“I AM NOT PREPARED to associate myself with a policy where well-to-do people can afford to build luxury homes and poor people go without homes!”

The old newsreel shows Aneurin Bevan in full flight: speaking as British Labour ministers were wont to speak during the crucial, but all-too-brief, period of Labour rule between 1945 and 1951.

It began with the landslide socialist victory of 5 July 1945.

Labour’s share of the popular vote was 49.7 percent (a remarkable result in what was still a three party system). When the counting ended Labour held 61.7 percent of the seats in the House of Commons.

On the night of their historic victory, thousands of working-class Labour voters gathered outside the party’s Transport House headquarters and sang, over and over again, William Blake’s great spiritual call-to-arms – “Jerusalem”.

I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Til we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

It was a pivotal historical moment in British history, and it has contributed both the title and the subject matter for “The Spirit of 45”, a documentary released in the UK today (15 March) by the celebrated left-wing English filmmaker, Ken Loach.

A trailer for the documentary can be found here.

Thank God for people like Ken Loach! Because without them so many of the memories, hopes and dreams of a generation which is rapidly passing away would be lost forever.

Thank Loach, too, for bringing together in one documentary so much superb archival material. The images of a people taking charge of their destiny are as precious as the memories they evoke.

At a time when our own Labour Party (whose record of radical reform was already ten years old in 1945) seems utterly incapable of formulating anything remotely resembling the transformative programme of Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 government, it is quite inspiring to hear the unequivocal declarations of Nye Bevan, and to see the UK miners’ union members marching shoulder-to-shoulder with the managers of the newly nationalised pits.

Loach does not, however, permit his audience to revel in wistful political nostalgia for very long. “The Spirit of 45” – so triumphant in the six years following the end of World War II – was reduced to a bitter memory during the Thatcher Years (1979-1991). The contrast Loach draws between the collective spirit of 1945 and the brutal individualism so assiduously fostered by the “Iron Lady’s” neoliberal mentors is as important to draw as it is agonising to watch.

In his interview with the Guardian, Loach recalls how difficult it was to get anything remotely resembling an alternative version of events onto the screens of Thatcherite Britain. The blatant censorship of dissenting voices (including his own) in the 1980s should alert us to the dangerously totalitarian trajectory that remains embedded in neoliberal thought.

Comparing the joy, the exhilaration and the powerful sense of rapidly expanding social horizons ushered in by the Attlee Government in 1945, with the vicious selfishness held up as the new normal by Mrs “There’s no such thing as society” Thatcher, one cannot help being seized by the sheer magnitude of the social transformation which neoliberalism has wrought – as great in its own way as the transformation overseen thirty-five years earlier by Labour’s socialists.

The Pagani School of Labour theory rejects out-of-hand any possibility of a return to the spirit of 1945 (or, in New Zealand’s case, of 1935 and 1938) and urges the party’s policy-makers to embrace Tony Blair’s vision of “New” or “Modern” Labour.

Unfortunately, the differences between the neoliberal policies of the Right and the neoliberal-lite policies of Modern Labour are differences of degree not kind. Rather than its nemesis, Blairism turned out to be Thatcherism’s bastard child.

More than anything else, it is the Shearer-led Labour Party’s inarticulateness; its singular incapacity to think outside the neoliberal box; that illustrates how very far it has strayed from the impulse to improve and empower the lives of ordinary people which Loach’s latest documentary so movingly elucidates.

The chances of anyone singing “Jerusalem” outside the New Zealand Labour Party’s Wellington headquarters in 2014 are, for the moment, depressingly slim.

JUST HOURS AFTER 77 New Zealand MPs voted for Louisa Wall’s Gay Marriage Bill, at least 77 Cardinals voted for the 77-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Enough to make him Pope Francis I.

In St Peter’s Square and throughout Latin America there was rejoicing. Born in Argentina, Bergoglio is the first non-European Pope to be elected since the Eighth Century.

And yet, in spite of the new pontiff’s origins, there will be many among the ecstatic crowds thronging the streets of Buenos Aries who harbour the deepest misgivings.

Just three years ago, when the Argentine legislature was debating its own Gay Marriage Bill, the then Cardinal Bergoglio denounced the measure in the most unequivocal terms.

In language which the Argentine President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said reminded her of the Medieval Inquisition, Bergoglio declared:

“Let’s not be naive, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

Behind the humble bus-rider of Vatican publicity; behind the warm grandfatherly smile; Francis I remains as much a prisoner of reactionary Catholic theology as John-Paul II and Benedict XVI.

And according to the research of Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s leading investigative journalists, Bergoglio’s reactionary beliefs are not confined to the issues of homosexuality, abortion and contraception. Francis I is also a political reactionary.

Forty-three years ago Argentina entered one of the darkest periods in its history. A military junta, having seized power from an unstable right-wing populist government, launched what came to be known as “The Dirty War”. Argentine Military Intelligence (itself deeply implicated in the process) estimated the number of Argentinians murdered, tortured, or simply “disappeared”, at 22,000. Civilian estimates put the toll much higher, at 30,000.

The Dirty War lasted seven years (1976-1983) and convulsed the whole of Argentinian society. The military strongman, General Jorge Rafael Videla, believed he was waging war not simply against left-wing revolutionaries and trade unionists, but against the whole tide of social and sexual liberation rolling out of the 1960s and early 70s.

And he had allies.

Hugh O’Shaughnessy has been reporting Latin American politics for 40 years. In the Guardian of 4 January 2011 he wrote:

“To the judicious and fair-minded outsider it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentine church contained many … [individuals] … who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal Western-supported military dictatorship which seized power in that country in 1976 and battened on it for years.”

Reviewing Verbitsky’s book “El Silencio” (The Silence), O’Shaunghessy recounted how:

“The Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to choose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of [South] America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.”

That scandal has now occurred.

A scandal of which the College of Cardinals could not possibly have been ignorant, but which it considered of insufficient importance to prevent Bergoglio emerging as the “runner up” to Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) in the Conclave of 2005.

A scandal which, in a Catholic Church riven by so many scandals, was completely invisible to the College of Cardinals in 2013.

Even though, the Princes of the Church, gathered in Rome, had only to flip open their lap-tops and Google “Bergoglio” to learn from Wikipedia that:

“On 15 April 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of involvement in the kidnapping by the Navy in May 1976 (during the military dictatorship) of two Jesuit priests. The priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, were found alive five months later, drugged and semi-nude. Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.”