Pip: A young mother loses her children on a railway platform while strangers walk past — and sixty years later, Britain is still walking past.
Mara: This episode covers freerein61's deep look at Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home, the housing crisis it exposed, and why the system that produced Cathy's fate is still very much in business. Let's start with the film itself and what the numbers say about where we are now.
Sixty years since Cathy Come Home
Pip: The question this piece is really asking is whether Cathy Come Home is a historical document or a live dispatch — and the answer, sixty years on, is uncomfortable.
Mara: The post sets the stakes directly: "135,580 households in England were living in temporary accommodation" as of March 2026, the highest ever recorded, with 177,530 children among them — another record, up five percent in a single year.
Pip: So the film that shocked twelve million viewers in 1966 is essentially a preview of conditions that are still getting worse, not better.
Mara: And the parliamentary figures go further. Between April 2019 and March 2025, 104 children died in England with temporary accommodation listed as a factor in their vulnerability or death. Seventy-six of those 104 were babies under one.
Pip: That is not a policy failure. That is a policy outcome — which is exactly the distinction the post is making.
Mara: Right, and the post names it plainly: "The housing crisis is not a failure of capitalism. It is a product of it." The liberal framing of the anniversary — the "sixty years on and all we've really achieved is nothing" lament — is treated here as a way of avoiding that conclusion.
Pip: The film itself earns that argument. Loach and Tony Garnett shot on sixteen-millimeter film, on real streets, in real hostels, and laid the recorded voices of people actually experiencing homelessness over the images. Critics at the time complained it blurred documentary and fiction.
Mara: The post's answer to that complaint is sharp: "What the critics found so troubling wasn't that Cathy was a fiction; it was that it was true." Every episode in the film drew on cases Jeremy Sandford had documented over years of research.
Pip: Cathy and Reg are not drunks or wasters — they are ordinary people undone by an injury, a landlord, a waiting list, a rule. The middle-class comfort that homelessness is a personal failing gets quietly demolished.
Mara: The post traces what came after the broadcast — Shelter founded two weeks later, the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, council house completions peaking in 1968 at over 400,000. But it argues those gains came from the balance of class forces, not moral suasion.
Pip: And then Thatcher's Right to Buy sold off two million council homes, New Labour handed the rest to private developers, and the coalition after 2010 introduced the bedroom tax. The post calls Grenfell — 72 dead in June 2017 — the most horrific consequence of decades of neglect.
Mara: On Loach himself, the post is precise and genuinely critical. His political perspective, it argues, stayed anchored to the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy — the very institutions that presided over the destruction of the housing stock his films document. His 2013 documentary The Spirit of '45 is the clearest example: it looks back on the Attlee government with nostalgia, as a lost golden age to be restored.
Pip: The post cites Stefan Steinberg's WSWS review arguing that film revealed Loach's "very serious and even fatal limitations." A return to 1945 cannot solve the housing crisis, because 1945's reforms were concessions made inside capitalism, and capitalism spent sixty years clawing them back.
Mara: The post closes on Engels — The Housing Question, 1872 — and the argument that the housing shortage is a structural product of subordinating land and shelter to profit. "It is sheer folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question." The solution the post names is socialist expropriation of banks, landlords, and property developers.
Pip: Which is a long way from a better charity — and exactly the distance between what Cathy Come Home implied and what sixty years have demonstrated.
Mara: The film has not dated. The system it exposed has simply continued.
Pip: Housing as a commodity, reforms as temporary concessions, and a film that keeps being right — that is a bleak triangle to sit with.
Mara: It is. And the thread running through all of it is the question Engels was already asking in 1872: whether you can solve this inside the existing order at all. That is the argument worth carrying into the next episode.
