I, Daniel Blake

I got home from London Saturday morning, planning to pack a new bag and go to Derry for the weekend. USA Today declared Derry the best place in the world to celebrate Halloween. Instead, I got in bed Saturday morning and stayed there much of the day. Congestion, coughing, etc.

Sunday I felt better, got a lot done around the house and rewarded myself with Ken Loach’s new film, I, Daniel Blake. I’m no good at anagrams, but I can see that Denial and Bleak are both in the title. Fittingly.

It’s a gut-punching, unflinching look at the UK benefits system (a more generous version of the US welfare system). Under the tories, the UK has hired US contractors whose job it is to figure out how to get people off benefits. They’ve created a confusing maze of rules, procedures, forms, deadlines, and tricks to confound the most persistent benefits applicant. We follow a man in his 60s who’s had a heart attack and is trying to convince the heartless benefits consultants that he can’t work. And we follow a single mom of two who is sanctioned (loses benefits) for being late for an appointment. It is heartbreaking to watch them try to scale a bureaucratic wall specifically designed to prevent them from getting the benefits they are entitled to.

Not too far into the film, I actually thought of leaving. The emotional intensity of watching desperate people be humiliated was more than I could take. I stuck it out and thought how amazing it would be if everyone saw that film and committed to donating to food kitchens this year instead of buying Christmas gifts. There’s a scene in a food pantry that has people all over the UK talking. Twice in the film I was film-sobbing--not giving into the need to sob entirely, but at the expense of great, headache-inducing effort.

The UK has recently committed to building a nuclear plant that is a disaster--unneeded, destined to overrun an already huge budget, a politicised albatross involving French and Chinese companies. That one bad decision by Theresa May, reversed, could relieve queues and queues and queues of people spending their lives at JobCentres and food kitchens. Too bad the brilliant minds that brought us neoliberalism and globalisation didn’t anticipate that huge swaths of the citizenry would be made permanently redundant, necessitating an annual guaranteed income rather than a dogfight for benefits. Remove the cost of monitoring, assessing, and generally harassing poor people and you’d have much of that payment in hand.
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