A Tale of "Conscious Cruelty"
In 1966 Ken Loach directed the BBC television play, Cathy Come Home. The central themes of the play were evidently clear. They were homelessness and a social housing crisis. Things changed, people reacted strongly, laws were implemented and time passed. Inevitably time passes. We are no longer in 1966. It is certain a housing crisis still exists in Britain and it is also certain a number of other things are happening in Britain which are unceremonious. With Ken Loach, he is a progressive film maker who does not want to create stunning art like Tarkovsky or Vigo but to create change: social change, political change or whatever. It comes at a price of course. He has been largely ignored in his own country which is not really too surprising. But when he wins the Palme D'Or it is a little more difficult to ignore him. Instead a new tactic is employed.
I, Daniel Blake, is Loach’s latest offering. It is centred around Daniel Blake, who is a professional joiner. We learn from the opening scene that he has had a heart attack, he is a widower and lives alone. He does not work but that is not to say he has not worked previously, he has. He wife has died from a slow and agonising illness before the film begins. In the opening scene then we hear voices but we see nothing, at least to start with. We hear a woman’s voice and a man’s. The woman’s voice is one of authority and a pseudo professional. She refers to herself as a “healthcare professional”. We only hear this when she is asked by Daniel Blake or “Dan” if she is a doctor, she clearly is not. The reason for him being here is an Orwellian term called the “Work and Capability Assessment”. He has had a heart attack and this woman, who is not even a qualified doctor, asks him the most absurd questions such as can he touch his toes or put a hat on. Dan, as everybody in the film calls him, keeps reminding her what has this got to do with him having a heart attack. He gets a futile response by insisting he answer the questions he is being asked. He is told he must look for work or not be paid any money. Then Daniel Blake enters a Kafkaesque world.
His cardiologist has told this 59 year-old that he is not ready to go back to work but a “healthcare professional”, who is not a professional at all, claims he can now begin to look for work. He can appeal the decision but that takes longer than one may imagine. In a fortuitous moment he attends a job centre appointment. He witnesses Katie, a young mother of two from London, who is late and is threatened with another Orwellian term, “sanctions”, which in layman’s terms means her benefits will be removed for a number of weeks for being late for her job centre appointment. She attempts to explain the situation but to know avail. Daniel intervenes but he and Katie are sent packing by the towering security guard. We learn that Katie has spent two years in a homeless hostel with her two children in London. After those two years a flat is found for her…three-hundred miles away in Newcastle where the film is set.
As the film progresses things only get worse for Dan and Katie. Katie fairs worse. She is forced into the ultimate humiliation of going to a food bank, where she is seen opening a can of food and gorging on it. She breaks down in tears, Dan, along with the staff console her. Later, because, of a direct consequence of facing “sanctions”, she goes even beyond the humiliation of entering a food bank: she shoplifts and is caught in the act. A member of security there gives her a card and calls her a “nice girl”, later we find out this work is escort work. It appears she has now entered the ultimate perverse underworld where anything is possible. Before these events unfold, we see her desperately looking for work. It is not London, and anybody who knows Newcastle will know unpleasant truths about work. So she struggles. Dan struggles. Everybody struggles. The end of the film is grim.
Within tragedy comes comedy, we see this with even the greatest writers in history. It is in Shakespeare, Beckett, Kafka, Cervantes, Gogol, Goncharov and so on. We see it also in I, Daniel Blake. One can make comparisons with Daniel Blake’s plight. He is thrown into a world where he must look for work under the Kafkaesque conditions in which the archaic welfare state works under. That means the man nearing sixty must master the art of using computers of which he knows nothing about. He is sent on a course which teaches him how to create a CV. He fails and writes one out instead, and because he is unable to provide “evidence”, another Orwellian term in this context, he has his benefits “sanctioned”. He is forced to sell many of his possessions. With no real jobs, with a totalitarian system which is designed to punish people so severely they take their own lives, evidence is needed when looking for work, when on most occasions it is impossible to provide evidence. Some, however, do not think is so bad after all. Because, this film, as people who watch it should know, may be a fictitious story with fictitious characters but that is where the fiction ends. In fact, the film does not even begin to tell of the misery and suffering; it would be an impossibility because nobody would believe it.
Toby Young, who does not call himself a madman, is a journalist, of a kind, who writes for the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and the Spectator magazine. He wrote an article for the Daily Mail with the title of “Why only Lefties could go misty eyed at a movie that romanticises Benefits Britain”. He starts off by calling Ken Loach a “left-wing director”. This is a queer thing. By the same token we could call Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman left wing. That is quite a pertinent point but not a relevant one which is why I will touch upon this briefly. When Bergman and Antonioni died in 2007, Toby Young wrote one of his little pieces in the Spectator about them. What he wrote was total absurdity. Mr Young wrote the following words “Unlike the champions of Bergman and Antonioni, it is popular movies I regard as true cinematic art, not obscure, art-house films — and I’m convinced that posterity will prove me right.” In effect what he is saying is that popular Hollywood movies are better than these films by these directors, and why? That is not such a hard question to answer. It has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with art and culture. One may even go so far as to call it the indoctrination of the young. Elsewhere in the piece he says “L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse have all been rightly forgotten.” He even goes on to say people like John Ford and Hitchcock are better. It is uncertain what sort of reality Toby Young belongs to but in this Loach article, it is purely pathological.
The first scene of the Loach film, Toby Young calls “entertaining”, he then goes on to say “The remaining 135 minutes are unremittingly depressing”. The entire film lasts 100 minutes. He again repeats this claim, which suggests he has not seen the film; Mark Steel, a columnist for the Independent, tells us he has not. A paragraph later, he is again talking about the left wing, this time in reference is to the Guardian newspaper, giving us the impression, only the readers of this paper and people like them should be interested in the issues of the film, because, of course, to be concerned for the downtrodden, the despised, those who suffer the torments of this life, to document or to even spare a thought about them must be a “left wing” affair. As we read on we discover Toby Young is fabricating everything he writes or perhaps he has not seen the film. It may be both, which is more likely. Katie faints from hunger at the food bank, he writes. No, she does not faint. She breaks down, after she opens some canned food and eats it, he says she is caught shoplifting sanitary towels, she takes other items which he does not care to mention then says she becomes a prostitute so she can buy shoes for her daughter. All this is false. Not only false but absurdly so. He pauses, possibly because he knows so little about the film, he the goes on letting his readership know the director of the film is a supporter of current leader of the Labour Party.
Toby Young’s lies, conscious or not, then change to farce. “I’m no expert on the welfare system”, he tells us. He begins talking about an abysmal and abominable T.V show called Benefits Street, which he appears to know a lot about, he even mentions one of the characters names, expecting us to know who she is. He even calls the people in this program “scroungers”, but does not apply this term to the characters in the film he is attempting to review. Daniel Blake, is, according to Young, “a model citizen”. “At no point do we see him drinking, smoking, gambling, or even watching television. No, he is a welfare claimant as imagined by a member of the upper-middle class metropolitan elite.” The first point is that he is not a model citizen, a model citizen does not get cautioned by the police for causing criminal damage. He does not listen to classical music either. At no point in the film does any character make a reference to classical music and we never hear anybody listening to it if you discount Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over the phone when Dan phones the job centre. It is here where Toby young reveals himself. He believes people who are benefit claimants take part in criminal activity, drink until they collapse and watch T.V shows all day about benefit claimants like Toby Young does, because, it would be a scandal of sorts to paint benefit claimants as people, the same as Toby Young, and the same as you and I. They must be shoved into their own misery because Mr Young must preserve his own vacuous lifestyle. In the end he calls it an “inaccurate” portrayal in the film.
What Toby Young and many other people discuss are not the facts. I, Daniel Blake, is a political film, and indeed the director and the people behind the film intended it to highlight the “conscious cruelty” of the current system that is in place. The department for Work and Pensions, who are responsible for the current abominable system that is currently in place, due to significant pressure from the public, released statistics. Some thought they would be surprising. This, however is not the word to describe the “conscious cruelty”. Of the two million people that had attended these “work and capability assessments” and received Employment Support Allowance (ESA), which is the benefit which replaced Incapacity Benefit and works under a much harsher system, and needless to say, is harder to receive, from the month of May 2010 to February 2013, 41,000 people died within a year of that decision being made. Between the months of December of 2011 to February 2014, 81,000 people died claiming Employment Support Allowance.
So Toby Young who is “no expert on the welfare system”, thinks Loach’s picture of the welfare state is contrived. Hayley Squires, who plays Katie in the film, and perhaps should have won best actress award at Cannes for her devastating performance, spoke candidly about her research for this film. She worked alongside Shelter, the homeless charity, as well as with two women who were in a similar position to Katie in the film. The food bank in the film was a real food bank and the staff that worked there were not actors either but real staff that worked there. The staff working in the office in the job centre were not actors either, according to Ken Loach. They had all worked at the job centre. But deep inside the deep chasm that is Toby Young’s brain perhaps they were all in on the deception game, but Mr Young is not the only one who takes to fabricating nonsense.
Ian Duncan Smith, the former Work and Pensions secretary is not in prison or under criminal investigation as one may expect, he was not even sacked from his role in his job. Now, he seems to have caught the Toby Young syndrome. He, too, has made the mendacious claim that the information presented in I, Daniel Blake, is “simply not true”. Does he make a reference to a “healthcare professional”, effectively overruling a cardiologist, who is a real professional, does he allude to the sanctions culture presented in the film, that a man, after having a serious heart attack, can be forced to look for work? Well, no. Instead, he informs anybody who could be bothered to listen to him, that the job centre staff do not behave in the fashion in which they behaved in the film. Mr Duncan Smith knows this because he has been to job centres, not as an unemployed unperson, but as a man indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. So, the job centre staff would really behave that way when he is looking over their shoulder. Damien Green, is another lamentable character in this sorry affair. He, currently, is in the job Iain Duncan Smith once presided over.
Damian Green labelled the portrayal of the benefit staff in the film as “monstrously unfair”, which is a rather queer comment to make. The portrayal of job centre workers in the film are what we would expect them to be. People have reported far worse harrowing stories, but this is how the job centre do behave in the film. What do they say which is so “monstrously unfair"? They apply the rules by having Katie’s benefits “sanctioned” for being late which is a policy at the job centres. They stop Daniel Blake’s benefits because he cannot provide the evidence that he is applying for jobs. That, to Damian Green, is “monstrously unfair”. In response to this, Ken Loach said “If they don’t know what they are doing to people they are incompetent and shouldn’t be in Government; if they do know what they are doing then they are not fit to be in Government. In terms of Green’s comments, he either has no idea what is doing in his own department or he is lying". Paul Laverty, the writer of I, Daniel Blake, wrote the following letter:
To Mr Damian Green, WP, Minister of State,
We noticed you condemned our film in Parliament as having “no relationship to the modern benefits system” and as being “monstrously unfair” to Job Centre staff. It is a pity you didn’t see our film first. Do you always reach conclusions before examining the evidence? Especially, while speaking at the dispatch box? I thought the script might be easier for you in your busy schedule.
For the record, we stand by every single incident as a fair reflection of what is going on today. If you haven’t time for this script, visit a food bank. They will tell you as they told us. Do the decent thing – put an end to this barbaric and systematic attack against our fellow citizens.
Paul Laverty
Of course Mr Green, Mr Duncan smith, Mr Young and all the other people who have echoed similar sentiments have no real arguments. What they really dislike is what Ken Loach calls “the common good”, we see this in the film. It is the solidarity, coming together, empathy, support for others in times of pain and anguish, it is not the free market their ideology preserves over; they can preside over this system that has systematically killed thousands but I, Daniel Blake is not intended to change the law, it’s intent is far more simpler than that; it is to tell a story and to tell the truth so people can understand and grasp not the fiction in the film but the neo realism in the film. If such a pathological system prevails we are all in danger of becoming Daniel Blake’s.
A Tale of "Conscious Cruelty"
In 1966 Ken Loach directed the BBC television play, Cathy Come Home. The central themes of the play were evidently clear. They were homelessness and a social housing crisis. Things changed, people reacted strongly, laws were implemented and time passed. Inevitably time passes. We are no longer in 1966. It is certain a housing crisis still exists in Britain and it is also certain a number of other things are happening in Britain which are unceremonious. With Ken Loach, he is a progressive film maker who does not want to create stunning art like Tarkovsky or Vigo but to create change: social change, political change or whatever. It comes at a price of course. He has been largely ignored in his own country which is not really too surprising. But when he wins the Palme D'Or it is a little more difficult to ignore him. Instead a new tactic is employed.
I, Daniel Blake, is Loach’s latest offering. It is centred around Daniel Blake, who is a professional joiner. We learn from the opening scene that he has had a heart attack, he is a widower and lives alone. He does not work but that is not to say he has not worked previously, he has. He wife has died from a slow and agonising illness before the film begins. In the opening scene then we hear voices but we see nothing, at least to start with. We hear a woman’s voice and a man’s. The woman’s voice is one of authority and a pseudo professional. She refers to herself as a “healthcare professional”. We only hear this when she is asked by Daniel Blake or “Dan” if she is a doctor, she clearly is not. The reason for him being here is an Orwellian term called the “Work and Capability Assessment”. He has had a heart attack and this woman, who is not even a qualified doctor, asks him the most absurd questions such as can he touch his toes or put a hat on. Dan, as everybody in the film calls him, keeps reminding her what has this got to do with him having a heart attack. He gets a futile response by insisting he answer the questions he is being asked. He is told he must look for work or not be paid any money. Then Daniel Blake enters a Kafkaesque world.
His cardiologist has told this 59 year-old that he is not ready to go back to work but a “healthcare professional”, who is not a professional at all, claims he can now begin to look for work. He can appeal the decision but that takes longer than one may imagine. In a fortuitous moment he attends a job centre appointment. He witnesses Katie, a young mother of two from London, who is late and is threatened with another Orwellian term, “sanctions”, which in layman’s terms means her benefits will be removed for a number of weeks for being late for her job centre appointment. She attempts to explain the situation but to know avail. Daniel intervenes but he and Katie are sent packing by the towering security guard. We learn that Katie has spent two years in a homeless hostel with her two children in London. After those two years a flat is found for her…three-hundred miles away in Newcastle where the film is set.
As the film progresses things only get worse for Dan and Katie. Katie fairs worse. She is forced into the ultimate humiliation of going to a food bank, where she is seen opening a can of food and gorging on it. She breaks down in tears, Dan, along with the staff console her. Later, because, of a direct consequence of facing “sanctions”, she goes even beyond the humiliation of entering a food bank: she shoplifts and is caught in the act. A member of security there gives her a card and calls her a “nice girl”, later we find out this work is escort work. It appears she has now entered the ultimate perverse underworld where anything is possible. Before these events unfold, we see her desperately looking for work. It is not London, and anybody who knows Newcastle will know unpleasant truths about work. So she struggles. Dan struggles. Everybody struggles. The end of the film is grim.
Within tragedy comes comedy, we see this with even the greatest writers in history. It is in Shakespeare, Beckett, Kafka, Cervantes, Gogol, Goncharov and so on. We see it also in I, Daniel Blake. One can make comparisons with Daniel Blake’s plight. He is thrown into a world where he must look for work under the Kafkaesque conditions in which the archaic welfare state works under. That means the man nearing sixty must master the art of using computers of which he knows nothing about. He is sent on a course which teaches him how to create a CV. He fails and writes one out instead, and because he is unable to provide “evidence”, another Orwellian term in this context, he has his benefits “sanctioned”. He is forced to sell many of his possessions. With no real jobs, with a totalitarian system which is designed to punish people so severely they take their own lives, evidence is needed when looking for work, when on most occasions it is impossible to provide evidence. Some, however, do not think is so bad after all. Because, this film, as people who watch it should know, may be a fictitious story with fictitious characters but that is where the fiction ends. In fact, the film does not even begin to tell of the misery and suffering; it would be an impossibility because nobody would believe it.
Toby Young, who does not call himself a madman, is a journalist, of a kind, who writes for the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and the Spectator magazine. He wrote an article for the Daily Mail with the title of “Why only Lefties could go misty eyed at a movie that romanticises Benefits Britain”. He starts off by calling Ken Loach a “left-wing director”. This is a queer thing. By the same token we could call Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman left wing. That is quite a pertinent point but not a relevant one which is why I will touch upon this briefly. When Bergman and Antonioni died in 2007, Toby Young wrote one of his little pieces in the Spectator about them. What he wrote was total absurdity. Mr Young wrote the following words “Unlike the champions of Bergman and Antonioni, it is popular movies I regard as true cinematic art, not obscure, art-house films — and I’m convinced that posterity will prove me right.” In effect what he is saying is that popular Hollywood movies are better than these films by these directors, and why? That is not such a hard question to answer. It has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with art and culture. One may even go so far as to call it the indoctrination of the young. Elsewhere in the piece he says “L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse have all been rightly forgotten.” He even goes on to say people like John Ford and Hitchcock are better. It is uncertain what sort of reality Toby Young belongs to but in this Loach article, it is purely pathological.
The first scene of the Loach film, Toby Young calls “entertaining”, he then goes on to say “The remaining 135 minutes are unremittingly depressing”. The entire film lasts 100 minutes. He again repeats this claim, which suggests he has not seen the film; Mark Steel, a columnist for the Independent, tells us he has not. A paragraph later, he is again talking about the left wing, this time in reference is to the Guardian newspaper, giving us the impression, only the readers of this paper and people like them should be interested in the issues of the film, because, of course, to be concerned for the downtrodden, the despised, those who suffer the torments of this life, to document or to even spare a thought about them must be a “left wing” affair. As we read on we discover Toby Young is fabricating everything he writes or perhaps he has not seen the film. It may be both, which is more likely. Katie faints from hunger at the food bank, he writes. No, she does not faint. She breaks down, after she opens some canned food and eats it, he says she is caught shoplifting sanitary towels, she takes other items which he does not care to mention then says she becomes a prostitute so she can buy shoes for her daughter. All this is false. Not only false but absurdly so. He pauses, possibly because he knows so little about the film, he the goes on letting his readership know the director of the film is a supporter of current leader of the Labour Party.
Toby Young’s lies, conscious or not, then change to farce. “I’m no expert on the welfare system”, he tells us. He begins talking about an abysmal and abominable T.V show called Benefits Street, which he appears to know a lot about, he even mentions one of the characters names, expecting us to know who she is. He even calls the people in this program “scroungers”, but does not apply this term to the characters in the film he is attempting to review. Daniel Blake, is, according to Young, “a model citizen”. “At no point do we see him drinking, smoking, gambling, or even watching television. No, he is a welfare claimant as imagined by a member of the upper-middle class metropolitan elite.” The first point is that he is not a model citizen, a model citizen does not get cautioned by the police for causing criminal damage. He does not listen to classical music either. At no point in the film does any character make a reference to classical music and we never hear anybody listening to it if you discount Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over the phone when Dan phones the job centre. It is here where Toby young reveals himself. He believes people who are benefit claimants take part in criminal activity, drink until they collapse and watch T.V shows all day about benefit claimants like Toby Young does, because, it would be a scandal of sorts to paint benefit claimants as people, the same as Toby Young, and the same as you and I. They must be shoved into their own misery because Mr Young must preserve his own vacuous lifestyle. In the end he calls it an “inaccurate” portrayal in the film.
What Toby Young and many other people discuss are not the facts. I, Daniel Blake, is a political film, and indeed the director and the people behind the film intended it to highlight the “conscious cruelty” of the current system that is in place. The department for Work and Pensions, who are responsible for the current abominable system that is currently in place, due to significant pressure from the public, released statistics. Some thought they would be surprising. This, however is not the word to describe the “conscious cruelty”. Of the two million people that had attended these “work and capability assessments” and received Employment Support Allowance (ESA), which is the benefit which replaced Incapacity Benefit and works under a much harsher system, and needless to say, is harder to receive, from the month of May 2010 to February 2013, 41,000 people died within a year of that decision being made. Between the months of December of 2011 to February 2014, 81,000 people died claiming Employment Support Allowance.
So Toby Young who is “no expert on the welfare system”, thinks Loach’s picture of the welfare state is contrived. Hayley Squires, who plays Katie in the film, and perhaps should have won best actress award at Cannes for her devastating performance, spoke candidly about her research for this film. She worked alongside Shelter, the homeless charity, as well as with two women who were in a similar position to Katie in the film. The food bank in the film was a real food bank and the staff that worked there were not actors either but real staff that worked there. The staff working in the office in the job centre were not actors either, according to Ken Loach. They had all worked at the job centre. But deep inside the deep chasm that is Toby Young’s brain perhaps they were all in on the deception game, but Mr Young is not the only one who takes to fabricating nonsense.
Ian Duncan Smith, the former Work and Pensions secretary is not in prison or under criminal investigation as one may expect, he was not even sacked from his role in his job. Now, he seems to have caught the Toby Young syndrome. He, too, has made the mendacious claim that the information presented in I, Daniel Blake, is “simply not true”. Does he make a reference to a “healthcare professional”, effectively overruling a cardiologist, who is a real professional, does he allude to the sanctions culture presented in the film, that a man, after having a serious heart attack, can be forced to look for work? Well, no. Instead, he informs anybody who could be bothered to listen to him, that the job centre staff do not behave in the fashion in which they behaved in the film. Mr Duncan Smith knows this because he has been to job centres, not as an unemployed unperson, but as a man indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. So, the job centre staff would really behave that way when he is looking over their shoulder. Damien Green, is another lamentable character in this sorry affair. He, currently, is in the job Iain Duncan Smith once presided over.
Damian Green labelled the portrayal of the benefit staff in the film as “monstrously unfair”, which is a rather queer comment to make. The portrayal of job centre workers in the film are what we would expect them to be. People have reported far worse harrowing stories, but this is how the job centre do behave in the film. What do they say which is so “monstrously unfair"? They apply the rules by having Katie’s benefits “sanctioned” for being late which is a policy at the job centres. They stop Daniel Blake’s benefits because he cannot provide the evidence that he is applying for jobs. That, to Damian Green, is “monstrously unfair”. In response to this, Ken Loach said “If they don’t know what they are doing to people they are incompetent and shouldn’t be in Government; if they do know what they are doing then they are not fit to be in Government. In terms of Green’s comments, he either has no idea what is doing in his own department or he is lying". Paul Laverty, the writer of I, Daniel Blake, wrote the following letter:
To Mr Damian Green, WP, Minister of State,
We noticed you condemned our film in Parliament as having “no relationship to the modern benefits system” and as being “monstrously unfair” to Job Centre staff. It is a pity you didn’t see our film first. Do you always reach conclusions before examining the evidence? Especially, while speaking at the dispatch box? I thought the script might be easier for you in your busy schedule.
For the record, we stand by every single incident as a fair reflection of what is going on today. If you haven’t time for this script, visit a food bank. They will tell you as they told us. Do the decent thing – put an end to this barbaric and systematic attack against our fellow citizens.
Paul Laverty
Of course Mr Green, Mr Duncan smith, Mr Young and all the other people who have echoed similar sentiments have no real arguments. What they really dislike is what Ken Loach calls “the common good”, we see this in the film. It is the solidarity, coming together, empathy, support for others in times of pain and anguish, it is not the free market their ideology preserves over; they can preside over this system that has systematically killed thousands but I, Daniel Blake is not intended to change the law, it’s intent is far more simpler than that; it is to tell a story and to tell the truth so people can understand and grasp not the fiction in the film but the neo realism in the film. If such a pathological system prevails we are all in danger of becoming Daniel Blake’s.