This is a gloomy chronicle of a family in a perpetual poverty cycle, where the older folks remember better times, but things get steadily worse as the years roll on. The townsfolk are mean and ragged, their houses are dark and shabby, and as employment disappears, and then their dole gets cut and eliminated, all their illusions about decency and respectibility are shattered.
A hero of sorts shows up, a clean cut, soft-spoken Labour agitator. He gives street corner sermons of socialism and wins the girl's heart before a martyr's fade-out. The one bright spot is a short holiday to Blackpool, before we come to a crisis of daughter's morals. It's like a leftist "Hindle Wakes."
This is the sort of angst-choked melodrama that lead to the "Kitchen Sink" dramas of the next two decades. Bathetic, unhappy stories of lower class life can always be palmed off as "realistic", and if you can get in some censorship controversy, it's a success!
It seems to me that this film, about mass unemployment, would seem ill-timed when the nation at war was so worker starved that women were being drafted, but it is likely intended to raise support for the Beveridge plan, as a reminder of what might come again, post-war, if the government doesn't step in.