Any space will do

I watched a meaningful film last night on BBC iPlayer. Read any review of Ken Loach's 2016 film The Old Oak and the keywords xenophobia or racism will jump out.

I found the film much deeper.

It's a story of the survivors of two traumatised communities coming together in reality. One group are Syrian refugees arriving in Britain from the warzone. The other group are survivors of Thatcher's ideological and economic war on the working classes of Britain.

Each are outcasts, looking for a place to be. Yet neither have a place. The Syrians cower in their homes, speaking only in Arabic and watching social-media horror of bombed schools. The Englishmen take refuge in a faded-glory pub, drinking their lives away, stewing in resentment of long-past injustice and loss.

Speaking personally, for 55 years, every government in my life so far has done its damnedest to destroy not just communities, but the very concept of "community" itself. Thatcher denied its existence. Britain is more atomised than anywhere else I've been, including sparse Nordic lands where people are snowed-in for six months. And if we do meet, it is under some corporate pretext, all watched over by loving CCTV.

In the UK we've paved over green spaces, built on children's' playgrounds, closed pubs, parks, public rights of way, shut down libraries and community centres or let them fall into disrepair. Whether anyone recognises it or not we've had a half-century of policy in Britain to separate, isolate, and alienate.

That's what Ken Loach's film is really about.

In fact the "right wing" antagonists in The Old Oak are pitiful (not merely pitless). They are lost man-children, stuck on social media, sharing nasty memes and videos of violence against immigrants. None have the stomach for any more action than lifting a pint. Besides, their real enemies left for the Cayman Islands with a suitcase of money thirty years before.

If Loach had wanted comic-book racists, wardrobe would have put them in Harrington jackets and Doc Martens as skinheads. In fact the script goes out of its way to distance them from "racists they don't want turning up to their meeting". They're a bunch of sore men rightfully angry at being left on the scrapheap of Britain, robbed of any future and any hope.

The meeting with the Syrians and ultimate catharsis happens in the dilapidated backroom of the pub, contested by the locals. It's transformed into a community centre, with free food for the miners families and the refugees, both isolated and impoverished. Under the old miners' banner that says "when we eat together we stick together", they find common cause and companionship that is situated in a place, not some digital la-la land of disinformation and mindless distraction.

That sense of not having a "meeting place" is a horrible emotion I can relate to, not from homelessness but from work. Many of the hateful places I taught at were locked-down corporate hellholes. Universities became unrecognisable after the 1990s. Before that, you could just find and use any empty classroom or lecture theatre out of hours. There was a student union building. In and around Bloomsbury in the 1980s there were literally hundreds of societies, clubs, associations, and dozens of free, empty spaces with open doors, from Conway Hall to the Tavistock, to Senate House. The whole campus of the University of London was once an open community of learning.

As a visiting professor I saw the change across a lot of institutions over 35 years. By 2010 most universities were high security gulags, accessible only by key-cards and turnstiles and covered in cameras. Booking a room was a technofascist nightmare, via awful "portal" websites, needing "apps", pre-arranging lists of students. To escape this Kafkaesque horror show in summer I took to organising my tutorials in the local park, or at a nearby pub. Any space will do. Anywhere we can sit in a circle and hear each other. By 2016, when Loach's film was made, I'd already soft-quit in my mind, recognising British universities no longer as fit places for teaching and learning. The university as a place had ceased to exist.

These two narratives still coexist. The populist idea that "digital technology connects people" is met in equal and opposite measure by the corporate project that uses technology to divide; To drive down wages. To oppose solidarity and unions. To herd people into walled gardens. To disrupt organisation, spontaneous meetings, unauthorised mutual support. To monitor, separate, discipline and punish. Nothing outside the matrix of control can be allowed to exist.

That sense of oppression, by a regime determined to stop groups of people meeting, discussing, or sharing, hangs in the air across "Western society" still. It came into sharper relief during the pandemic, but let's note that "social distancing" was already a thing before it had a name. The crackdown on protest and gatherings in Britain are telltale signs.

The role of technology in Loach's film is not especially emphasised. He paints it somewhat negatively, but avoids demonising social media specifically. There is some hint that the British and Syrian women may have worked digitally to patch up and heal rifts. However, Loach focuses hugely on the power of place and embodiment as alternative modes of being and necessary components of unity.

Despite the efforts of community organisations and pressure groups like Reclaim The Streets, today across Britain there are thousands of empty buildings, closed police stations and council offices, shops, cafes and pubs boarded up. High-streets are decayed, filled only with betting shops, vanity emporiums (nails and tattoos), and charity stores. A tyranny of sky-high rents, licensing laws, insurance rules, liability and safety codes make sure they stay empty and unused.

This is the flip-side of how digital technology splits our country through fear, racism and hate. It's roots are in isolation, not just because the digital world is an addictive distraction from real life, but because in getting stuck there we've abandoned tangible spaces to meet, eat, talk together and build human relations. Loach's film is a great reminder we must take back or recreate those spaces in order to heal.