Last night I sat in the Curzon Cinema in Clevedon and watched ‘I Daniel Blake’. To be honest the location is not really relevant, but its a great little cinema, so free shout to them.
More important, much more important, was what we saw. This was not a drama. This was not a fictionalised account of someone’s life. This was real, and hard, and shaming, and uplifting, and completely unfair and wrong.
Yes, there are actors, a few actors. But all but two of those in the scenes within the Jobcentres were ex-DWP workers. Those working in the food bank were people who work in food banks. The legal adviser was a legal adviser.
This story is real. It is the brutal truth for thousands across the UK, in every part of the UK. And it is the result of the intentional targeting of those who can least afford it, and have the least influence and power to fight it.
The system has been constructed to penalise, and to defeat those who need just a little help to get back up again. And those who administer the system are not to blame. Those who design the system, and see it as a solution should be held to account.
And before anyone raises the ‘scrounger’ flag, the numbers are so small as to be irrelevant. Truly.
There is strength, and compassion, amongst it all, despite it all. Because the vast majority of people are fundamentally good. But that is no compensation for the state sponsored suffering of those struggling to survive.
But this obscenity of how so many are treated is not in clear view, and is dismissed by those in power.
And yet George Osborne can remain as an MP, whilst gaining a £650.000 a year consultancy, and now the editorship of the London Evening Standard.
The innocent are suffering the pain of the government’s expediency, and it will never be right.
This film should be shown in Parliament, in every government office, in every institution behind whose walls the ‘great and the good’ hide themselves from the reality they cause.
And Ken Loach should be loudly acclaimed for the powerful integrity he continues to show to those who prefer to ignore the fall-out of their actions.
And we should get angry. We should be angry already. And we must stay angry.
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