Observations on Mike Leigh's films. By Brendan O'Neill

I think I have found the common theme that runs through Mike Leigh's films. His most abiding prejudice is that the working classes should not get ideas above their station and should learn to be happy with their lot in life.

Take his latest, now on general release. Vera Drake is about a doting wife and loving mother in 1950s London who also, of a Friday afternoon, happens to perform illegal abortions in order to "help out young girls". The villain of the piece, however, is the materialistic sister-in-law, Joyce. She certainly caused the middle-class audience at the Odeon Swiss Cottage, where I saw the film, to groan with disapproval. Vera is selfless, singing to herself during her daily grind of domestic work for posh gits and cooking and caring for her family and ailing mum; Joyce is selfish, demanding that her browbeaten husband buy her a fridge and a £36 TV to keep up with the Joneses on the soulless suburban street where they live. Even the police come out better. They are kind to Vera even as they arrest, fingerprint and bang her up. Joyce, with her blond hair and red lipstick, is calculating and cold. She calls for her leopard-skin-lined coat and hat so that she can flee the Drake household when things start to fall apart.

This kind of character, who moves off the council estate in search of a better, wealthier life, crops up again and again in Leigh's work - and she (it is almost always a woman) is consistently the flawed player. Where those left behind are poor but happy, the aspirant character ends up a drunk or a floozie or alone in a big heartless house, or all three. Where those who stay where they belong are fucked up but funny, the character who runs off in search of riches is just fucked up.

Remember the awful, lower-middle-class characters in Leigh's play Abigail's Party (1977), whose desperate attempts to posh up left middle-class theatregoers in stitches? In High Hopes (1988), sweet, working-class Cyril and Shirley live in a tiny flat with a cactus called "Thatcher" - but they are far happier than Cyril's pretentious, wine-quaffing sister Valerie (married name: Boothe-Brain), who lives in a house cluttered with nouveau riche furniture. In Life is Sweet (1990), Timothy Spall's character, Aubrey, tries to open an upmarket restaurant. What was he thinking of, this fat oik with a speech impediment, imagining he could bring a bit of Islington to Wembley? It was bound to end in failure. In Secrets and Lies (1996), loveable Cynthia is a nervous wreck who says "I'm ravishing" when she means famished and has a street-sweeper for a daughter. Her sister-in-law Monica has a nice house that she keeps spotlessly clean. But she's not at all loveable.

The moral of Leigh's story is always that you're better off staying put. The same story has been told to the poor in different ways for generations: chasing riches will only make you unhappy, so you may as well know your place, stick to it, and muck in as best you can. As far as Leigh is concerned, the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, while the boastful and ambitious and greedy will inherit a semi-detached in suburbia but lose their soul in the process. To be a member of the aspirant working class in a Leigh film is death.

In Vera Drake, which so powerfully shows what life was like for women in Britain before they could control whether or not to be pregnant, the result is a deeply conservative message: it is more noble to be a good-hearted old dear than an aspirant bottle-blonde who would do anything to escape the estates.

Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of Spiked (www.spiked-online.com)

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