Film review: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Stuart King reviews the new film by Michael Winterbottom and Russell Brand

This documentary now on general release brings together film director Michael Winterbottom with comedian turned political activist Russell Brand. It’s a winning combination.

It’s rare that an hour and forty-five minutes of political polemic can be made interesting, outraging, sad and yet extremely funny – all these emotions are produced in the audience by a very clever film. Sure it has been done before by Michael Moore in the USA and by Mark Thomas on TV and radio but The Emperor’s New Clothes is an up to date attack on the very nature of neoliberal capitalism.

The film takes us on a historical journey charting the rise of neoliberalism in the United States with Milton Friedman’s “Chicago School economics” under Ronald Reagan and in Britain with the triumph of Margaret Thatcher. The central argument of the film is how these policies of free market capitalism, combined with smashing any working class and trade union resistance to them, has resulted in a hideously unequal society.

At one point the film-makers have a group of Kenyans driving through a huge shanty town in two coaches wearing the masks of the 80 richest people on earth, who between them own as much wealth as half the world’s population! It is a bizarre scene as the Rupert Murdochs and Bill Gateses of this world get off the coaches into the sewage strewn streets, yet it brings home to a western audience just what that inequality means. This is the film’s strength, its ability to turn dry statistics into good agitprop.

In another scene office window cleaners in the City are contrasted with their bosses in terms of salary, the film pointing out how it would take the cleaners 300 years to earn the same as their boss does in one, and taking us on a quick historical tour of three centuries to hammer home the point! At other points we meet the cleaner who gets up every day at 5.30am returning home after 8pm just to survive, the disabled woman who is campaigning to save the Independent Living Allowance, the mother who works the evening shift till 12am that starts after her children come home from school.

The strength of Russell Brand is that he does not stop at pointing out the inequalities of capitalism – he encourages people to come together to fight it. Throughout the film he forefronts campaigns like the New Era Housing estate that fought off an attempt to gentrify their estate and drive them out by raising rents. He’s there with the Occupy protests and emphasises the importance of combining in trade unions in the workplace to fight for a living wage.

At the same time he does it drawing on his own experience, taking us to his boyhood town of Gravesend in Essex. Walking the high street, past the endless loan shark shops, the pawnbrokers, the pound shops – symbols of 21st century capitalism’s future for working people. And then into the massive glass offices of the bankers to demand to see the bosses to ask a few questions – of course he never gets past the bouncers in suits on the front desks.

He uses this to make a powerful point. How were the bankers treated when they drove the economy into bankruptcy, when the defrauded millions of people over PPI insurance, when they fiddled the Libor exchange rates to make more profits, when they facilitated tax evasion and money laundering through offshore accounts? How many were arrested or imprisoned? Answer: zero. Yet when he looks at the 2011 riots he talks to people arrested for looting trainers or juices and being sent down. He points out that those arrested were sentenced to a total of over 1,200 years in prison. It is class justice explained simply for a mass audience.

Russell Brand gets a bad press not just from his natural enemies at the Mail, Sun and Telegraph but from Radio 4, the Guardian and from much of the left who view him with suspicion. Yet he reaches young audiences in a way the far left has never been able to do and delivers a message that we should welcome. He shifts the terrain of debate to the left through his writing and vlogging and now through his films. We should welcome his entry into left activism, not be sniffy about it.

Of course The Emperor’s New Clothes has its weaknesses, but they are the weaknesses of the radical left. You could come out of the film thinking that capitalism before Milton Friedman was pretty damn good, that Roosevelt’s New Deal or even Macmillan’s Britain were the type of societies we should be getting back to. Russell Brand’s “programme” presented at the end of the film reflects this – taxes on wealth, income tax rates for the highest earners up to 90%, ending tax evasion and tax havens, paying people a living wage etc. All things we in Left Unity would agree with.

But left at that it’s a programme for a fairer capitalism – where wages a better, the rich pay more taxes and public services are properly supported. Russell Brand titles his latest book “Revolution” but it is clearly a very moderate one indeed! It leaves intact the system that guarantees inequality and poverty – capitalism. And like the film it does not think about the reaction of the banks and the capitalists to encroachments on their wealth and power and how we should counter them. With Greece and Syriza’s predicament very much in our minds at present these are issues we cannot afford to avoid.