By Daniel Margrain

Defined in the objective Marxist sense, class is an historical constant. However, the extent to which workers, historically, are conscious of their class and its potential power in helping to shape and transform society, is dependent upon prevailing socioeconomic circumstances.

The long demand-led economic boom which had gathered pace during the 1950s in Britain, alongside the developments in the welfare state and the growth in power of social democratic discourses of meritocracy, had led to the emergence of a new social formation of better educated, assertive and frustrated, younger people who wanted to see the stuffiness of a system based upon status and respect shift into a meritocratic environment.

The social realism and British new wave movements in film-making that emerged from the optimism generated after the 1950 Festival of Britain and its espousal of new technologies, produced talents of the stature of Ken Loach, Jack Clayton…