Many of you may have read Alex Cox's swingeing attack in The Guardian this week on the Summer of British Film season currently being run by the UK Film Council and the BBC.

For those who are not familiar with the season, it amounts to little more than a bit of harmless re-issuing of a few classic old movies in our multiplexes, a handful of nostalic documentaries and a short film competition.

But for Alex Cox it represents an evil, US-backed New Labour plot to erase left-of-centre filmmaking from British history.

No, really.

He has several gripes about the season, which pretty much amount to:

a ) It's only showing movies that the BBC happen to have under license (no shit, Sherlock).

b) It's all just pro-American propaganda (Cox, you must realise, has never made a film in America, about America, or with American funding, never ever).

c) It doesn't feature anything radical, experimental or political.

It's the latter charge that worries me most. There is a place for all three, of course, and some of the suggestions he makes are films I'd like to see given their due, like A Very British Coup and The War Game (both of which are TV dramas rather than movies).

But to seriously suggest that people are going to pay good money to see Derek Jarman's Sebastiane at Cineworld is to grossly over-estimate the gullibility of the cinemagoing public in this country (something Cox has done way too many times already).

I would pick apart Cox's absurd, tortured logic in the article line by line if it wouldn't bore everyone to tears, suffice to say that almost every conclusion is totally undermined anyway by the generous documentary on Social Realism (see the trailer here).

Left-wing filmmaking, whether you agree with its politics or not, represents a tiny minority in the UK, and I speak as someone with many thousands of miles of Trotskyite fellow travelling behind me. Indeed, to call it a minority is to overstate its significance. It's a caucus of a sub-sect of a minority ('Splitters!')

This isn't evil New Labour cultural repression backed by the CIA. This is just a plain old simple truth. Our classic war films, romances, comedies and gangster flicks are still, even now, much more popular than our political films. They always have been and they always will be. And that is why they will always be celebrated more.

Cox, in the end, comes across rather like Stan of the People's Front of Judea (or is it the Judean People's Front?) who wants to fight against the evil oppressors for his right to have a baby.

It's not so much symbolic of his struggle against oppression, it's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

Read Alex Cox's ridiculous load of old bollocks in The Guardian.