Among More Reasonable Viewers

Dawn Foster writes:

For those who have worked in housing, homelessness and advocacy, Ken Loach’s latest film, I, Daniel Blake will seem more documentary than fiction.

The two protagonists are both subject to arbitrary and damaging periods of extreme poverty after their benefits are stopped. 

Daniel – a 61-year old joiner recovering from a heart attack and rejected for Employment Support Allowance (ESA) – is hit by the bedroom tax after the death of his wife, while Katie, a young single mother with two children, is evicted after complaining about the black mould in her flat that hospitalises her son. 

After a year in a hostel in London, she is shunted far from her family to Newcastle and after getting the wrong bus during their first days in the city, is sanctioned for turning up slightly late to a benefits appointment. 

Neither of these tales is unusual given the intense focus on lowering the number of people on Jobseekers Allowance and ESA, and both sanctions, and the ludicrous telephone assessment for ESA that Daniel undergoes, are arbitrary measures focused not on helping individuals but on cutting expenditure while hitting targets. 

But critics from a certain political bent have found it unpalatable. 

If the film causes discomfort, perhaps your political system should be the target of your ire rather than a director and the screen representation of thousands of near identical stories across the country. 

Sanctions are meted out constantly for ludicrous reasons; people are evicted from appalling housing simply for requesting basic repairs; families in hostels are moved far from home with no support; and many people have died shortly after being declared fit for work. 

It takes a special arrogance for people who have never sat in a foodbank or been near a job centre to proclaim that these cases are unrealistic.

Poverty and, by extension, the benefits system, together work to instil shame and isolation in those subjected to such miseries.

Political and media narratives reinforce the idea of people in need as architects of their own misfortune and to blame for the fact that they’ve fallen through the cracks.

But there simply aren’t enough houses and jobs available to end homelessness and reach full employment overnight.

Rather than admit this, and work to ensure that there is a safety net for people who are sick, homeless and unemployed, lives are instead treated as a problem on a balance sheet.

If you sanction enough claimants, withdraw employment support allowance, and shift people from temporary accommodation in the cities where they’ve always lived to towns far away, the issue is deemed solved.

That people are left reliant on foodbanks, living without electricity and forced to sell furniture simply to feed their children because they’ve been sanctioned is ignored.

Instead, the fact that someone who once claimed Jobseekers Allowance or ESA has been sanctioned is offered as proof not of a dysfunctional system arbitrarily aiming to meet targets, but of the claim that those left with no support were gaming the system and not entitled to support in the first place.

I, Daniel Blake is an uncomfortable film for anyone to watch, but more so if you are intent on disregarding the experiences it presents.

If you believe that too many people would rather claim benefits than work, being forced to confront the human fallout of the system doesn’t sit comfortably with you.

Facts can be inconvenient in that way: the film is meticulously researched and each scene has played out in countless lives around the country.

I report regularly on poverty, and have visited many houses where the residents are embarrassed to admit they can’t offer you a cup of tea as there’s nothing in the meter – and many people who visit foodbanks are dizzy with hunger.

I watched this film with a friend, who works in the housing benefit department of a London council, and he remarked that he’d seen it all before.

People who disregard Loach’s film as unrealistic proselytising might do well to spend some time actually asking the people affected about their experiences of the labyrinthine housing and benefits system.

But more than that, they should consider why they’re so threatened by the stories presented in I, Daniel Blake.

The characters are people who are rarely represented in the media and often scapegoated and dehumanised. Loach presents his characters as complex but utterly failed by the system that nominally helps them, stuck in sub-standard homes with no money to pay basic utility bills, beaten down by shame and punished for fighting for basic rights.

These are the people who are ignored for political expediency – that Loach has shone a light on the human cost of austerity has rattled the government’s defenders, but could forge more empathy and understanding among more reasonable viewers.