The lesson of The Long Good Friday

On the 30th anniversary of the release of Britain’s best gangster movie, Hardeep Singh Kohli celebrates its eerie prescience

‘I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman with a sense of history… our country is not an island any more…’

Harold Shand; gangster, visionary and entrepreneur. For many, The Long Good Friday is the finest British gangster film ever made. Much as I concur with that recommendation, to describe it as merely a gangster movie is to be excessively reductive.

When I first watched The Long Good Friday a couple of decades ago, I too loved it as a gangster movie; a film bristling with brutality, suffocatingly suspenseful and fulfilling all the criteria for excellent storytelling. Every few years I would dust off the DVD and watch it again; having done so recently with a friend, I experienced the film anew. I realised that beyond the unfolding inexorability of the protagonist’s downfall, there was a significance in the film in terms of the unfolding inexorability of British politics.

The Long Good Friday is the first truly Thatcherite piece of cinema, a movie that predicted the burgeoning growth and development of London into a world city, a magnet for new non-manufacturing business, a city willing to embrace the free market and exist at the very epicentre of a global economy. And it was through the single-minded prosperity of the City of London that the rest of the nation enjoyed the prosperity that followed.

‘What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a hot dog, know what I mean?’

It seems rather apt that The Long Good Friday celebrate its 30th anniversary this year, just as the once new gold dream of London as financial centre of the world lies in tatters at our feet.