SAMANTHA MORTON grew up in care and experienced homelessness and abuse that led to drug use and crime. But at 16 her life was transformed. Today, the 47-year-old Nottingham-born actress continues to enjoy a hugely successful career in theatre, film and television. 

What saved her, Morton said, when honoured with a Fellowship at the Bafta awards in February, was the work of Ken Loach. 

“When I first saw Ken Loach’s Kes on a huge telly that was wheeled into my classroom, I was forever changed,” she told an audience of her peers. 

“Forever. Because seeing poverty and people like me, my life and my family on the screen, I recognised myself. You see, representation matters.”

At 88, Loach is still representing families like Morton’s. On Saturday the legendary film director turned up at a Finsbury Park housing estate in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency to remind an enthusiastic audience of locals and Corbyn canvassers just what is at stake for the working poor who have featured so often in his films.

“This is the most important part of this election, this result here,” Loach said. “If Jeremy wins it shows we put integrity and principle before shallow opportunism.”

Loach was expelled from the Labour Party almost three years ago, something he called a “witch-hunt” meted out as punishment for failing to condemn Corbyn and disown others already expelled.

On Saturday he proclaimed: “I wear my expulsion as a badge of honour! I’m proud of it,” drawing a cheer from the crowd, many of whom had likely experienced the same fate.

That shallow opportunism, exemplified by the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, has led to the abandonment of working families, says Loach. “The rise in foodbanks, hunger used as a weapon. Starmer never mentions that. He has nothing to say about the desperate poverty that so many face.”

The roots of Starmer’s betrayal, says Loach, date back to the lack of solidarity shown to striking miners 40 years ago by then Labour opposition leader Neil Kinnock and deputy leader Roy Hattersley. The strike was eventually crushed by the ruthless tactics of the Conservative Thatcher government.

“Kinnock and Hattersley didn’t organise solidarity action,” Loach said. “They walked away. That’s the tradition that led to Blair and his increase in privatisation, the illegal Iraq war and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that he caused. It led to Brown and the privatisation. And now it’s led to Starmer,” who, says Loach, “has turned Labour into a neoliberal party out for every exploitative device the ruling class can throw at the working class.”

When it comes to Starmer’s integrity, chuckled Loach, “I have to quote my old friend Ricky Tomlinson, who in this circumstance would say, ‘Starmer’s integrity, my arse!’ Instead, it’s been “every bloody promise broken,” said Loach.

What’s most needed now, urged Loach, is a movement that doesn’t evaporate after the election, whether Corbyn and other left independent candidates win or lose. To that end, Loach helped create the For the Many Movement, which organises at the grassroots level in local hubs to keep people active and engaged in the important social and environmental issues of the day.

“It’s a good initiative because it’s not saying we want to take you over, it’s about getting people committed to the basic principles,” Loach said, finally sitting down to talk after an eight-minute speech in the hot sun during which he supported himself with a cane. 

“It’s a long tradition from Wat Tyler to the Diggers to the Chartists to us and we mustn’t drop the ball,” he said. “These core ideas, these socialist ideas, we now need them more than ever, not as some vague text but as the only way we can survive. And in the end, we’ve got to have a party to articulate this.”

Will Loach help lead it, now that he has retired from film-making? His 2023 film, The Old Oak, will be his last, he insists. “I’d like to be involved but you’ve got to be realistic when you reach this age,” he told me. “But I will do what I can.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently in London covering the elections.