The movie in review here, is a reminder to me that the idea of "documentary" is in itself elastic and potentially a tool to distort the "reality" it supposedly documents, into an ideal understanding of that "reality". This is also known as propaganda.
After watching this it would be a good thing to point out a few aspects to look for in one-sided documentaries, designed to skew your idea of reality to conform with a political ideal. It is only showing arguments from people who benefit from that particular ideal. Huge chunks of aspects that might show the opposite story is left out without a trace. The good and the bad is always portrayed and those in support of the ideal are the good people while those who criticise it are the bad people. Lastly, freedom is ALWAYS portraid as egoism and blamed exactly for the same problems, that the "ideal" produces", so that those within the ideal can give the "egoists" the blame for their own faults and so will never have any reason to change that system as it is always some evil entity outside the "norm" that is destructive. It is in fact all over the place in this "documentary".
45 refers to the year 1945 and as anyone will know it was the year that world war 2 ended. In Britain this meant that there were a lot of widows, crippled men, orphan children and destroyed families one way or another, predominantly "ruled" by the women in a war-created majority. Women are known to prefer "security" over freedom and off course, the socialist Labour party won a landslide election in july that year, while the war in the pacific was still raging.
It is all kinds of ironic that men died in millions on battlefields fending off extreme statism, in fascism and to some extend communism ... only to come home crippled and have socialism imposed on them in their homeland. Another interesting thing is that Britain, originally the ignition of free markets and individual liberties, is leading the march into socialism and communism in the west. It could seem that there are certain cycles that small states lead to great wealth, that leads to big government, that leads to socialism and so on ... down into a venezuelan style pit of poverty.
Most of those interviewed here obviously have no real clue how "an economy" works. And the middle class academics and government employees, are clearly very pro government and socialism, because it enriches them personally. Collectivisation works so well as a political tool, exactly because individual responsibility is washed out of all interactions and a monopoly of "services" replaces it. Therefore no one any longer have any idea of how much a particular service is supposed to cost, since competition is eliminated. And then people start to think that the service itself is only upheld because the government provides it.
between the lines though, you get a sense of the egoism it is really based on and which ultimately destroys the economy. Through taxation, people who "pay" for a service in reality, are not (always) those who are involved in those interactions where those money changes hands as services or goods. it means they very likely (unless in rare coincident cases) will get poorer by the simple fact that they did not have the ability to say NO THANK YOU. The skewed incentives it creates is most clearly seen in the part where a woman has heard that families with two children will get a house from the government. And so she convinces her husbands to have another child to get that house. But hundreds of other women have got the same idea, and then they have to regulate the "service" and they don't get the house. So after all, they ar left poorer than they were when they did not have that extra child they cannot afford in the present situation. The taxpayer gets poorer, the families get poorer ... the only one who wins are those state-protected jobs in the government. The government "workers" have won and it just keeps growing and growing ... as we have seen all over the west ever since.
The nationalisation of railways, electricity, coal and so on is described as "the government takes over X". The director makes sure not to spell out that those private companies were threaten on their lives, by the government to hand over their businesses, or they would be shot. Everything has to look like it is all milk and honey and that private businesses are stupid and inefficient and employing people that are not needed and so on. Exactly the problem nationalisation and socialisation of anything inevitably will result in.
Then it takes a huge leap from 1951 to 1979, where everything supposedly must have been a paradise. Since nothing is shown from this period, it must have been fantastic right? And then the evil people come in and destroy heaven for the socialists. Thatcher becomes primeminister in 1979 and starts to privatise everything as far as possible. The "documentary" portrays it as if that is the sole reason why and the point when things started to go sour. And now we see the police slamming down on the "innocent" workers and one of them asks who would want to beat an innocent worker ... and the director cuts to a clip of Thatcher. My god it is manipulative. Apparently there was "no violence at all" involved in the "Spirit of 45" and the following years ... then suddenly in 1979, the "bastard" individualists in the conservatives had a hard-on (or wet-on) for beating up the population and destroying what they had so "carefully" custoded since 45. Bullocks.
The reality is that for two decades or so, the economy and social environments became worse and worse. Unemployment was rising, crime was rising, taxation was rampant (one for me nineteen for the government, to paraphrase the Beatles). And everything only seem to get worse and worse. inflation was rampant and really turned into stagflation, after the gold standard was abandoned completely by the USA.
It is clear that things were nice, for a while, back in the late 40s and early fifties, but when the bill came due, there was no one to pay it .. and the inevitable systematised poverty, which is the best way to describe socialism, kicks in. And off course the hardline socialists are then taking their gloves off and stating how people should be ostracised, and yes, even killed if they don't like the system they are forced into.
People never learn. It is demanding immediate gratification by sacrificing longterm stability. It is appealing to a collective that cannot exist, to subdue individuality. it is the fear of everyone else having the ability to say "no I will not have anything to do with you". It always leads to destruction. Just look at what is going on with riots around the world at the moment. It is sad, that both the illusion keeps reappearing and that people believe in it.
6/11