I shouldn't have done that. You know how if someone says 'don't look, it's too horrible!' you instinctively do, and then feel sick, repulsed or degraded and can't get the vile image out of your mind? That's what reading Daily Mail articles is like.
Why, then, did I give the tiniest, weeniest damn what Toby Young had to say about I, Daniel Blake in his review for that ghastly rag? I've read and heard plenty of positive, promising reviews and it's not as if the Daily Heil was ever likely to do anything other than a hatchet job on it. Indeed, Young went out of his way to slate the film and - the bastard! - put in a load spoilers without any prior warning too. Why would he worry about that, though? His readership won't go to see it anyway; they'll draw their conclusions about it from his own wise words and insightful analysis (clears throat ironically...).
I'll pick the bones out of Young's critique shortly but I should start by confessing that I haven't actually seen I, Daniel Blake yet. It isn't showing here in Stoke during its opening week which is odd, when we probably have a disproportionately high number of 'Daniels' here and a growing number of displaced 'Katies' too. I'm sure one of the multiplexes will squeeze it onto one of its smaller-than-your-own-TV screens in due course. The excellent Stoke Film Theatre at the University has it later in November, probably just before it's out on DVD or on Film 4. In the meanwhile, I wait in anticipation (and with almost unrealistically high expectations) to see it. Welfare Rights Lit - the Movie. Go, Ken Loach!
But back to Toby Young and the Daily Mail. Apparently, Daniel Blake isn't a 'real' benefit claimant because we don't see him 'drinking, smoking, gambling or even watching television'. In short, he's too 'good', too far removed from the Benefits Street stereotype, to be credible. Young also can't believe that someone recovering from a major heart attack could be found 'fit for work' (happens all the time, dude) and he doesn't believe Blake can't immediately appeal when he gets the decision (he can't - see below).
I'm guessing it may be some tome since Toby Young was last employed assisting clients with ESA appeals (me too, actually, thanks to the removal of Legal Aid funding for us pesky do-gooders), but there really are a great many paragons of hard work and respectability who fall ill and are, quite wrongly, found 'fit for work'. Some of them don't drink, smoke, gamble or even watch much TV. Some of them have hobbies like carpentry, tend nice gardens, help their neighbours, volunteer for their communities and dress smartly for their tribunals. They maintain the standards we are encouraged to believe only 'hard-working people' care about. I even met one chap on incapacity benefit who spent the years of his enforced early retirement building a fantastic model railway while campaigning tirelessly, and ultimately successfully, for better full-sized rail services for his community. To nick a classic line; 'Reader, I married him'!
Some people wrongly denied their benefits are Daily Mail readers. Yes, even they could be Daniel Blake! When I was doing regular appeal casework, I was always being told ''They're right to clamp down on all those shirkers, but I've worked all my life and I'm genuinely ill!'. They had seen and believed the 'Saints and Scroungers' and 'On the Fiddle' programmes about benefit claimants swindling their way to a life of luxury because the system was too soft, so how the hell could this be happening to them?
How indeed? (Clue - it isn't the fault of immigrants either...)
Confidentiality rules prevent me sharing too many details of my Daniel (or Daniella) Blakes' health problems but they included people trying to recover from heart attacks and strokes, serious brain injuries, complex fractures to their limbs, progressive conditions such as MS, as well as profound mental ill health. I assume that Mr Young's knowledge of the ESA system is so good that he's already aware that you can have completely lost the use of your dominant arm and hand - or even actually have lost the arm and hand entirely - and still not have 'limited capability for work'? 'Common sense' - that precious commodity of which the Right believe they have a monopoly - may tell you a person is not fit for work and never in a hundred years is going to be offered a job, but the Work Capability Assessment's points system, devised by Civil Servants with secure, steady, office-bound lives, tested by an ill-trained, hasty or bigoted 'health care professional' and considered by an over-worked, under-trained Decision Maker, insists they are. Time and again, the DWP fails to properly consider the 'exceptional circumstances' route to entitlement - Regulations 29 and 35 to those in the know. Both medical assessors and Decision Makers frequently overlook their power to declare that a claimants health at serious risk if not found to have 'limited capability for work' if they slip through the awkward gaps in the points system, Daniel Blake style. Real people have died as a result and DWP internal enquiries flagged this as an urgent training need, and yet it is still happening.
Of course the hundreds of Daniel Blakes I've encountered in my years as a benefits adviser haven't all been likeable, upright characters. They've included addicts and thieves, child abusers, wife-beaters and neo-Nazis but, however unsavory their past or present, if they had been wrongly assessed as 'fit for work' when proper analysis of the facts and application of law said they were not, I would advise and represent them accordingly. Justice and the means to live are not, at least in a civilised society, the sole preserve of 'nice' people. Sadly, after years of claimant-bashing TV, it's difficult to imagine a cinema audience taking too complex a character to their heart so, if Daniel Blake does prove on viewing to be a little too saintly to be 'typical', I can understand why the film-makers might have erred on the side of niceness. When I wrote Severe Discomfort I tried to make Lyn and Terry Walker, my central claimant couple, slightly flawed yet still sympathetic. Anyone who reaches the end of that book and isn't rooting for them has failed my Empathy Capability Assessment. While most reviews suggest it worked, others felt their negative views on claimants vindicated by the characters' shortcomings.
I'm bracing myself for some necessary over-simplification of the benefit regulations in I, Daniel Blake, something you can avoid with 500 pages of a novel to play with, though too much legal corner-cutting leaves a get-out for
defenders of the current system - that the film is inaccurate so can be
disregarded. Unsurprisingly, this is part of Young's attack. He is critical that the film suggests say Blake cannot appeal his 'fit for work' decision without first getting a call from the DWP decision maker and says this is false. It is, but not in the way Young wants us to believe. The reality, since October 2013, is actually worse than this. Prior to appealing to an independent tribunal, a claimant has to request that the DWP 'reconsider' their decision. Only when the 'mandatory reconsideration' has taken place, perhaps weeks or months later, and the claimant has written notice of the outcome from the decision maker, not just a phone call, can s/he lodge an appeal with the Tribunals Service and, with a 'sick note', go back on ESA at the basic assessment rate. ESA claimants found 'fit for work' can only 'sign on' for JSA during the reconsideration, unless signed off by their GP with a
completely new medical condition or by providing medical evidence that
their existing condition has significantly deteriorated. As DWP cut-backs remove skilled staff, 'reconsideration' is becoming little more than a rubber-stamping exercise or worse, a delaying or deflecting tactic. See this blog for an in-depth critique of the process.
It's also troubling me that the movie might lay the blame for all this misery at IDS and the Tories' door, when ESA was actually a New Labour creation. Even the stricter descriptors and 'migration' of Incapacity Benefit claimants to ESA which started in 2011 was signed off when Yvette Cooper was still Secretary of State at the DWP. When, in 2015, Rachel Reeves said Labour wasn't the party of 'people on benefits', she wasn't kidding. They hadn't been for years. Ironically, then, Toby Young is cheering for measures to supposedly put the 'workshy' back to work which were none of his party's doing.
Young is quick to point out that cuts to 'welfare' are popular and mocks the film for suggesting communities might co-operate to support claimants. Paradoxically, both are true. I've advised in Foodbanks and met helpers who are fully behind both austerity and benefit cuts, in principle, but appalled by what they add up to in practice. Even people who get riled up by stories about benefit cheats will willingly rally round friends and neighbours who fall victim to those cuts, just as someone might express strongly prejudicial and negative views about 'immigrants' and yet get on perfectly well with a Polish work colleague or have the greatest respect for their Syrian cardiologist. When the abstract 'them' becomes someone you know, everything can change - but only if people appreciate that their mate isn't the exception but the rule.
Or, to put it another way, that #WeAreAllDanielBlake.
