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On 16 November 2009, while Oranges and Sunshine was in production in the UK, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to the ‘Forgotten Children’ in the Great Hall, Parliament House

“We come together today to deal with an ugly chapter in our nation's history. And we come together today to offer our nation's apology. To say to you, the Forgotten Australians, and those who were sent to our shores as children without your consent, that we are sorry. Sorry - that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry - for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy, of childhoods lost. Sorry - for all these injustices to you, as children, who were placed in our care.

As a nation, we must now reflect on those who did not receive proper care. The truth is this is an ugly story. And its ugliness must be told without fear or favour if we are to confront fully the demons of our past.”

The full text can be found at http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/6321

On 24 February 2010, while Oranges and Sunshine was in production in Australia, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology in the Commons on behalf of the British Government.

“Until the late 1960s, successive UK Governments had over a long period of time supported child migration schemes. To all those former child migrants and their families... we are truly sorry. They were let down. We are sorry they were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. We are sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we are sorry that it has taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved.”

The full text can be found http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/
cm100224/debtext/100224-0004.htm

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We are all familiar with the ritual of the body of a dead soldier returning from foreign soil; solemn music, the national flag, escorts and salutes recorded in detail by the nation’s media. Words of consolation flow from politicians and generals to broken-hearted relatives, many so young they often clutch infants. It wasn’t quite that way for Deely, the sister of Robert, an ex-Paratrooper who was ambushed in Iraq. He was flown back from Kuwait and arrived at Glasgow airport. The undertaker told Deely there were ten bodies on the plane that day, two of which were unidentifiable. Robert’s coffin looked “like a big orange crate”. There was no fanfare, no union jack, no journalists and not one question. His death, as far as we know, wasn’t added to any list. The reason is simple. Robert was no longer a Paratrooper, but a private contractor. Some call them private soldiers, or Corporate warriors, or security consultants. Iraqis call them mercenaries.

The business of war is being privatised slowly and deliberately before our eyes. Robert’s orange crate of a coffin tells us so, as do the statistics. Patrick Cockburn, a well respected commentator on Iraq, estimated that there were around 160,000 foreign contractors in Iraq at the height of the occupation, many of whom, perhaps as many as 50,000, were heavily armed security personnel. The conduct of the war, and occupation afterwards, would have been impossible without their muscle.

Thanks to Paul Bremer, the US appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority each and every one of those contractors was given immunity from Iraqi law in the shape of Order 17 which was imposed on the new Iraqi Parliament. (Order 17 lasted from 2003 till the beginning of 2009.)

Nobody is interested in counting how many Iraqi civilians have been killed or injured by private contractors, but there is a vast body of evidence to suggest that there has been widespread abuse. Blackwater’s massacre of 17 civilians in the middle of Baghdad was the most notorious incident, but there were many more that went unreported. One senior contractor told me, on condition of anonymity, that he spoke to a South African who told him killing an Iraqi was just like “shooting a Kafir”. Other bone fide contractors, proud of their professionalism, told me of their disgust at the violence of “the cowboys”. If a contractor was involved in an incident which caused a fuss, they were whisked out of the country by their company. Impunity, by order.

While lowly contractors gambled with lives and limbs on Route Irish, the Chief executives of those same companies made fortunes. Mr David Lesar, chief executive of Halliburton, (former CEO being Dick Cheney) earned just under 43 million dollars in 2004. Mr Gene Ray of Titan earned over 47 million between 2004 and 2005. Mr JP London of CACI earned 22 million. The devil is always in the detail. Private...

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In 1980 Pat Martino moved his belongings from California to Philadelphia to live with two complete strangers: his parents. As a young jazz guitar virtuoso he had achieved near legendary status during the 60s and 70s, before being diagnosed with a life-threatening brain condition. Surgery had saved his life but wiped his memory. Back in his childhood home, surrounded by the relics of his former life, his father played him his old recordings at full volume and friends rallied to try to coax him back to being the great artist he had been. He could not dispute the evidence; the face in the mirror was the same as the one on the record sleeves but it meant nothing to him. Amnesia had ripped selfhood from his brain and rendered his life meaningless. He was nobody.

Director Ian Knox and Neuropsycologist Paul Broks travel America in search of the soul of the legendary jazz guitar great Pat Martino. Tracing his remarkable return from the depths of amnesia to the peak of artistic achievement, Broks explores the nature of memory, self, creativity and the mysterious brain mechanisms underlying the construction of personal identity. What is the self? How much change can it survive? Pat Martino is an unlikely American hero whose moving story holds meaning for us all.

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Eric the postman is slipping through his own fingers...
His wife has gone, his stepsons are out of control and the house was chaotic even before a cement mixer appeared in the front garden. Life is crazy enough, but it is Eric's own secret that is driving him to the brink. How can he face up to Lily, the woman of his dreams that he once loved and walked out on many years ago? Despite the comical efforts and misplaced goodwill of his mates, Eric continues to sink.
In desperate times it takes a spliff and a special friend to help a lost postman find his way, so Eric turns to his hero: footballing genius, philosopher and poster boy, Eric Cantona.
As a certain Frenchman says "He who is afraid to throw the dice, will never throw a six."

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Shaun and Daz are vibrant kids, wasted by their experience of education. All they have is their friendship and for Shaun his first love Katy. From the moment Shaun steps into our world he is bound to lose. Labelled as a violent bully he destroys himself and takes Daz with him.

Shaun has twelve years to reflect on an intense summer of love, sex and loyalty. But Daz's imminent death forces Shaun to go on a journey to confront his past. This is the story of a man full of intelligence and promise struggling to reclaim his life.

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Hundreds of thousands of migrants have come to Britain since the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. Many are prospering. They are net contributors to the Exchequer.

But those at the bottom of the heap - the unskilled, the non-English speakers - are becoming a new kind of workforce. They come expecting a reasonable wage, and in the belief that they will work full time. Instead, they find themselves part of a vast and transient pool of casual day labourers, not knowing each morning whether they will be working or not, and often bonded to their employer by debt and circumstance.

Britain is more than happy to have them: jobs get done that Britons won't do1. Employers know that businesses would suffer without migrant labour, in fact migrant workers are sometimes preferred over UK nationals, particularly in the agricultural, hotel and catering sectors2. They are preferred because migrant workers are generally better qualified3 and they offer 'flexibility.'4

'Flexibility' is a loaded euphemism. Although some migrant workers don't want to be tied down to solid contracts, more often 'flexibility' means a workforce that can be hired, fired, mistreated and underpaid with impunity.

And in return for their flexibility these workers get very few rights in return. They might, for example, be offered temporary, non-renewable grants of leave. But temporary leave stops workers enforcing their workplace rights, as it usually requires at least twelve months in a job to challenge unfair dismissal.5

Some of these workers may be working illegally. But it is one of the crowning ironies of the system that the features characteristic of the deregulated economy - recruitment agencies, the use of outsourcing and contractors; lengthy sub-contracting chains - all obscure and facilitate forced labour, trafficked labour and illegal migrants. Papers get lost, someone else is to blame, and that suits everyone very nicely. It is no coincidence that, under the current system, employers are punished solely for the administrative failure of not having checked documents. If the Government really wanted to tackle exploitation, employers would be punished primarily for employing migrants in exploitative conditions.

What action is the Government taking? In the 2004 Warwick Agreement, Labour pledged to introduce domestic legislation to protect temporary workers, should the EU fail to reach consensus on a European Directive. It is now widely recognised that such a consensus is unlikely (due, inevitably, to efforts by some EU governments to maintain 'flexibility' in their labour markets).

On January 30 this year, a private member's bill, the Temporary Agency Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Bill, was brought by Paul Farrelly, the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It sought to give agency workers the same rights as full time staff on key issues including basic wages, sick and holiday pay. UK trade unions...

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"'Twas hard for mournful words to frame

To break the ties that bound us,

Ah but harder still to bear the shame

Of foreign chains around us.

And so I said: the mountain glen

I'll seek at morning early

And join the brave united men

While soft winds shake the barley."

Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830 - 1883) "The Wind that Shakes the Barley"

"To break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects."

Wolfe Tone c.1790

"The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they and none but they are the landowners and law-makers of this island."

James Fintan Lalor, 1848

"We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies...

...In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms."

Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 1916.

The English ruling class first invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, when feudal barons staked out their territory. Over the centuries English landlords grew rich at the expense of the Irish people.

A settler population to rule on behalf of the English was established and penal laws kept the Irish in subservience. As well as taxes and rents, Ireland supplied England with farm produce and cheap labour. Famine, evictions and poverty were the lot of Ireland's rural population.

The United Irishmen fought for their country's independence in the wake of the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century the Fenian Brotherhood took up the struggle. Then in the early years of the twentieth century the movement would no longer be denied, though it was fought at every turn by the British establishment.

THE IRISH REVOLUTION:

FROM WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO CIVIL WAR

At the height of the First World War, in which thousands of Irishmen were fighting with the encouragement of moderate nationalist leaders, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army staged a militarily doomed but symbolically powerful armed uprising in Dublin during Easter 1916. The execution of its leaders, including the socialist James Connolly, and the military repression that followed, helped to sway public support in Ireland away from moderate nationalism towards the separatist movement, embodied in the resurgent Sinn Féin ('We Ourselves') political party and the Irish Volunteers.

In the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin won a huge majority across the country, with the exception of the northeast, where Unionists, opposed to any diminution of...

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Ae Fond Kiss, written by Robert Burns to the lover he must relinquish, is a song of heartfelt regret, more resigned than railing against the society that forces them to part. It sets a brooding keynote to what intially appears the very essence of light-hearted romance. Yet the ease with which Casim and Roisin come together is in stark contrast to the difficulties their developing situation causes.

A love story, as well as being naturally compelling, was a way of highlighting conflicts within Casim's family and arising from Roisin's background. "It's interesting how parents want their kids to marry someone who's like themselves. It goes very deep," observes Laverty, who was interested in the process of people "shaking off the beliefs of their parents. It's a serious decision, and it has massive consequences."

It's also a film that deals with identity, not just personal identity, but that unwittingly imposed by family and community.

Laverty is fascinated by "the way we may call a child a 'Muslim child' or a 'Catholic child' without any qualms, without considering what the child himself will make of the world."

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"The genesis of Sweet Sixteen may have been back with the making of 'My Name is Joe," says writer Paul Laverty. "When you're imagining a story there are often dozens of characters screaming for attention, all saying 'me, me, me, me'. We can't feed them all otherwise the story will collapse. But there was one persistent character who would not give up or shut up. He demanded our attention." That voice became the character of Liam.

"Paul and I made Bread and Roses in L.A. and thought it would be good to do another film on home ground," explains Ken Loach. "We went on a trip at Paul's instigation to Greenock which is a town just along the Clyde from Glasgow. The scenery is spectacular, which is more than can be said for the job opportunities since the shipyards closed."

Laverty began his task by spending lots of time with young people. "For some time I'd been talking with Ken about doing another very personal story; about how one young person tries to make sense of his life. It's as simple and as complex as that. Friends, family and community connect or smash up against each other in endlessly complex patterns. Liam is at a delicate point in his life. Some things just don't fit, though he is absolutely determined to use his considerable talent and cheek to make them do so."

"What struck me," says Laverty, "from talking to lots of carers who work with children (either in children's homes with foster carers or even secure accommodation) was that, no matter how chaotic the family home, most were still determined to make contact with their mother. There's something extra concentrated about adolescence. There's a special energy which can be exhilarating or explosive. Fragility, and often a wild courage, even if misplaced, can sit easily side by side. We were keen to try and capture some of those qualities in our story."

"During auditions we worked with hundreds of young people in sports clubs, schools and community groups," explains researcher Pam Marshall. "A lot of the teenagers had never acted before and were quite nervous. I was amazed at how they surprised themselves. Everyone was able to jump in and have a go. I don't think they expected to get caught up in the improvisation. That was very exciting."

The sense of place is probably stronger in Greenock and Port Glasgow than many towns. The river itself has such presence. Its shipbuilding history, which once provided work for tens of thousands of men, is implicit; monster sized cranes still dwarf the new call centres built along the banks. The wind from the West, the open expanse of water and sharp rising hills of the town also dictate a tough wind-swept climate. In his highest and lowest moments, Liam is drawn to the river. It's where he can dream and let his imagination run wild; and where he has to reflect on the choices he's made which will change his life for ever.

Although Liam's story is told in a town with a very particular personality it will...

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If first-time script writer ROB DAWBER hadn’t torn a tendon falling off a sand dune on holiday in 1996, The Navigators may never have been written. “I sent in a letter to Ken Loach about my experiences working on the railway and he wrote back saying he was interested and would like to see the script” said Dawber. As there was no script to speak of, the enforced rest after the holiday accident provided the six weeks needed to shape ideas into a script.

Dawber spent eighteen years working for British Rail within the Signalling and Telecommunication department in Sheffield, Yorkshire. As a union representative he worked through privatisation until 1997. The changes worried him deeply and, despite many occasions on which he raised concerns about safety and working conditions, the new managers didn’t seem to respond.

“The idea of dramatising the issues was born largely out of frustration” recalled Dawber. “We were down to the last six men in the depot who refused to take redundancy.” Ultimately, they were forced to take compulsory redundancy, despite the union winning agreement that all redundancies should be on a voluntary basis.

Rob Dawber died on 20 February 2001. The cause of his death was mesothelioma, a cancer contracted while working with asbestos on the railways.

An internal management memorandum revealed that although workers were continually being exposed to lethal asbestos, it was considered to be too expensive to remove it all or to educate them about safer ways of handling it.

It was a bitter victory for Rob when he established in court that his employers were to blame for his illness.

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Here I am in the United States, ten years have gone by since

I crossed as a wetback, with no identity papers I'm still illegal.

I've got my wife and my kids - who came so young they don't remember

My beloved Mexico which I'll never forget and where I can never return...

Los Tigres del Norte

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THE UNDERSIDE OF A DIVIDED CITY

A love story full of humour, passion and danger, "My Name is Joe" was filmed in the heart of one of the poorest and most neglected neighbourhoods of Scotland's biggest city. Two street-wise but vulnerable people struggle to overcome the harsh conditions that press in upon them, leaving few choices in their lives.

The details of their story reflect the reality of today's Glasgow, a divided society where options are so limited that the hair's-breadth frontier between survival and disaster is often just a matter of luck. Can these two people, from different walks of Glasgow life, emotionally hampered as they are, succeed in building a relationship in these circumstances?

The film explores the emotional struggles of Joe and Sarah amidst the drugs, prostitution and violence that condition their lives. No longer young, the couple bring baggage from the past so that tenderness is laced with the wariness of those bearing scars of previous emotional battles.

Like all Loach's films, "My Name is Joe" portrays its setting with unsentimental honesty, and celebrates the power of the human spirit to overcome apparently insuperable obstacles.

The background of the film was meticulously researched with the aid of Glasgow community workers, ex-drug addicts and former prostitutes who made invaluable contributions to both plot and detail. The screenwriter Paul Laverty says: "I spent three months just walking the streets of Glasgow, talking to people, hearing their stories, before I started to write a word. The characters came first, then I spent months working out the story they would tell."

A pair of important secondary characters soon emerged: Joe's young friend Liam, a good hearted lad all but crushed by his personal circumstances who tries to steer clear of the drug culture after serving a jail sentence, and his girlfriend Sabine, fighting a heroin habit fed by prostitution, and trying to keep their little boy from being taken into care.

What struck Laverty about his home city was the grotesque disparity between neighbourhoods, often separated by only a street, or a canal. In a crucial scene in the film, Sarah tells Joe that the life expectancy in the poor area of Ruchill, is ten years less than in a nearby smarter quarter, because of poverty and inequality. With the swift humour that shafts through the film like a spear, Joe responds "That does it then. I'm moving!"

Loach says what he admires about Laverty is "his refusal to accept anything second-hand: he goes to the source." The reality is that in one of Europe's most advanced and dynamic cities, conditions within a short walk of its most fashionable areas could be plucked from a 19th century novel by Dickens or Zola.

Loach's radical political vision remains clear and unrepentant in "My Name Is Joe". "All this would vanish if only there were jobs," he says. "The only jobs that exist are those servicing the...

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Carla's Song tells the story of the relationship between George, a free-spirited Scottish bus driver and Carla, a Nicaraguan refugee who is adrift in Glasgow. The setting is 1987 and in Carla's home country the Contra rebels are continuing their assault on the people and their Sandinista government.

As George's feelings for Carla deepen, he believes the only way for her to overcome the traumas that haunt her is to return to her homeland. But will she be able to bury the ghosts of her past and stay close to George?

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1936. David an unemployed young man, leaves Liverpool to join the fight against Fascism in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. He joins an international section of the Republican Militia on the Aragon front where he experiences the trials and anguish of the war.

Wounded, he convalesces in Barcelona and is caught in the conflict on the Republican side between the Communist Party and his revolutionary comrades in the militia.

The resolution of this conflict and David's return to the front may seem tragic but his belief in the possibility of revolutionary change is unshaken. His story is revealed only after his death, sixty years later, in letters discovered by his granddaughter.

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Ladybird, Ladybird, inspired by real events, is a love story; the story of Maggie and Jorge and their struggle to have a family. Maggie has had four children, by four different fathers, removed by Social Services because of a previous violent relationship. When she meets Jorge, a gentle Latin American refugee, she gradually sees her chance for happiness, but her history still haunts her. She finds it difficult to escape the image that is described in her official records. Ladybird, Ladybird is an emotional and harrowing story of a woman's fight to keep her children and her relationship intact.

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(Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 1993 & Best Film, Evening Standard British Film Awards 1994)

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(FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Film Festival 1991 & Best Film, European Film Awards 1991)

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(Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 1990)

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Two linked dramas look at the lives of those living in a Yorkshire colliery community. The first part, Meet The People, takes a look at preparations for a visit by Prince Charles, as management try to enlist the miners help in sprucing up the pithead. Completely different in tone, Part Two, Back To Reality, is set one month later as an underground explosion has disastrous consequences – above and below ground.

For these episodes of BBC films, Loach was reunited with playwright Barry Hines and producer Tony Garnett for the first time since they worked together on Kes. Filmed on location at the disused Thorpe Hesley pit, Part One saw the unusual casting of several northern comics including Jackie Shinn, Duggie Brown, Stan Richards and Bobby Knutt.

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“The only war worth fighting is the class war".

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This film, directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, was originally commissioned by Save the Children and London Weekend Television in the 1960s to mark the Charity’s fiftieth anniversary.

The film was shot in 1969 in the UK, Kenya and Uganda. Already an established filmmaker, Loach opened the film with a quotation from Friedrich Engels, and went on to construct a film that explored the politics of poverty, class and charities and the relationship between them. At that time Save the Children representatives felt the film subverted their aims. They did not agree to a public screening of the work and the film was immediately withdrawn and kept in the BFI’s national archive. L.W.T. wrote off their investment.

Forty years later Save the Children is pleased that the film is to be shown to the public. It depicts a unique slice of British social and cinematic history and highlights how much the charity world and Save the Children have changed.

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In response to plans to mechanise the docks which directly threaten jobs, the dock workers take industrial action. As the striking workers’ families struggle with poverty, they realise the odds are against them. But is there another way? Former strike leader Jack Regan suggests the dockers occupy the docks and run the operation themselves: a resolution the state cannot afford to succeed…

This was writer Jim Allen's second Wednesday Play (after The Lump), and his first with Ken Loach, who would deem it to be Allen's "definitive script". The BBC postponed showing it twice, but eventually it was broadcast with a predictable reaction – the Daily Mail calling it a “Marxist play presented as sermon”, while a new revolutionary socialist organisation took the name ‘Big Flame’. The reaction however would put pressure on a new regime at the BBC, who would become increasingly less inclined to produce drama-documentaries.

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British filmmaking showed much of its potential in this marvellous production chronicling the boyhood experiences of Billy, whose expectations lead no further than following his brother into the pit when he reaches manhood. Written off by his teachers and often neglected at home, his future is pre-determined.

He finds and trains a young kestrel. Through his care and respect for the bird, we see qualities in Billy that the world cannot allow to be recognised.

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For The Wednesday Play, BBC, tx. 1/3/1967 - 75 mins, black & white

Kate, a young girl under psychiatric examination, suffers from a lack of confidence, self-esteem and self-control – telling of the “bad Kate” who commits immoral acts. Could the hypocrisy, selfishness and weakness of those around her have led to this state of mind or can Kate simply be diagnosed and dismissed as a schizophrenic?

In a drama told in Loach’s convincing documentary style, writer David Mercer questioned the accepted condition of schizophrenia. The film, broadcast in The Wednesday Play series, led to heated discussions on television and in the press, while Mercer won the Writers' Guild Award for the Best Television Play of 1967.

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London in the 1960's: this is an account of a young woman trying to cope while her husband, a small time thief, is in jail. Clutching at any slight chance of happiness, she has a promiscuous relationship with his best friend which in turn leads to heart breaking consequences.

Poor Cow is a poignant, controversial slice of raw social realism, and in true Loach style, is an imaginative exploration of the thin line separating fiction and real-life.

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"The most important piece of dramatised documentary ever screened" The Sunday Times

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Taking its title from a Home Office ruling that three clear Sundays were to elapse between a sentence of death and execution, James O’Connor’s "emotional autobiography" tells the story of Danny, a young prisoner put up to attack a warder by two old lags. When the warden dies, Danny is left to await and contemplate the ultimate punishment.

Jimmy O’Connor‘s moving, warm and, at times, humorous play was based on his own harrowing experiences. He had been sentenced to death for murder only to be reprieved two days before he was due to hang. Shown in the BBC’s The Wednesday Play series in 1965, the broadcast was watched by 11 million viewers and boosted the abolitionist lobby during the then raging debate over capital punishment.

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For The Wednesday Play, BBC1, tx. 17/11/1965

70 min, black & white

In this off-beat musical – a satire that combines fantasy, social observation and songs – a working class man goes to put a deposit on a new house only to find he prefers spending to saving and is happy to spend his money on a few hours of happiness rather than a lifetime's conventionality.

Written by poet and Private Eye contributor, Christopher Logue, with music from Stanley Myers (best known for Cavatina, the signature theme for the 1978 film The Deerhunter), the film features songs from Samantha Jones, Long John Baldry, Lesley Wood and others and locations ranging from Fortnum & Masons to a strange gas-works in the East End of London.

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For The Wednesday Play, BBC, tx. 3/11/1965 - 75 minutes, black & white

“We told our director, Kenneth Loach, that none of the sacred cows of television drama need stand in his way… This is a show which defies the categories. It is not a play, a documentary, or a musical. It is all of these at once. It is something new - but, more important, it is something true.” Tony Garnett

This ground-breaking drama saw Loach take the filming out of the studio and onto the very streets depicted in the story. With an immediacy only ever seen in current affairs programmes, the portrayal of ordinary people’s lives had an authenticity seldom witnessed in television drama.

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