A small slice of life

Submitted by Anon on 3 May, 2007 - 9:55

Caroline Henry reviews This is England

This is England is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Thatcher’s Britain from Nottingham based director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands). Meadows draws on his own experience of joining a skinhead gang to show the tension between the influence of the fascist National Front (a forerunner of the BNP) and the skinhead movement’s roots in the rude boy culture of the West Indies.

The film’s main character, Shaun, is twelve years old, bullied at school and something of a loner. It’s the summer of 1983 and he has already lost his father to the Falklands War. Shaun’s life changes for the better when he’s taken under the wing of a good-natured gang of skins. Under the leadership of Woody they offer him the friendship and sense of belonging that he yearns for. But everything changes when racist Combo takes over the gang.

Shaun is initially drawn to Combo as a surrogate father figure, and even attends a National Front rally, but is soon confronted with the brutal reality of his racism.

Meadows obviously feels compassion for the characters he portrays in the film, and even Combo is portrayed as damaged and vulnerable. Milky is the gang’s sole black member, and at one point reminds the racist Combo of the origins of skinhead culture in Jamaican music. But most of the victims of the gang’s racism appear only very briefly and the focus is on the division that Combo’s politics cause within the group rather than the wider issues of racism.

Meadows says he wanted to tell the story of “a small part of society” in a very particular time. In this I thought he was entirely successful and the result is a compelling, powerful and moving film. It’s got a great soundtrack, loads of 1980s nostalgia, and some impressive acting, in particular the central performance by Thomas Turgoose (who was an expelled fourteen year old with no acting training when he was “found”).

Meadows says he wants his film to be seen by young people because it has an educational message relevant to today. That aim was frustrated by the film’s 18 certificate although it has been overturned by at least one council. But the film’s ability to address issues of racism is limited by the very way the story is told.

Passionately delivered race-hate speeches in the film put forward the usual poisonous racist lies about the impact of immigration on British “culture”, employment etc. The film answers this by showing, in a very dramatic way, how racism splits up friends, is violent, hateful, frightening. That is all fair enough, but leaves the underlying arguments about the roots of racism and the politics necessary to fight it unanswered.

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