‘I’m Talking But No One Is Listening’

Claire Gray

doi:10.2218/music.2021.6481

Abstract

Even though Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s term ended in 1990, the reverberations of her policies have lingered on in British politics, culture and social life. This paper discusses the legacy of Thatcher within the soundscapes present in the 2016 social realist film I, Daniel Blake (dir. Ken Loach). By looking at the effects of Thatcher’s policies and how they are made audible in working class communities, this paper ultimately questions whether her presence has truly disappeared. In employing the fields of hauntology and sound studies as an approach to Thatcherism, this study sonifies the voices of the past, and questions how they will echo in the future.

Highlights

Even though Margaret Thetcher’s term as Prime Minister ended in 1990, the reverberations of her policies have lingered on in British politics, culture and social life
Ken Loach, 2016), another man yells amongst a cheering crowd that the current political era is ‘just like Thatcher’, and that working-class people ‘will never be free’ from government marginalisation in Britain
Ernment to be responsible for the problems of New Labour at the turn of the twenty-first century and the following coalition government, as the policies of Thatcherism continued ‘not merely in terms of [the Prime Minister’s] weakened role as a representative of organized labour and champion of the welfare state and in terms of [their] unashamed adoption of [Thatcher’s] neo-liberal agenda’.[2] Economist and social historian Ben Whitham agrees, positing that Thatcher’s policies set the course for the increasing neoliberalism in the succeeding New Labour and Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition governments, as they all followed ‘the trajectory of [Thatcher’s] neoliberalism’ through the acceptance of globalisation in the economic market, the stripping of welfare, and the promotion of austerity.[3]

Summary

Introduction

Even though Margaret Thetcher’s term as Prime Minister ended in 1990, the reverberations of her policies have lingered on in British politics, culture and social life. ‘I’m Talking But No One Is Listening’: Sounding the Hauntology of Thatcherism in I, Daniel Blake

Results

Conclusion