Taking Liberties

Chris Atkins’s documentary takes the ten years from Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street and asks what happened to the right to say no to the people inside it. The tagline is Since 1997, and the film means it as a charge sheet. It is a cheerful, scrappy, openly one-sided 101 minutes, built from archive clips, interviews and cartoon interludes, and it is at its best when it stops arguing and simply shows us somebody being arrested for something that should not be a crime. That happens often enough to make it worth an evening. It does not happen often enough to make the case.

The method will be familiar to anyone who has sat through a polemical documentary since the turn of the century. Blair’s early promises are cut against what came after; Gordon Brown and John Prescott turn up in archive to look evasive; George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin appear so that a comparison can be drawn without anyone having to say it aloud. David Morrissey and Ashley Jensen share the narration, he gravely and she with a lift in the voice that warns you a joke is coming. The jokes are the problem, and we will come back to them.

What works are the people. Atkins has found a run of ordinary Britons who did something mild, mostly in the way of protest, and were treated as if they had done something dangerous. He also follows some of them as they push back against the new rules, and win small victories, which is the film’s most cheering stretch. None of them is a radical in any sense you would notice on a bus. That is the film’s strongest point, and it makes it without raising its voice.

We will admit to being got at. The footage of ordinary people being stopped, moved on and arrested for the crime of standing somewhere with an opinion made us laugh, because the gap between the offence and the response is absurd, and then it made us angry, because it is our own country and our own police. Atkins lets the officials explain themselves and then cuts to the people on the receiving end. Those cuts do more work than the twenty minutes of argument that follow them.

The argument is where the trouble is. Atkins has decided the audience needs jollying along, so the serious material keeps being interrupted by an animated sequence, a jaunty cue and a narrator’s quip, as if we might otherwise reach for the remote. The cartoons are neatly made and some are funny. But a passage about detention without charge does not need a gag at the end of it, and the habit of supplying one makes the film look less sure of its material than it is. Tony Benn and Shami Chakrabarti speak for the defence and are given room; Boris Johnson is there to be amusing and is. Almost nobody is brought on to put the government’s side and have it tested, so the film wins every exchange, and the wins are worth less for it.

It also goes on. In 101 minutes it covers identity cards, extradition, surveillance, protest law, detention and the war, and by the last third the cases start to blur into a list. A shorter film with half the subjects and twice the time on each would have been harder to dismiss.

Against the Michael Moore model it is plainly working from, it is gentler, more British and less pleased with itself; Atkins stays off camera, which is a mercy. Against the standard of a documentary that changes a mind, it falls short, because it is speaking to people who have already made theirs up. Watch it at home with someone who voted the other way and see how far you get. We would give it forty minutes.