'Get Carter': social injustice and poverty in the UK, then and now

I remember the first time I saw Newcastle. I must have been about eight when I travelled over on the ferry from Stavanger where my family lived at the time. Stavanger, the Norwegian hub of the North Sea oil and gas industry, was just beginning to feel the positive effects of oil wealth, and the money showed in the smart new houses being constructed and the prosperous look of the local population, which was amply swelled by an influx of brashly rich American ex-pats.

Newcastle proved to be a starkly different place. Once our family car was hoisted off the ferry at Newcastle docks I recall being immediately gripped by the kind of keenly sensed visceral unease that only a child can feel. As we drove south (with merciful speed), all one could see was a Novocastrian wasteland of industrial decay, frightful tower blocks, and pinched, grey-looking people.

Of great fascination to me since that brief, but unhappily memorably transit through Newcastle in 1971 is the awareness that at about that time, actor Michael Caine and director Mike Hodges were making film history in the same city. Get Carter is Britain's best gangster film. Notice, I don't refer to it as 'arguably Britain's best gangster film'. Forget all the lightweight pretenders such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and The 51st State, or the frightful Brannigan (John Wayne rides into Londonshire - I mean, I ask you!), and while The Long Good Friday is excellent too Get Carter is definitive because it was made nearly a decade earlier. As with all great films, it works on many different levels and Hodges' masterpiece offers as much value as a vignette of British social history as it treats its audience to a magnificently murderous thriller.

Get Carter was made at a time in the UK when the prosperity of the post-war boom years was giving way to a new darker era. It would be an era of industrial unrest, of John Aspinall, the Clermont Club and plans to overthrow the British government. The 'white heat of technology' and the much-vaunted modernisation of Britain promised by prime minister Harold Wilson, was also rapidly giving way to a very different narrative, that of the 'sick man of Europe'. And while Britain's south prospered from new industries such as advertising and television, the north was waking up to the start of a 30-year decline.

This darker mood was reflected in the films made at the time, such as Kes, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange. Get Carter is very much part of this oeuvre, telling the story of gangland enforcer Jack Carter’s return to his hometown of Newcastle to attend his brother’s funeral. Carter realises that his brother's death was not accidental, and as he muscles his way through the city’s underworld, things begin to unravel and murder and mayhem ensue. While Michael Caine steals the picture as the eponymous Carter, actors Ian Hendry, Bryan Mosley, and Britt Ekland provide memorable, authentic performances. But it is the gritty, grimy authenticity of the city backdrop which really drives the perpetual sickening lurch of the film. The Tyneside portrayed isn't the one of the Tup Tup Palace, Perdu, or Geordie Shaw, but of dark, post-industrial and remorselessly grinding poverty. 

Today, people under 40 would know little of this Britain. The country's calamitous economic decline showed like the lines in the careworn face of a sick friend. While the north showed this sickness most of all, it was also on display throughout the country, with dingy train stations, putrid tower blocks, and the growing number of rough sleepers in London giving stark evidence of Britain's national decay.

The cinéma verité qualities of Get Carter, from the worn-out faces of Geordie pub-goers to Coronation Street vistas of slum housing, to the most brutalist of brutalist architecture such as the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead - all of it reveals a grim, vanished world. Did this country ever exist?

One starkly obvious aspect of Get Carter is the poverty it depicts. It is still with us and has, in many respects grown worse. In Poverty and wealth across Britain 1968 to 2005 (The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2005), the report observes that "since 1970, area rates of poverty and wealth in Britain have changed significantly. Britain is moving back towards levels of inequality in wealth and poverty last seen more than 40 years ago."

In the much more recent Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2020 (Institute for Fiscal Studies, a study compiled with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and The Economic and Social Research Council), the study observes that "despite temporary increases in benefits announced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the benefits system in 2020 provides less support to out-of-work households than in 2011. Average benefit entitlement among workless households is 10% lower in 2020?21 than it would have been without any policy changes since 2011, and among workless households with children it is 12% lower. These cuts in generosity are mainly due to the ‘benefits freeze’ and the introduction of universal credit; without the temporary increases, they would have been 15% and 16% respectively."

It would seem that Britain is today in some ways only a better-looking backdrop to the same raft of dire social problems that existed 50 years ago; it is still an unequal society with growing poverty And what of crime, another power fuel which drives the narrative of Get Carter? Statisa.com reports that in 2019/20 the number of overall crime offences in the United Kingdom reached approximately 6.43 million, an increase of around 130 thousand offences when compared with the previous reporting year.

And what are we to make of this exploration into a world of 50 years ago? Michael Caine, the anti-hero of Get Carter, remarked in a 2018 interview: "Crime comes from poverty, and those suffering are darker people"('Interview with Michael Caine', by Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian, August 30, 2018).

While Get Carter seems wholly remote from 21st-century Britain, its themes of extreme poverty, urban decay and crime resonate powerfully with our own contemporary fears.

From The Daily Mirror, 'Northerners facing unemployment levels not seen since 1994 with Tier 3 areas worst hit' (The Daily Mirror, 7th December 2020)