Catching up (part 1) - Age of Uncertainty

In case you've been wondering how the 'welfare rights lit' gang are getting on, here's the first of a few short stories looking at how they are now...

    'Here we go again, Lyn love.'

    Terry Walker slumped onto the settee next to his wife's armchair before handing her the day's one non-glossy piece of post.

    'It might just be the annual uprating letter, luvvie...'

    As soon as she unfolded the dull, greyish paper from the brown envelope, Lyn knew it wasn't.  She had been volunteering at the Solent Welfare Rights Project for over three years and, in the past year, had become very used to reading letters like this to other people.  She had known for a while that there would be one for her too and, one day, for Terry.  She was still upset.

    'Bugger!'

    She and Hilary had first run through the activities and the descriptors for Personal Independence Payment together, soon after Lyn started doing advice work.  Lyn paid close attention, especially when Hilary explained that one day almost everyone getting Disability Living Allowance - DLA - would have to make a claim for Personal Independence Payment, or PIP, instead.

    'Even if they've got their DLA for life?'

    'I'm afraid so, Lyn.  Unless you were sixty-five or over on 8th April 2013, you'll be invited to claim PIP.'

    During the difficult year of her appeal, against an unjustified accusation of benefit fraud, Lyn had learned a great deal about the assessment of her DLA.  Whereas once she had believed she got that because she had a permanent spinal injury, she had come to realise that it wasn't the nature of her disability that mattered, it was how it affected her ability to look after herself and to get around.  After no end of trouble, a tribunal had eventually decided that she reasonably required attention in connection with her bodily functions frequently, throughout the day, which entitled her to the middle rate for care.  At the time, she was told she had this indefinitely.  They had also declared her virtually unable to walk and so eligible for the higher rate for mobility.  That was an indefinite award too.  She and Terry had opted to use the latter for a Motability car; it was only a couple of months since their nice new Vauxhall Corsa had arrived.  She often teased Terry that he spent more time polishing it than driving it, but it enabled he and Lyn to do their shopping, socialising and volunteering.  Terry, who said he had no head for rules and regulations, spent a couple of mornings gently pottering about making up parcels for the customers of the Community Café's Food Bank while Lyn saw her clients.

    It was only when the team had been talking about pension changes and Hilary had remarked that she would have to work until she was sixty-six, that Lyn realised she wouldn't get her pension at sixty either.  That would mean six extra years of being assessed for Employment and Support Allowance, or whatever it was by then.  Everything kept changing.  It wasn't fair.

    Although Lyn hadn't asked directly about her entitlement, she soon knew enough about PIP to be able to make a rough self-assessment.  PIP used a points system to decide if you qualified and what you got.  Lyn was fairly confident she would score four points for needing assistance to cook a main meal, as she couldn't lift hot pans or dishes safely with one hand while holding a stick or the worktop for balance with the other.  She needed aids and appliances to manage her toilet needs and to shower, which would get her two points each - enough for the same rate of PIP for daily living as she got in DLA - although Toby had been saying something about an Upper Tribunal decision on bathing and showering which might give her extra points over that, because she couldn't use a bath.    She wasn't clear where the case law had got to on dressing and undressing, which she had to do sitting down; at one point, her bed would have counted as an aid for that but when Tom had been checking one of her advice letters, he had suggested she rephrase what she had written about this to make her client's two points for this activity less certain.  But she often needed Terry's help to put on her socks or tights, so perhaps there were still points due for that. 

    She managed her own medication, still took responsibility for most of the bills and, since starting her voluntary work, had gained enough confidence that engaging with other people, even strangers, now came as second nature to her.  Overall, she should be no worse off on the personal care side.  She might even gain a little.  She wasn't confident enough of that to initiate a new claim without waiting to be invited to do so and anyway, on the mobility side, things were a lot less certain.  Certainly, none of the planning and following a journey descriptors applied to her.  Physically, when it came to stand and move, some days were better than others.  Using her crutches, she estimated she would still have been up to walking round to Susan's, if Susan still lived in her old house.  She could park right outside the Community Café but the building was quite big inside and, by the time she reached her desk, opposite Deepak and next to Jenny, she would probably have walked over twenty metres.  It was a little further still if she went straight to the ladies, and she didn't actually stop to rest on the way, though whether she could do that repeatedly was open to question.  That was likely to be the crux of the case.  Just as she and her colleagues advised their clients, she would have to test herself over the next couple of weeks, before the form was due back, and make a judgement based on that.

    'I'll make a start on that tonight, if there's nothing good on TV,' she told her husband.  'I don't expect there is.'

    Terry picked up the paper and thumbed through to the entertainment pages.

    'Britain on the Fiddle,' he said.  'Richard Bilton joins the investigators chasing Britain's benefit cheats.'

    'More poverty porn!' snapped Lyn.  'Bastards!'

    'You're starting to sound like young Martin!' laughed Terry. 

    'Now I do his kind of work, I can see why he swears,' Lyn replied.  'It's programmes like that which allow the Government to get away with all this!'  She brandished her form at him before stuffing it in the plastic bag on the handle of her chair where the important papers for her attention went.

    'You'll help me with mine when it comes, won't you?' Terry asked.

    'Of course I will, luvvie.'

    Lyn already knew that Terry would get nothing when he was reassessed.  She had run the sums for him even before she had considered her own likely score.  She hadn't the heart to tell him.

Where's Daphne?

After the last little diversion on here, pondering how my Geordie-exile-in-the-Potteries Daphne Randall might have cast her ballot in the recent by-election, it's time for me to get back to where I left her in my latest draft novel.  Without giving too much away, she's on a late spring cruise downstream towards Shardlow but, this being Daphne, her plans have been derailed by a suspicious death. 

I've been making quite good progress so far with what is essentially an old-fashioned whodunit (not that I've decided for sure yet who did) with a few threads from the previous stories woven in.  The action takes place along a stretch of waterway I know well and enjoy cruising, plus I've invented some new characters who are great fun to work with.  All that would be marvellous material if I didn't have my social conscience nagging me that I should actually be working with my other cast of characters on another benefits-focussed story, as there have been so many further cuts to entitlement since we left the Solent Welfare Rights Project on the final page of Claimant Commitment.

I've tried the riding-two-horses approach to writing before, when I took a long break during the second draft of Limited Capability to write Grand Union - and it didn't work well.  While GU probably benefited from the National Novel Writing Month discipline of a tight deadline, I lost the thread of the longer, slower story and took a long time to get back into it, hence I'm disinclined to try that approach again.

Instead, I might do a few short stories on this blog to fill in the gaps between where we left the Hampshire-based characters in 2013 and were we might rejoin them in 2017.  Alternatively. I could just get on with Daphne's latest adventure, finish that off quite briskly and then get back to the serious social security stuff.  With one of the real-life counterparts of the SWRP gang giving evidence on PIP to the Work and Pensions Select Committee tomorrow, who knows whereabouts in the corridors of power Hilary, Toby or one of their colleagues might find themselves? 

Meanwhile, if you spot a bloke called Gary wandering around Westminster in his best suit tomorrow, rest assured that he is one of the good guys, despite supporting Portsmouth!
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/7b123d6e-0555-4b2d-ba6a-d2fdb799c871

Daphne's Dilemma - A Floating Voter in Stoke Central.

If you make one of your principal characters a resident - at least occasionally - of the City of Stoke-on-Trent and give her a political journalist as a side-kick, it's inevitable that the question "What would Daphne do?" arises on by-election day.  Here she is, the evening before polling day, trying to decide.


    As the sun sank behind the Bet365 megalith and twilight fell over the marina where she once again made her home and moored her narrowboat, Daphne Randall decided to use her second Who Wants to be a Millionaire lifeline to complete her postal voting paper.  She would have to deliver it in person the following day, going out into Storm Doris to do so, having dithered over her decision for too long to send it.
    She had tried 'ask the audience' earlier that day, with a Facebook post, which initially demonstrated that she didn't live her online life in a bubble of like-minded liberal lefties.  A series of testy exchanges and several unfriendings later and her 'friends' were now slightly less diverse a group, if only politically.  Opinions among even those who remained were still split.  She needed someone thoroughly level-headed to advise her. 
    Daphne picked up her phone.  "Hi Hils!  Are you busy, pet?"
    "Hello Daphne!" 
    Hilary sounded reassuringly relaxed.  Daphne pictured her in her elegant Hampshire sitting room, probably with a glass of red at hand.  Although that image might suggest she would have little insight into life in The Potteries, Hilary had spent much of her life as a welfare rights worker and had looked more than most into the face of modern British poverty.  The North/South divide was, like many other supposed divisions between those suffering under austerity, a convenient fiction of the political right; being low-paid, jobless or sick was as much of a challenge in the southern shires as the north Midlands.  To dismiss people like her friend Hilary as 'metropolitan elite' and an enemy of working class people was an equally devious deceit.
    "How funny you should call!" said Hilary.  "I was just thinking that I should phone you, to catch up with the latest news in the by-election.  Have they arrested Paul Nuttall yet, or are they waiting to see if he'll manage a hat-trick of electoral offences?"
    "Don't joke!  That might be all that saves us from a depressing misrepresentation of the people.  He certainly thinks there are enough mugs in the Potteries to elect him, lies and crimes notwithstanding."
    "I expect you've been very busy canvassing to stop that, though."
    "I left the Labour Party four years ago, pet," Daphne reminded her friend.  "After a massive argument, a rebellious speech to full Council and a spectacularly indiscrete encounter with a political journalist, if you recall."
    "Of course!  How silly of me!"  Hilary giggled.  "How is Harry?"
    "Ridiculously busy and as happy as a lark.  He says he cannot believe his luck with a national news story to cover and both main party leaders in Stoke.  Before Christmas, he had been talking of retiring!" 
    "You haven't fallen out over it, I hope?"
    "Hardly.  The way the candidates line up, we're practically on the same side, pet."
    "But you're always teasing him and calling him a Tory!"
    "He is a Tory - or near as dammit - but the thing is, Hils, that's centre-left in this race!"
    "I suppose it is, if you have that ghastly man from UKIP hoping to get in."
    "Believe it or not, there are three candidates to the right of him."
    "Sweet mercy!  How can that be?"
    "Well," Daphne explained.  "There's a BNP bloke, someone else who wants to scrap Magna Carta and give the Queen the right to rule as an absolute monarch, while the guy standing for the Christian Peoples Alliance is going for more of an Old Testament approach to government.  The poor lad from the Monster Raving Loony Party is struggling to keep with the pace."
    "At least that splits the right-wing vote," Hilary observed.  "If the bigots are spoilt for choice, with a half-decent candidate Labour should be quietly confident."
    "With a half-decent candidate they probably would be."
    "Don't they have one, then?"  Hilary laughed.  "Don't tell me they've sent another Tristram, Quentin or Algernon up to you?  Surely they know better than that!"
    "I'd take a Quentin or an Algernon, as long as he had the sense to stay off Twitter!"  Daphne sighed.  "Their man's a menace at the keyboard; he's upset the Brexiteers and the Corbyn camp, and he's done a grand job of offending women voters too.  On a scale of one to Trump, he's a good seven and a half!  The Kippers don't think he was being enough of an arse to turn off their idea of the traditional Stoke voter, so they've been doctoring his tweets.  They even photoshopped a shot of him campaigning with Jeremy Corbyn, replacing Corbs with a fully veiled woman."
    "That's quite funny, with Corbyn supposedly such a turn-off for voters, but I hope your candidate had a real go at them for being so prejudiced."
    "He's playing the nationalism and nostalgia game himself.  His manifesto has a St George's flag and a bottle kiln on the cover."
    "Oh dear."
    "It's not so bad inside but I have to be honest, Hils; if there wasn't the risk of the Nuttall man stealing the seat, I wouldn't even consider him."
    "If Labour don't win, that would be awfully bad news for Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the party, wouldn't it?" Hilary suggested.
    "No question of that, pet.  His opponents will cite it as vote of no confidence in the leader if they lose but, if they win, they'll be quick to remind everyone that their man was virulently anti-Corbyn and attribute his win to that.  Sometimes I even wonder if they picked a weak candidate to embarrass him." 
    Hilary didn't seem convinced.  "So if you don't vote Labour, what are your alternatives?"
    "There's a cardiologist at the local hospital but he's a LibDem and, much as I think a vote for him would make a point about the importance of the NHS and a shout out to the Remain agenda, I'm not sure I'm ready to forgive that lot for the Coalition any time soon."
    "Fair point."
    "There's an earnest little fellow for the Greens too.  Talks a lot of sense and not afraid to speak up for migrants and refugees, but I'm far from sure they did the right thing putting anyone up at all."
    "You're worried that if you vote for him, that's one less left-of-centre vote for a candidate likely to beat the odious Mr Nuttall?"
    "Spot on, Hils, though there's another thing too.  Like the Labour guy and the Tory, he's making much of being 'Local'.  I know it's a useful stick to beat the opportunist Kipper with but, as someone who chose this city as home rather than being born and bred, I feel more than a little excluded by that and I'm only from another part of England!  How any of them plan to appeal to anyone from further afield, I cannot imagine.  It's an insult to immigrants and incomers alike to suggest you have to be born here to understand the place or represent it.  It's supposed to be a modern city, not a local shop for local people in Royston Vasey!"
    Hilary laughed.  "Poor old Daph!  You seem to be running out of options.  If you can't get enthused about any of your League of Gentlemen, is there a female candidate, or at least someone who would promote women's rights?"
    "The only woman candidate is the one arguing for Her Maj to run the show again and she actually got herself arrested for her racist views.  Promoting the rights of one particularly wealthy white woman hardly seems to fit our agenda!"
    "Good heavens, Daph!  At this rate, you'll be left with nobody to vote for!"
    "I have to vote, Hils!  I have to do something to stop Nuttall."
    "Isn't he sabotaging his own cause rather well with the Hillsborough issue?"
    "It's not just that.  He's had friendly fire locally from his own people too.  One of his canvassers pissed up a pensioner's wall the other day."
    "Always a vote winner!" Hilary laughed.  "Goodness me, you don't want to upset the pensioners!  After all, that's been Conservative strategy in recent elections.  Are they trying to woo the older vote in Stoke?"
    "Funnily enough, pet, I suppose they might be, if they think pensioners will vote for a candidate who reminds them of their smuggest grandchild!"
   "That's a bit cruel!"
   "I know.  Actually, their candidate doesn't come across as a bad lad and they must fancy his chances as he's had Theresa the Appeaser up here backing him this week.  However, after all we've suffered through their austerity policies, even if I thought he could beat Nuttall, I couldn't vote for him."
    "I should jolly well think not!  He is a Tory!"
    "So who do I vote for, Hils?  Head or heart?  Labour or Green?" 
    Daphne was down to her last lifeline; it was fifty-fifty time.
    "Who do you most agree with?"
    "Probably the little Green fella."
    "But he can't win?"
    "I'm afraid not, pet."
    "Then how certain are you that either your Labour candidate can beat the UKIP candidate - or that he absolutely can't?"
    "Labour's lad should do it but, to be honest, it's a bit too close to call.  The latest polls are pretty much neck and neck and the weather forecast for tomorrow is diabolical.  Turnout will be right down with the storm too and every vote will count."
    "Then I think you already know what you have to do, Daph," said Hilary gently.  "I know they gave you a hard time and probably don't deserve your support, but hold your nose, dear!"
    "You're right.  I cannot bear the thought of that lying carpet-bagger representing me in Parliament.  He needs to lose and he needs to lose heavily!"
    Daphne made her mark.
    "Keep your fingers crossed for us, pet!" she said to Hilary.  "It's forecast to be a very stormy day."

The Best of Times: The Worst of Times

Welcome to Stoke-on-Trent, February 2017.  Suddenly, it seems, the eyes of the world are on my adopted home town again and not for the reasons some of us might have hoped.  At the same time as the campaign to gain the accolade City of Culture 2021 is swinging into action, so is a bitter by-election battle, with the reprehensible UKIP attempting to parachute their newish leader, Paul Nuttall, into Parliament via the protest votes of disgruntled voters in Stoke Central.  With the kind of irony that's almost typical of anything linked to Stoke-on-Trent politics, the by-election only comes about because the seat's former Labour MP, celebrity historian Tristram Hunt, is vacating it to take up the role of director of the V&A, suggesting there's not enough culture hereabouts to satisfy his tastes. 

Much has been made by Labour's opponents that it's not just a prestigious but a lucrative role, although surely it's disingenuous to suggest that someone with Hunt's interests, background and (probably) enviable financial security would have done it for the money.  I haven't always had a great deal of time for his particular style of soft left, let's-not-upset-the-Daily-Mail politics but, frankly, good luck to the lad.  The odds are that one of the three Stoke seats will vanish with the next set of boundary changes anyway, so parachuting out when there's such an exciting opportunity is a 'no-brainer'.  Anyone trying to make anti-Corbyn capital from it (yes you, BBC Radio 4 News!) was, to quote The Last Leg, being a dick. 

Anyway, the upshot from all this is that, instead of being weighed up as a potential City of Culture, Stoke-on-Trent is now being branded "Brexit Central", a small-minded city suspicious of outsiders and resistant to change.  In case anyone from outside the area wonders what kind of a place this is, there's a tendency to trot out an unhelpful reminder of the bad old days when there were nine BNP councillors in the council chamber.  Media coverage reinforces that with sound-bites of market traders backing Trump, or parochial locals claiming to be unaware that a by-election is even happening.  The reaction of any arts professionals viewing is more likely to be to #binthebid rather than #backthebid. 

Those disconnected voices are, perhaps, those of the very people any City of Culture programme most needs to reach.  It's going to be a challenge to do so, however, especially if they do end up electing a UKIP MP likely to dismiss any such proposal as a pipe-dream of the "liberal metropolitan elite."

And, if you're reading this blog, "liberal metropolitan elite" probably includes you.

Being Daphne Randall

I have to own up to being quite a lazy writer.  While some authors invent fabulous fantasy worlds, others seek to inhabit characters very different from themselves, stepping away from their own age or gender, following an unfamiliar career path or living in another time.  Much patient research and scholarship is called for, as well as great empathy and imagination.

I haven't, to date, done so much of that.  Although the 'Welfare Rights Lit' books have multiple viewpoints, the principal characters lead lives that, at least to some degree, intersect with my own.  I housed the Walkers in a town I knew well and in a type house I visited time and again as a housing officer, often to assess the benefit entitlement of people just like them, and not so far removed from our own friends and family.  The Solent Welfare Rights Project is a parallel universe version of an advice centre I know and love, staffed by people sufficiently unlike my former colleagues to save embarrassing them but doing the same work in much the same way, with the same commitment, humour and self-sacrifice.

As for Daphne Randall, principal protagonist and narrator of 'Grand Union' and the forthcoming 'Daphne of the Four Counties', I might have made her a Geordie lass with a penchant for strong beer, lively shades of hair dye and a certain Stokie bloke, but I've also made her (another) middle-aged voluntary-sector worker and a narrowboater, settling her into a world I know well. 

If that's cheating, I'm afraid I'm a cheat!

Himself and I enjoyed a very Daphne-esque Christmas/New Year, afloat around South Cheshire and North Staffordshire, firstly pottering up to the foot of the Bosley Locks then, on a journey I could picture Daph and Harry making together, through the Harecastle Tunnel to Stoke, crunching through the ice to Etruria en route to Stoke City's home fixture against Watford.  Going out, it was quite a fun activity, although the noises from under the hull as slivers of ice rattled and scraped under us, were rather terrifying.  As a Southampton native, I tend to work on the principle that boats and ice shouldn't mix!  That was certainly the case on our home run, when we found the ice tougher to crack, having been smashed by other boats during the course of the week, only to have refrozen in awkward chunks glued together by a cold rain.  At one point, close to the site of the old Burslem Port branch, I feared we would find ourselves stranded, Endurance-style, unable to make further progress and it took some ice-breaking with the boat hook to enable the stern to swing far enough for us to take the turn.  

I haven't got a plot lined up for a story where Daph makes a similar trip, though it might make a good 'short'.  Plans following on from Four Counties involve a spring voyage through the Black Country, a summery sojourn on the T&M and an autumn on the Llangollen, though not necessarily in that order, with an epic Pennine expedition mapped out in sketchy notes too.  Now I've bought a little inverter and should be able to recharge an electronic notebook while afloat, I hopefully can get writing while we're on the move this year, instead of returning home with random thoughts in paper notebooks, so look out for more Daphne Randall adventures soon!

Coming Soon...

After much dithering (which sounds as if it should be a Cotswold village), I am almost at the point of releasing a second '4mph thriller', with doughty boat-dweller Daphne Randall again on the trail of modern-day villains, aided and abetted by some familiar, and some new, characters. 

The Kindle version of 'Daphne of the Four Counties' is available to pre-order here.  There will be a paperback version out soon too, subject to a final proof-read - which as always, I would urge people to buy via CompletelyNovel or your local tax-paying Indy bookshop, rather than Amazon.  I attack them with a clear conscience still, since I've noticed that, despite others being tagged more helpful and a more recent highly positive review, Amazon have a one-star slating of 'Severe Discomfort' pinned as top review for that book.  Not helpful to The Cause at all...

The question that arises whenever I finish a book is 'where to next'?  To which I have to add 'and with whom?' as, while I have notebooks full of navigational and nature notes for more Daphne Randall adventures, I can also imagine countless plotlines for the stalwarts of the Solent Welfare Rights Project.  I had resolved to keep on boating and leave the 'Welfare Rights Lit' be until Universal Credit was fully rolled out in southern Hampshire but it seems implausible that the team wouldn't be at least as busy right now, handling DLA to PIP migration and the cut to the Benefit Cap.  I'd also like to eavesdrop on their conversations about Brexit and The Donald, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May.  There are personal stories to pick up too, though I can't speculate on those without chucking spoilers about like confetti at a wedding (though that would have to be sustainable, bio-degradable confetti...).

Meanwhile, The Lady Eowyn is moored close by, waiting to cast off for more unexpectedly eventful cruises along ostensibly tranquil waterways.  I've a rough-and-ready plot sketched out for a tale with the working title All Along the Rochdale, with some more changes to the crew, and an equally lock-filled sequel crossing back over the Pennines on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, with Daphne falling in and out of work, and love, along the way.  Then she'll be off around parts of the BCN for a gritty little mystery, down the Trent and Mersey to Shardlow for something altogether lighter, and picking up clues to cold cases along the Llangollen.

If I stick to my one New Year's Resolution - of spending less time scrolling about on Facebook and/or Twitter and more actually writing - it's all possible.  After all, Grand Union was the work of just one month, in which I was working slightly more hours than I am currently contracted to do. 

I just need to get on with it...

Saving Daniel Blake

In my previous post I slated the Toby Young/Daily Mail review of I, Daniel Blake, which was taking a bit of a risk as I hadn't actually seen the film then.  However, the odds of the Daily Mail being right about something multiplied by the odds of Toby Young being right about it too...  So not that much of a risk, eh?

Anyway, I have now seen Ken Loach's superb drama and cannot recommend it enough.  The film manages to be warm and uplifting, yet also strikingly bleak.  Unlike the hated Mail I'm not going to include spoilers, but will admit I'm not as brave when plotting my own characters' misfortunes as Ian Laverty has been here.  The performances from the two principal actors are outstanding - so convincing that you seem to be witnessing the real lives and conversations of friends and neighbours, as they spiral into despair and desperation.  You can see Daniels and Katies in the early morning queues outside advice centres from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Newquay; or rather you can where those services still exist. 

I expected to be moved to tears and to anger, despite knowing more than most about how benefit cuts and sanctions impact on the lives of sick and disabled people, and so it proved.  Stoke Odeon set the mood for the scenes of fuel poverty by apparently not bothering to put the heating on in tiny Screen 10.  Midweek, with little publicity, there was only a small audience, which was a pity as this film deserves to be seen by everybody.

Initially, the benefits geek in me was wary that some aspects of the story were going to be over-simplified.  The conversation heard in the background of the opening credits didn't resemble any Atos/Maximus medical assessment I've ever sat in on - our local Healthcare Professionals ask oblique questions about a claimant's 'typical day' rather than quoting the descriptors and infer their points and abilities from those answers, often entirely incorrectly.  But it works, of course, as a way of explaining the assessment criteria to the uninitiated.

As a benefits specialist, I wanted to see Dan's interview with his welfare rights adviser, to hear their conversation explaining how Dan's failure to score 15 points was neither here nor there, because Regulation 29 should allow him to be deemed of 'limited capability for work' due to the serious risk to his health of finding otherwise (a scene for the 'Director's Cut'?).  That's important, because the DWP's own investigation into claimants' suicides revealed systemic failures by Decision Makers in applying this regulation.

It was, however, a nice touch to make the adviser/representative a wheelchair user.  After all, nobody is saying disabled people can't work; the need is for the right jobs, in respectful workplaces, for those capable of and ready for them.  On the other hand, if there are real reps out there talking as confidently of success before tribunals as Dan's man, they are tempting the fates something rotten!

I knew Ken's team had really done their homework when the 'shite music' started.  No offence to Vivaldi, but you won't find a benefits adviser or claimant in the country who doesn't hate 'Spring' from the Four Seasons with a passion.  I have read bundles of appeal papers, drafted submissions, chatted to clients or colleagues and drunk gallons of tea to that soundtrack, waiting so long for someone to pick up that, when they do, I've almost forgotten what I needed to ask about.  It irritates and demoralises in equal measure.  How much worse it must be hearing it on an endless loop when you're down to your last couple of quid of credit and chasing a long-promised payment.  When (very minor spoiler) Dan's rebellion against the DWP included a demand they change the tune, I cheered quietly.  It's the little things, as much as the threats and sanctions, that eat away at the souls of real Daniel Blakes.

I have met many Daniel Blakes, like the man described in this post.  Although "Jeff" was fully fit for work and would never have declared otherwise, he too fell foul of a Jobcentre jobsworth who treated him with contempt as an unemployed, uneducated man, rather than respecting and supporting his efforts to find work in an unfamiliar and rapidly changing world.  Like Loach's hero, the system cut off his income before he could argue or appeal, putting him through hell before he got to tribunal. However we want to change the benefits system, that should change first.  

It isn't too hard to imagine how much less harrowing Daniel Blake's lot would have been if, after his 'fit for work' decision, he'd been allowed to stay on ESA pending his reconsideration and appeal.  Ironically, until October 2013, that was exactly what did happen if you appealed a 'fit for work' decision.  Then some bright spark invented 'mandatory reconsideration' and decided that, unless you had a new disabling condition or medical evidence of significant deterioration in your existing health problems, you would have to come off ESA at that stage and, in most cases, claim JSA instead if you needed an income. Since then, we've seen thousands of people wrongly assessed either compelled to 'do a Daniel' and go through the wearing motions of job-seeking when they aren't fit for it, struggle without funds because they can't cope with that, or get lost in the system because they think 'signing on' is an admission of wellness and will count against them in their appeal. 

If the DWP don't change the decision and your case goes to appeal, it is then possible to go back onto ESA - so why force the break in claim at all, except to drive sick people off of ESA or discourage their appeal?  Needless stress for claimants and pointless work for DWP staff could be avoided, if ESA remained in continuous payment throughout the whole process.  While I can dream of an unconditional Citizens Income, in the short-term, perhaps we should campaign hard for this simple reform. 

I watched I, Daniel Blake with my husband.  Twenty-five years ago, he claimed Invalidity Benefit after a heart-attack ended his career as an ambulanceman.  It came through, without a glitch, on the basis of a GP certificate, until he felt well enough to end his claim and seek lighter work.  There was no half-baked assessment by someone completely unqualified to offer an opinion, no hasty totting up of points by a harassed Decision Maker, no bullying at the Jobcentre, no suggestion from Government or media that he was 'scrounging' - in short, no needless, dangerous extra pressure during his convalescence.  Seeing, through Daniel Blake's eyes, how much things had changed, upset him deeply.  He too would have been found fit for work long before he actually was.  I'm sure he would have tried, just like Dan to meet his Claimant Commitment.  I don't like to think about how his story would have ended.

#WeAreAllDanielBlake