The document discusses Ken Loach's films and portrayal of the British working class. It notes that Loach began chronicling the plight of the working class before and after Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister. Loach's films focus on the unemployed, poor, and crime-prone who were left behind by the shift to a high-tech economy and cuts to social services. While Loach can be overly accusatory of the "system," The Angels' Share suggests both negative and positive aspects of the working class, showing how crime may result from upbringing or need for money, but also one character's desire to get a job and turn his life around.

1. The Angels’ Share
Narrowly avoiding jail, new dad Robbie vows
to turn over a new leaf. A visit to a whisky
distillery inspires him and his mates to seek
a way out of their hopeless lives.

2. • Responding to the death of Margaret Thatcher earlier this week, film director Ken Loach
told The Guardian: "Mass unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed —
this is her legacy. She was a fighter, and her enemy was the British working class.“
• Loach speaks from experience: He began his tireless chronicling of the plight of Britain's
underclass long before Thatcher came to power, and he didn't go much easier on
Labour governments before or after her tenure as a Tory prime minister. He might, in
fact, have thanked the Iron Lady for providing him with several decades' worth of
material for the social-realist dramas that have won him prize after prize in Europe.
• These are not the steadily employed working stiffs of Mike Leigh's movies. Loach speaks
for the chronically unemployed, the desperately poor and crime-prone. Left behind in
the rush to a high-tech economy and cast adrift by escalating cuts to social
services, these are the men and women who were derided by conservatives as
"benefits claimants."
• At his worst, Loach can be a scold, ever ready to point a relentlessly accusatory finger at
repressive agents of the "system," whose sole reason for being, at least in his movies, is
to keep the underdog down. And like many middle-class defenders of the working
poor, Loach often assumes that the working classes walk around being working class

3. Crime
• The Angels’ Share suggests that the characters
are criminals because of the way they are living
and how they have been brought up in working
class as the father of Robbie’s partner tells him
that he won’t change as he is from the working
class.
• The four also only stole the whisky so they could
make money which implies they wouldn’t have
done so if they weren't from the working class.

4. • Ken Loach also implies that working class
aren’t intelligent through the character Albert.
• However, he does show a more positive side
of the working class as Robbie wants to get a
job and be free from crime. He shows that
once he has a job things go well from him.
This shows that the working class aren’t
always looking for trouble.

5. • The wardrobe choices suggest that the
characters as ‘charvers’ and rough as the are
wearing tracksuits throughout the film.
• The taboo and slang language used
throughout the film also suggest they are of
lower class and are not very intelligent.