses due to ‘shrinkage’ and surly to non-existent customer service.
The Uber type ‘gig’ economy is really the tip of a much larger employment iceberg. Many large companies employ relatively few people with the bulk being rented from staffing agencies. The rentals do the same work in the same circumstances as the employees proper, usually the only way to tell them apart is the different type of employee badge, and they may even earn similar wages. What they lack tends to be employment security, career path and any goodies like stock options.
At the risk of going on too long I should remark that our state — California — has recently passed legislation to force gig economy companies to treat their workforce as employees. Its a great idea but it has unintended consequences for people who are truly gig workers (e.g. screenwriters). Keep an eye on the state to see how it pans out.
A relative of mine has worked in a large factory on a production line for 30 years’
He is the last full time regular employee they have.
All the others are short term agency staff, a lot of them eastern European.
I thought they could probably get away with that given the nature of the work, but that is not the case.
Some of them are only there for 10 or 12 days or less, hardly long enough to take their hat and coat off. They are brought in for a short time at short notice, and don’t know basic things like where to get a brush or an oil can, so this causes endless problems. There isn’t much incentive for them to find out before they move on to their next gig.
This actually costs the firm a lot of money and a lot of production.
They put the labels for the products in the machines upside down or back to front so the whole batch has to be done all again.
Or they put the bar codes on in the wrong place. The goods are taken to a warehouse 60 miles away. When they get there, they can’t be recognised by the computer and the whole load has to be brought back to the factory and done again.
This sort of thing happens on a daily basis.
My relative sometimes sees things going wrong and sorts it out. Sometimes he just can’t be bothered, shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders, and goes home and drinks his beer.
They have offered him supervisor jobs a few times, but he always turns them down.
Periodically, all the supervisor and QC jobs are cut to save money, so that would probably happen to him and he prefers to stay where he is.
Mark, your friend’s hilarious description of how things go wrong when you don’t have a regular workforce seems to me to have an evolutionary moral. It was the great 18th century German evolutionary biologist Wolfang von Goethe who first realized that advanced forms do not arise suddenly out of the blue but develope from gradual modification of simpler forms. Things that work better started as things that work reliably. It is harder to adapt to an environment that is constantly changing. This is the argument for Conservatism as against Revolution. The passing on of hard-earned skills (memes) is as much a factor in evolution (especially human evolution) as the passing on of genes.
Don’t mention France, it’s in the EU, you’ll be giving people a heart attack on here .
Apologies if this seems a bit of a tangent but this article on the gig economy reminded me of another article on the seemingly unrelated topic of the 70s movie “Taxi Driver”. This is the one where Robert DeNiro in familiar deranged and indeed neo-Fascist mode fumes away in a sleepless taxi job before finally losing it and …well, you get the drift. I found this piece:
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/7/30/17629402/taxi-driver-martin-scorsese-paul-schrader-incels
This links the movie to the “incel” thing – which is irrelevant here – but this bit stood out:
So, compared to the bright shiny but isolated working methods of today, even the most depressing scenes of 70s squalor seem more hopeful in that they depict at least some kind of community.
Another great film by Mr.Loach. If you haven’t heard of him then its time to discover his other works like KES and HIDDEN AGENDA.
Its no wonder his work is more acclaimed in the EU than it is at home.
Debbie Honeywood and Kris Hitchen are more than convincing , they are brilliant.
5-Ken Loach.MOV