Sweet Sixteen leaves bitter taste for New Labour
The council’s three-man licensing committee, which includes local New Labour councillors Pat Stannard and Ed Turner, has refused to reduce the classification of the latest Ken Loach film, Sweet Sixteen from 18 to 15.
The film makers had asked for this reduction as it is currently illegal for under eighteens to see the film which, ironically, documents the lives of working class sixteen year-olds on a run down Glasgow council estate.
Stannard and his colleagues argue that young people could end up in hospital by copying a fight scene featured in the film if they were allowed to see it. Taken to its logical conclusion this patronising line of thought would have led to youths being kept out of Superman for fear they would jump off tall buildings after watching it.
Working class lives are rarely portrayed on the big screen. Ken Loach is one director who has consistently bucked this trend, telling sympathetic stories of people that most of us wouldn’t find hard to recognise. Loach makes realistic dramas in which there is thankfully no place for the plummy stereotypes usually found in British films.
Despite Tony Blair saying ‘We’re all middle class now,’ life for those on run-down, unemployment-ridden, northern council estates such as the one depicted in Sweet Sixteen is pretty much the same as it was under the Tories.
Could the real reason the film was refused a 15 certificate be that the local New Labour politicians feel uncomfortable about increasing the potential audience of a film that paints such an honest, grim picture of working class life in Blair’s Britain?
Leys Independent, issue 16, December 2002
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