Despatching Thatcher - who always had cost in her arsenal to justify cuts

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 April

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

In reassuring me that there was no expectation of a delay in my journey using The Tube, Transport for London's notices called 'Baroness' one whom some recently have been referring to as 'Lady' - who knows what the protocol is, but it seems more than a little odd that no one knows what to call Thatcher.

Certainly not, to my mind and the title of a recent waste of the medium of film, The Iron Lady. More like, if a noisy band hadn't got there first, an iron maiden, choking and skewering to death those whom she despised : just look at the footage from the time of the miners' strike in Ken Loach's excellent The Spirit of '45 (2013).

In London, this seems a day like any other, apart from those notices - just imagine a horrible world where everyone around you wore a black arm-band !

Which takes me, by an inevitable association, to the tomb of The Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral - about him, as about the snuffed-out promise of Prince Henry (i.e. the elder son of James I (of England)), there was no doubt what was felt. Yes, even in the seventeenth century, people were not as free as we now think ourselves, but there was a lively press, and a spirit that would lead to a monarch on trial for crimes against his own country...

Not that the chummy trio of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne need face any more than tha ballot-box, but they are fools if they think that their self-minded and motivated support of their cronies builds this country, rather than their wealth and interests, and that it will all go unforgiven, let alone unnoticed !


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Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 March

Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.

Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.

And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.


As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?

Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then

Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.

And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...


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