Last night my wife and I watched the film Pride. In case you haven't seen it, the film chronicles the fortunes of a London-based Lesbian and Gay Support Group raising money for striking miners in the mid-80s. When its members go to the Valleys to meet the socially ultra-conservative miners and their families, much hilarity ensues. And not a bit of poignance, if that's a proper word.
I enjoyed Pride, although not as much as my wife, and not as much as I should have done. One of the annoying things about the film (and Brassed Off too) is that its account of the politics behind the strike is so one-sided.
The fate of the British coal mining industry is a genuine tragedy. The number of pits was in decline long before Mrs Thatcher came to power, and Harold Wilson closed many more mines than the Tories ever did. According to one set of figures I came across when I was writing an earlier post (Thatcher and the Miners Strike, if you're interested) nearly 350,000 miners left the industry in five years in the mid 1960s. By the time of the strike it cost £44 per ton to mine British coal. Other countries were selling it for £32 a ton. Taxpayers were subsidising the industry by more than £1 billion every year. Moreover the mining union was led by communists and militants who had demanded enormous pay increases and held the country to ransom in the 1970s in order to get them. The first of these strikes occurred when the NCB rejected a demand for a pay increase of 43%. The second brought down the Heath government, and after Labour was elected instead, Harold Wilson settled the dispute with a pay offer of 35%.
And yet while the economic and political case for buying coal elsewhere (or turning to other forms of energy, in particular gas) was overwhelming, so too was the counter-argument. Mining communities existed because of the pit. There was no other work. I know this from first hand experience because I went to school in South Yorkshire, which God knows was run down enough even before the strike, and it was only too easy to see what was going to happen once the pits closed. Whole communities faced ruin.
I gave money to the miners in the 80s because I couldn't bear to see them suffer; but in my heart I also knew they were fighting a losing battle. When other people can produce what you do more cheaply, it's wrong for taxpayers in other industries, without job security themselves, to have to pay so that you can stay in work. It's also wrong for workers in other industries to see the competitiveness of their products undermined by artificially high energy costs.
The dispute was, as I say, a tragedy because it forced essentially good people, facing ruin, into conflict with a government which was essentially right.
None of these nuances could be detected in Pride. The film lined up on the one side The Evil Thatcher, represented by the jeering police, impersonal, inhuman and existing only as an object of hate (two of the most sympathetic characters decided whether Fuck Thatcher or Screw Thatcher is the most appropriate epithet for a placard), and on the other a stellar cast of some of Britain's finest actors (Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton particularly good) portraying the honest, humorous and human miners and their gay supporters. The film assumed that the justification of the strike and the rightness of the miners' cause was a given. It even, for God's sake, played Billy Bragg's There is a Power in a Union over the end credits. Not one second of screen time was given to the possibility there might have been another side to the argument.
Pride was a co-production by BBC Films. It was nakedly political. Incidentally it also demonstrated a view of gay people which was thoroughly positive, and of the main protagonist's suburban homophobe family as starchy, uptight and repressed. As it happens I'm not a homophobe - for one thing people can't choose their sexuality; for another I don't think it's a binary thing - but there was no mistaking Pride's political partisanship.
A rare example perhaps of history being written by the losers. Re-written, actually.
I don't mind the BBC making political films. It's very hard to produce art without political resonance anyway. But you have to ask yourself, Would BBC Films have put its money behind a film which took the other view? Would it have backed a film showing Arthur Scargill as an evil communist intent on bringing down the democratically elected Thatcher government? Or about Jack Jones taking money from the KGB? Would it have put money behind a story about dutiful women of South Wales Chapel righteously upset about the promiscuous Aids-bearing homosexuals from the capital? Even to ask the question is to realise how laughably unlikely that would be.
I've enjoyed the BBC's W1A much more. Hugh Bonneville does his bemused apparatchik turn to a tee; the rest of the cast are pretentious, ambitious, fatuous, ruthless and stupid by turns. Why is it funny? Because there's an element of truth in it.
On the one hand of course we should applaud the BBC for its willingness to lampoon itself in this way. On the other, the Corporation risks nothing by revealing its staff as some of them actually are because it knows that we've got to pay the licence fee anyway.
Two fingers to us - if things really are like this at Broadcasting House, or if we don't like the politics of BBC Films, there's nothing we can do about it.
