Reflections on ‘I, Daniel Blake’ by Prof. Simon Szreter

I Daniel Blake, is a film that anatomises the creeping corruption of our humanity and our endangered morality in British society today; and is itself a rallying cry of resistance against it. We are now six years on from the policy launched by a Conservative chancellor in 2010. To mend the hole in the nation’s finances caused by an under-regulated banking sector, the financial sector has not been called-on but instead the costs of the welfare state have been cut, in the name of ‘austerity’. The film shows how the institutions of our welfare state, designed after World War II to provide a common bond of resilience and social security for us all in our times of vulnerability, are consequently being turned into weapons of stigma, humiliation and social division.

In the job-centre in Newcastle, people with all kinds of different reasons for being in their current predicaments present themselves for help from their fellow-citizens. We encounter four of them. One is a local, skilled carpenter in his late fifties, Daniel Blake, a childless widower who has suffered a heart attack and needs temporary state support before being deemed by his doctor to be ready to return to work. Katie is a twice-deserted young mother, who, following two years waiting in a single room in hostel accommodation after her landlord exercised his apparently perfectly legal right to evict her when she asked for a leaking pipe to be repaired, has now has been removed by her London local authority to the cheaper north-east . Her children now have their own bedrooms but we see Daisy, her 8-year old daughter, bright and sensitive, climbing into bed with her mum, upset at losing all her London friends and encountering bullying at her new school. The fourth is Daisy’s five-year old brother, Dylan, also bright but naturally confused by the move and showing worrying signs of introverted, obsessive behavior.

The four come together when Daniel tries to support Katie when she is about to be penalized for being late for her interview, after getting lost in an unfamiliar city, by a strict application of the rules that she must be sanctioned, even though she tells the official that she has only twelve pounds left in her pocket to feed her children.

The film shows how those who are employed in the jobcentre are themselves of course very diverse, some more and some less sympathetic in their manner of dealing with the vulnerable who pass through their hands. Yet the reason for the general climate of officiousness is made perfectly clear, too. When one official, Ann, tries to spend a little extra time helping Daniel to navigate his way through an online form that he has to complete to make a benefit claim (like many working men of his age he has never previously bothered with the internet and so is a novice) she is noticed by her local office supervisor and is immediately summoned to a back-room for a reprimand- which side of the counter does she want to be on?

Of course we know that the mantra of austerity applies to the overbearing office supervisor, too – she is in turn responsible to her line-managers in Whitehall for reducing costs to the state. Slowing down the rate at which applicants obtain their entitlements is all part of the strategy of reducing costs, exactly as if this was all a matter of inching-up profits by close attention to marginal cuts to production costs in the standard business manual. It’s a kind of anti-nudge for public administrators. The jobcentres cheerily insist they are ‘digital by default’ knowing full well that those marginalized by the labour market are more likely, like Daniel to be ‘pencil be default’- more money saved as the poor’s progress through the system is frustrated and delayed by the sand thrown into the wheels.

The film makes it chillingly clear how staff deal on a personal level with the life-changing decisions they have to make. When Daniel is threatened with withdrawal of his benefit – not because he is not actively looking for work, but because he can’t provide photographic or online evidence that he is – he is told by the woman assessing him that she will pass the recommendation for sanction on to a “Decision Maker” to rule on. Everyone at the front line is able to use this formula to exonerate themselves from direct responsibility, even though they in fact make the discretionary decision to pass the papers on to this disembodied decision-maker, an entity who has no direct contact with or understanding of the nuances of the situation they are pronouncing on and no sense of the human misery that may be set in train by their action.

As I, Daniel Blake shows, every single day in which a vulnerable person, lacking a current source of income, goes without the entitlements they are statutorily due is a day of danger and desperation for our fellow citizen. The cruel, cost-cutting logic justified in the name of austerity becomes in reality a state-imposed policy of quite deliberately playing Russian roulette with the lives of the unlucky. That is no longer a deniable fact, since DWP were finally forced in August 2015 to issue damning statistics confirming that death-rates among those declared fit for work by commercial companies such as ATOS were disproportionate; and a number of them have been suicides. Each one of these individuals in the statistics is a son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife brother, sister, uncle, aunt, neighbor or friend. Daniel Blake is just one of these statistics brought back to life for us by Ken Loach’s skills. I, Daniel Blake should be the moment for us all to come to our senses and to reject the senseless inhumanity which leads to these needless deaths at the hands of a misguided state policy.

But there is also the ongoing misery and challenges to their self-respect of those whom the system fails, but does not in fact kill. The film does not stint on this. This is the heroic and tenacious life which Katie must make for herself. Cut-off from her mother, now on the end of a phone, and from her London networks, she now has a house for her children but cannot find a job in a jobless local economy. She tries her very best for her children but with the extreme shortage of income imposed on her by the austerity regime’s cost-cutting delays, she starves herself to feed them- an all too commonly documented choice made by desperate parents in times past and present.

Here we come to the central dramatic shocking scene of the film, which takes place in a food bank. This nationwide network has been set-up spontaneously with absolutely the best of intentions, often staffed by volunteers from local religious groups, which represent one of the bastions of institutionalized altruistic behaviour in our fraying society. Yet, as the film shows, the existence of foodbanks is cruelly exploited and parasited upon by the austerity state. Just as critics of the Big Society agenda feared when it was trumpeted by David Cameron in 2010, such willing voluntarism by well-meaning citizens is an appalling moral hazard, which permits Ministers to make unacceptable cuts and falsely believe their policies are doing no harm. Because food banks exists, claimants can be ‘sanctioned’, penalized and sent to them for survival rations, while the state delays its payments and saves the costs it has targeted as its top priority. Those staffing food banks are unwittingly complicit in a brutalizing welfare system designed by our latter-day Mr Gradgrinds. Without the food banks the mean-minded state-dictated tactics of austerity would never have worked because there would have been multiple and regular deaths from actual starvation for the Press to report. Furthermore, though not their intention of course, the food banks have become an integral part of an apparatus of stigmatization in austerity Britain. The demand for the foodbanks in many areas is such that the vulnerable must queue up in miserable dependency to be allowed in during the restricted opening hours that the volunteers can provide. It all feels like the Victorian workhouse.

The shock moment of the film, as visceral as it is unexpected, occurs when Katie, having starved herself for days (though we weren’t quite sure of this until this moment) , is portrayed losing self-control after several minutes of accumulating kindly and helpful food in her shopping bags. She suddenly turns her back and rips open the top of a baked beans tin to try surreptitiously to scoop its contents into her mouth to stop herself from fainting. She gets covered by beans and sauce of course and is immediately mortified and humiliated by her behavior. Tellingly, the volunteers have clearly seen it all before. They offer her comfort and understanding, not censure. Loach lets us see it all and the lessons it offers reflected on Daisy’s startled but quick-learning face.

But there are limits to what is given to foodbanks – apparently sanitary towels are not often donated - and this leads on to the second de-humanising plight facing women in Katie’s predicament. Loath to spend her precious resources on this ‘luxury’ for herself, Katie allows herself a tiny act of shoplifting to obtain what she needs - and is caught. This proves however to be another of the film’s moments for the expression of compassion and humanity; this time by the local store-manager. After what we have seen in the jobcentre we fully expect him to throw the rule-book at her and call the police. However, this man is a human being and not accountable to anybody above him, at least not for a packet of sanitary towels missing from his stock-inventory. Having already paid legitimately for all her other groceries, she is let go on her way.

But not before the security worker who had first caught her passes her a phone number: ‘I can help nice girls like you’. We of course know where this kind of help must lead. Childless Daniel is desperate to help Katie and her children in every way he can - paying her heating bill at one point, fixing her house, selling his own furniture. But he cannot prevent her from the logic of going on the game- only this can give her and her children 300 pounds per week in an alien city.

This is another of the film’s clearest and carefully-documented general lessons. Placing impediments of process within a system so that it fails to offer our fellow citizens fair and effective support in their periods of greatest vulnerability pushes people to extremes, whether it be prostitution, the black economy or the edges of criminality- just in order to survive and to look after their dependents.

This is a film which has more succinctly indicted the disgraceful nature and consequences of the social policy agenda of austerity than any sociological research project ever could. Ken Loach has put frail humans, both warm and cold-blooded varieties, into this mirror of how we live now for us all to see. There is far too much undeniable statistical evidence in the public domain for those who hate this film for its political message to deny its veracity with any conviction. Hundreds of food-banks operating in Britain in 2016 serving approaching a million ‘customers’ a day are a shameful necessity caused by a government policy of starving people of their rightful entitlements though a sinister policy of turning the procedures for claiming benefits into an obstacle course. That this causes premature deaths, misery and suicides is not deniable. The last time millions of meals were handed out in the UK was in the summer of 1847 in Ireland; and tragically that life-sustaining policy was abandoned the following year when a domestic banking crisis in London induced the government to curtail its ‘generosity’ and so the Irish poor were left to the mercies of their Poor Law workhouses, with appalling consequences, measured in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

We have been here before. The present thorough-going austerity policy was implemented once before in our history and in the name of the same right-wing ideological principles. In 1834 a longstanding, generous and universal social security system, the Old Poor Law (dating from 1601), was replaced with a deterrent system - the Victorian Poor Law of the workhouse test made infamous by its depiction in Oliver Twist.Dickens published his critical novel four years after the new workhouse regime was imposed. Humane and Christian principles of collective responsibility and assistance, whereby the more fortunate in every parish had been mandated since 1601 to support financially the old, the sick, the lame, the orphans, the single mothers and, yes, the unemployed, were superseded in 1834 by new principles of ‘rational’ market efficiency and ‘scientific’ cost-cutting .The nation’s bill for the poor was slashed in half within a year. Right-wing think-tanks today fantasise about such possibilities. But this came at terrible human cost, just as it does today. We now know that England’s previous remarkable and precocious universal social security system set up by her last Tudor sovereign had enabled its people to become famine-free over a century and a half earlier than the rest of Western Europe. But within a decade of the extension of the draconian deterrent workhouses of the New Poor Law to the province of Ireland, the United Kingdom was plunged into one of the very worst famines in recorded history, annihilating one in eight Irish inhabitants, in the name of saving costs for the well-off, supposedly promoting economic efficiency and maintaining work discipline.

The social security protection which Elizabeth I’s Poor Law offered to all subjects was re-incarnated in a new form as the UK’s modern welfare state after World War II. It is this that is now in jeopardy. The further tightening of the screw on the lives of vulnerable children like Daisy and Dylan announced by stony-hearted and self-righteous Ministers with their further reduction this year in the cap on benefits is an assault on the common decency of all of us. In 1834, when the British government last abandoned a humane system for the siren calls of market efficiencies, Britain was not remotely a democracy in today’s sense and all this was determined by an elite coterie. This time round the voting citizenry, have allowed a similarly inhumane system focused on cost-cutting to be created in their midst in their name – ultimately through the votes they cast, or failed to bother to cast, in general elections. Thus, a generation ago, proper housing provision through council houses and controls on unscrupulous landlords was available. All of this has been thrown away - the current wretched assault on Housing Benefit bills, whose consequences this film portrays, is the final manifestation, the result not of the profligacy of the vulnerable but of the out of control rental market. Something patently within the power of Parliament to regulate. Perhaps no wonder, then, that some of the desperate and dispossessed joined those voting to punish the establishment on June 23rd.

I Daniel Blake makes it clear that if Britain is to move on from this, it must replace austerity and referral to ‘the Decision Maker’ with humanity and presumption of entitlement as the principles with which official systems treat the most vulnerable in our society. Mrs May offered fine words of this sort in her first speech as Prime Minister, but her Chancellor offered no sign of changed priorities for the poor and vulnerable, those living the lives of Daniel, Katie, Daisy and Dylan in this epoch-defining film by Ken Loach.