With periodic readings from Robert Tressell’s classic text The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, documentary maker Daniel Draper gives us a downbeat, sombre film about socialist Merseyside activists and their gruelling experience campaigning for Labour in the 2019 general election – a film which leaves open the question of what exactly they have learned and what exactly they would do differently the next time. Maybe nothing. Maybe the point is that you stick to your guns and keep the pressure on.
The film shows party workers having meetings, reaffirming their faith in Jeremy Corbyn, knocking on doors and speaking to people who agree with them (except for one cantankerous old guy who is a Brexiter). I laughed when a woman was interviewed about her sweet necklace which turned out to read, in discreet decorative lettering: “Fuck the Tories”. The subject of antisemitism is aired and curtly dismissed as entirely irrelevant: “Just a few cases.” (Numerically, yes, maybe – but when those few cases include the people in charge, you’ve got a problem.)
On the big night itself, Draper’s camera shows that parliamentary victory for Dan Carden for Liverpool Walton and Ian Byrne for Liverpool West Derby causes not euphoria but exhaustion, etched on these men’s faces. The news about Boris Johnson’s victory has sunk in. Then there is frustration with the pandemic, the lockdown and the election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader, which in this film is passed over in relative silence, as just another queasy disappointment.
Watching the film now, it is impossible not to feel sympathy. The pure dishonesty and incompetence of the Johnson years has to some degree proved the activists’ point. Starmer is a dull and passionless leader, whose keep-wounded-Boris-in-power approach is uninspiring and risky. But in the end, when you hear angry, defiant party workers saying that the fight goes on and you can’t be squeamish about the struggle … what does that mean? In the end, it means swallowing your pride, biting your tongue and getting behind Starmer, the way Starmer bit his tongue and got behind Corbyn. Because politics is a brutal business.
• Manifesto is released on 17 June in cinemas.
