‘Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

Your house is on fire and your children are gone’

I am writing about Ladybird, Ladybird on this very day, exactly thirty years after the film’s official release. ‘What a happy coincidence’, I think, though I am on my way back from a conference where we, scholars and activists, debated for three intense days about precarious labour, unpaid care work, intimate partner violence, and the state’s failure to protect women, children, and trans* and queer folks. We commemorated the ‘Ladybirds’ of our times as constant reminders that state-enabled precarity and gender violence are more widespread and urgent than ever, even in the wealthiest nations of the Global North. A not-so-happy coincidence, if not a constant.  

When it comes to these harsh realities, few filmmakers are as committed as Ken Loach to bringing them to the screen, exposing the failures of social welfare and institutional care, which, while seemingly rooted in Britain, resonate with any country caught in the spinning wheel of neoliberal capitalism. Well before the critically acclaimed I, Daniel Blake (2016) which ensnares the protagonist in a bureaucratic deadlock of the Employment and Support Allowance scheme, Ladybird, Ladybird spotlights the Child Protection System and stands as one of Loach’s most hard-hitting portrayals of social services that systemically damage its neglected outcasts, reproduce human residues and invent monstrous mothers. This truly intersectional based-on-true-events docudrama touches upon multiple axes of power and domination including gender, class, race, nationality, immigration status, mental health condition, and political views, cemented by the community vigilantism.

In Ladybird, Ladybird, we follow Maggie Conlan (the brilliant Crissy Rock), a spirited, loud, and enraged Liverpudlian single mother in her thirties, struggling to cope with the loss of custody of her four children to social services under ‘place of safety’ orders. The story begins when Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a Peruvian political refugee, meets Maggie in a karaoke bar. Their connection quickly evolves into a romance, as two wounded hearts cling to each other through their sorrows. Through Maggie’s flashbacks, we learn of her turbulent upbringing in an underclass household marked by domestic violence and sexual abuse, and her search for love that has bequeathed her four children by four different fathers, as well as an abusive partner from whom she narrowly escapes. One tragic night, after locking her children in a women’s refuge, a fire breaks out, severely burning one of her little ones, who is then taken into foster care. With nowhere else to turn, Maggie seeks shelter in her abusive ex-partner, until another violent episode prompts social services to take the rest of her children. As the narrative unfolds, social workers’ mistrust of Maggie as an aggressive, submissive, and incapable mother becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more they scrutinise her, the more her patience frays, and her temper explodes. Her present is shaped by the shadows of her past, despite her non-abusive relationship with Jorge. Yet Jorge, too, is deemed unsuitable by the state – viewed through the lens of militant violence tied to his homeland. Though he reassures Maggie that they can build a new life, their two newborns are also ripped from their arms under the cold surveillance of state authorities. This incidence starkly illustrates how the state’s attempts to protect children from violence often manifest as ‘violence as protection’, especially for those deemed ‘unworthy’ of public assistance. [1]

It is not surprising that Ladybird, Ladybird stirred controversy upon its release. While some considered it a painfully blunt critique of the British welfare state, others criticised Loach for engaging in demagogy and manipulating the audience's emotions by boldly depicting unbearable scenes, such as separating babies from their parents at maternity. Others were less pleased with Maggie’s portrayal as an anti-heroine, as her aggressive, uncooperative, and at times violent attitude toward social workers and her partner Jorge was seen as contradictory. But this is precisely what Loach aims to convey through his realism: Yes, Maggie does not seek out our sympathy, justify her actions or place them on a moral pedestal. She is angry and refuses to be appeased and compromised. She is angry at the hypocrisy of heteropatriarchy, which shields batterers, rapists, child molesters, and the wealthy at the expense of women and children. She is angry at the system that confines her to her worst self. She does not tolerate the fact that, instead of offering her a long-term solution, they attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ her and make her ‘cope’ within a vicious cycle of ‘soft policing’ disguised as child welfare protection. [2] She is failed by her state, which has abandoned low-income women like her to ‘negotiate hostile institutions to keep their children’, deeming them disposable. [3] She aptly and furiously calls for a structural solution: ‘If you wanna help me, just get me a flat, not stick me in a dosshouse!’ Or, she could have added, ‘start with finding those four absent fathers of her children, who should be equally held accountable.’

Loach does not go that far but leaves us with a bittersweet feeling upon the closing remarks which inform us ‘Maggie and Jorge have had three more children whom they have been allowed to keep. They have been given no access to their first two daughters.’ It seems that they hold on to love and hope, much like Jorge’s initial wishes and the song Maggie sings at the beginning of the movie, during karaoke:

‘Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun's love
In the spring becomes the rose’

[1] Vergès, Françoise. 2020. A Feminist Theory of Violence. London: Pluto Press.

[2] Kaba, Mariam. 2021. We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

[3] Levine, Judith and Erica Meiners. 2020. The Feminist and the Sex Offender. London: Verso.