My Take

I, Daniel Blake is Ken Loach’s second Palm d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival. I watched it at the local cinema recently and was quite affected by it. The premise is an older guy in Britain who’s been working as a carpenter for the best part of 40 years, has a heart attack and his doctor/specialist tells him he’s not fit for work for at least 3 months. He goes on what the Brits call the Employment and Support pension to get him through while he recovers. A review of his eligibility for this pension happens, which occurs at the start of the film with just black screen and credits while we listen to the ludicrous questions thrown at him to which he replies with frustration and sardonic humour. Of course, the outcome is that his ‘score’ has lowered and he is now forced to look for work for 35 hours a week.

He has the the right to appeal the decision as long has he can negotiate the absurd bureaucratic red tape including phone calls that involve being on hold for a couple of hours only to be told that he has to wait for the ‘decision maker’ to call him before he’s allowed to appeal, even though he’s received a letter already outlining the decision. He’s also directed to a computer by social security and told he has to apply online, which for a bloke who’s never touched a computer in his life, is quite a task. He’s told by the worker when explaining his IT deficiencies that “we’re digital by default” to which he responds “I’m pencil by default”.

This is a guy who has specialised skills as a carpenter made to feel like a useless bane on society. He befriends a younger woman with kids at the dole office whom he defends when she is treated like some sort of unhinged banshee when she gets upset that her benefit has been frozen. Like most of Loach’s films we get see to ordinary people in extraordinarily frustrating circumstances that wear them down.

There’s some that criticise this film for being over the top with it’s depiction of how these people are treated by the Government. I came into this film with 20 years experience working in the Australian job centre (employment services) system, funded by the Government to administer the rules behind receiving the dole whilst helping people find jobs. Help find people jobs! If only our employment consultants, working with an unmanageable amount of clients, hired by the Government to administer the red tape involved in ensuring all of their job seekers meet their ‘requirements’, had time to actually help people find jobs! You also have an industry riddled with people who are ill-equipped to work with, empathise with and assist those coming in with a range of complex issues that need to be addressed.

I watched the system gradually decline over the years into the highly bureaucratic machine that it has become designed, whether it be deliberately or not, to make people give up all hope. It got so bad that I had to get out, no matter how well it paid, as I couldn’t take the absurdity of it all any longer. I can understand that you need to make a system robust and consistent to ensure people are treated equally, but it swayed way too far into the realm of Orwell’s 1984. Individual circumstances are not heard, nor have any place in this autocratic system. Our Government even went as far recently to adopt a robotised computer system to work out who has been wrongly paid and owes a debt to the Government. This flawed computer system does not take into account the many individual situations that actually deem people eligible for the money they’re being accused of receiving either mistakenly or fraudulently. Then there’s that brick wall of bureaucracy they need to try and negotiate to appeal, many of which are incapable of navigating.

You may feel after watching this film that you’ve been emotionally manipulated and the circumstances presented must have been embellished for dramatic effect, but believe me, this stuff is real.

Back to Daniel himself, a hard working tax payer and contributor to society with integrity, dignity and empathy for his fellow man, made to feel like like a parasite. In his own words “I’m not a client, a customer or a service user… I’m not a National Insurance number or a blip on a screen. I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen—nothing more, nothing less.”