text: Ed Miliband has been getting a lot of praise for admitting that he ‘blubbed’ while watching Pride, a British film released last year. It’s a rose-tinted, nostalgic look back at a critical moment in 20th-century British history. Every drop of sentiment is wrung out of the story, with brave young men and women risking their lives to take on an evil dictator. So what is it about, this heartwarming tale of British derring-do? The Battle of Britain? The Falklands crisis? The Iraq War? Scroll down for video . Labour leader Ed Miliband confessed that he 'blubbed' during the British film Pride that centres on the 1984 miners' strike . No. It centres on the 1984 miners’ strike and the plucky underdogs are a London-based group of gays and lesbians who travel to South Wales to express their solidarity with the local branch of the National Union of Mineworkers. Needless to say, the evil dictator who they’re fighting is Margaret Thatcher. Miliband received a lot of praise for admitting that he had a weep . What a surprise that such a storyline led the Labour leader to exclaim: ‘Justine [his wife] and I watched it recently and blubbed.’ I’m sure Pride isn’t the only British film that the right-on Milibands will have cried their way through. For there have been so many over recent years that mythologised the ‘brave and downtrodden’ workers whose lives are made miserable by the Tories. In truth, these movies — Pride, Billy Elliot (also a piece of miners’ strike propaganda that depicted Thatcher as the Devil incarnate), Made In Dagenham (about a car factory strike) and The Full Monty (about a group of redundant Sheffield steelworkers forced to strip naked to make money) —might as well have been party political broadcasts for Labour. For the keystone of these Left-wing propaganda films is a pernicious rewriting of history, portraying Britain’s recent past as a battle between heroic trade unionists, fighting to defend the poor and the vulnerable, and unfeeling bosses, bulldozing everything in their path in the ruthless pursuit of making money for their capitalist overlords. There is no acknowledgment by the film-makers that the unions’ greed and bully-boy tactics all but destroyed the British economy, or that their beloved welfare state (which has actually created a terrible dependency culture in many parts of the country) relies on a strong, unsabotaged economy to keep it afloat. The film Pride achieves a double whammy by venerating not one but two sacred cows of the Left: bolshie unions and minorities (in this case, homosexuals). Naturally, it doesn’t take long for the union bosses to recognise that the life-and-death struggle faced by gays and lesbians is very similar to that of their Welsh colliery members. Scroll down for video . Wringing every drop of emotion from Left-wing audiences, the director ends the film with a scene showing bus-loads of miners turning up to support a gay pride march in London’s Hyde Park, as singer Billy Bragg’s There Is Power In A Union comes blasting over the soundtrack. Strangely absent from the story, of course, is any reference to the role the NUM played in bringing down successive British governments — both Conservative and Labour alike — and its contribution to the terrible industrial unrest that gripped Britain in the Seventies and culminated in the Winter of Discontent. Nor is there any mention of the attempt by Arthur Scargill, the loony-Left leader of the NUM, to persuade communist Russia — not to mention Colonel Gaddafi — to bankroll the strike, which his members hadn’t even had the right to vote for in a fair ballot. Billy Elliott is another film about ‘brave and downtrodden’ workers whose lives are made miserable by the Tories . The same historical revisionism is exhibited in Made In Dagenham, about women workers walking out on strike at the Ford car factory in East London in 1968, demanding equal pay with male employees. As with Pride, the dramatic heart of the story is a conflict between two groups of Left-wing activists who gradually learn to make common cause — in this case, male and female shop-floor workers. At no point in the film is any sympathy shown towards the employers struggling to keep the firm competitive. The viewer is expected to assume that the demands of the strikers are completely justified. Made In Dagenham’s political message couldn’t be clearer, and it ends on a triumphant note with the passing of the Equal Pay Act by a Labour government in 1970. A more honest assessment of the British car industry would have featured the way union firebrands such as Derek Robinson — ‘Red Robbo’ — at British Leyland helped to destroy it and did so much damage to the economy at large. Indeed, a more realistic ending to Made In Dagenham would have pointed out that the Ford factory which once employed 40,000 people now has fewer than 4,000, thanks, in part, to rising labour costs — pushed up by militant unions. Brassed off starring Pete Postlethwaite and Ewan McGregor portrayed Margaret Thatcher as an orge . Then again, that would have meant acknowledging the inconvenient truth that the trade unions played a big role in the postwar decline of Britain’s industrial base. Perhaps the most glaring omission from such Left-wing propaganda movies is any concession that the policies of Margaret Thatcher were a necessary corrective to the chaos and pessimism of the Seventies. The fact is that her government inherited a country on the brink of political and economic collapse and restored it to rude good health, able to hold its head up high again in the world. But in so many Left-inspired British films of the past 25 years, whether Brassed Off (about a colliery band facing the closure of their coalmine by a Tory government), The Full Monty or Billy Elliot, Thatcher is portrayed as a wrecking ball determined to destroy traditional working-class communities and replace nice Left-wing values with nasty Right-wing ones. Inevitably, the period before Thatcher is depicted as a golden age, a pastoral idyll straight out of a Hovis commercial, while the Britain she left behind is portrayed as a money-grubbing spiritual wasteland. Is it any wonder that such films make Ed Miliband, brought up by a Marxist academic father, ‘blub’? The only exception to this disgraceful series of truth-twisting films was The Iron Lady, in which Britain’s first female Prime Minister was shown in a more nuanced light, almost in spite of its makers’ Left-wing instincts. Made In Dagenham is about women workers walking out on strike at the Ford car factory in East London in 1968, demanding equal pay with male employees. It is broadly unsympathetic — there are plenty of scenes in which she is seen to be suffering from dementia, which suggests an element of hostility — but actress Meryl Streep brings such depth and humanity to the lead role that Baroness Thatcher emerges as a more complex figure than the bogeyman of Left-wing mythology. Not surprisingly, The Iron Lady was condemned by many in the British film establishment for being ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’, an example of ‘self-important’ film-making. No doubt if it had depicted Thatcher as a cruel monster, the same critics would have acclaimed it an out-and-out masterpiece. But not to worry. This mistake was corrected the following year by Labour-supporting Danny Boyle. In his lavish £27 million opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics he made no direct reference to Britain’s greatest postwar Prime Minister — which was odd in itself — but left viewers in no doubt about his view of Thatcherism. Once again we were treated to the familiar Left-wing version of Britain’s history, in which top-hatted Tory industrialists, determined to despoil the country with dark satanic mills, are stopped in their tracks by an alliance of suffragettes, trade unionists and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists. Boyle’s collaborator, Frank Cottrell Boyce, condemned Thatcher for being ‘insufficiently British’ and said ‘although she draped herself in the Union Flag, she never seemed to understand this country’. The Iron Lady was condemned by many in the British film establishment for being ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’, an example of ‘self-important’ film-making . The truth is, it’s the Left that doesn’t understand contemporary Britain. We are not a drab, depressed country, riven with class divisions and grotesque inequality, as you would think from watching films such as Pride and Billy Elliot. On the contrary, crime is lower, life expectancy higher and the standard of living better than at any time in our past. The rights of women, gays and ethnic minorities are all robustly defended by politicians of both Left and Right, and our schools and hospitals have never been better (or more lavishly funded). Britain now has the fastest-growing economy in the Western world, with more jobs being created last year in Yorkshire — ironically, the county where so many of these Left-wing propaganda films have been set — than in the whole of France. Couldn’t we have just one home-grown film that celebrates the miracle that is modern Britain and brings a tear of pride to us all, rather than Left-wing drivel that triggers ‘blubbing’ from Ed Miliband?
target: Ed Miliband has admitted that he cried watching the British film Pride .
  Movie centres on the 1984 miners' strike and a group of gays and lesbians .
  Billy Elliott and Brassed Off could also get the Labour leader blubbing .