A GP, Consultant and Physiotherapist walk into a pub. Pointing to a regular nursing a glass half empty – Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), a 59-year-old Carpenter who has paid his dues but fallen on hard times after suffering a major heart attack – the barman asks the GP: is this man fit for work? The GP says no. The barman asks the Consultant: is this man fit for work? The Consultant says no. At the risk of repeating himself, the purveyor of real ales and false hopes poses the same question to the Physiotherapist who replies in a manner befitting her professional position: I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer my learned colleagues gave some moments ago.

Daniel Blake is not fit for work. Fact. In triplicate. Therefore, with no money coming in, nest egg to sit on or helping hand from the bank of mummy and daddy, he must claim benefits to make ends meet. Namely, the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) which offers “financial support” and “personalised help” to the “ill or disabled”. Unfortunately for Daniel Blake, however, and the tens of thousands of people who have suffered at the hands of the callous and impersonal welfare system as designed by that “preachy baldy cunt” Iain Duncan Smith (Daniel’s words, not mine, though I think he’s onto something), computer says no.

kenloach
Photo: Ken Loach

How can a “sick man looking for a non-existent job that [he] can’t take anyway” survive? How is it that a single mum with two kids has to choose between eating or heating, let alone swallow her pride and stand in an orderly queue at a food bank to ask for sanitary towels? And what kind of government of, by and for the people allows this to happen? Nay, goes out of its way to ensure that it happens by using inflammatory language which pits “workers versus shirkers”? Just three of the many questions which lie at the heart of director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty’s heart-breaking portrayal of The Little People versus The Machine of Big Government.

In which the former are forced to navigate their way through a maze of bureaucracy and automated telephone systems in order to speak to a faceless decision-maker who at the push of a button has the power to put bread on their table – or in the case of single mum Katie (Hayley Squires) shoes on her daughter’s feet – while the latter crack the whip of austerity, threaten sanctions and in the case of IDS and his Conservative cronies use parliamentary expenses to clean their moats and construct (I kid you not) a floating duck island. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!

Intense feelings of anger, frustration and sadness are provoked. But there is humour too. Of the gallows variety. Which is what Daniel and Katie and those, like me, who have had the misfortune to sign on or claim benefits are forced to draw upon to get through the day. For example, the IT-illiterate Daniel describes an onscreen cursor as “a fucking apt name for it”. And during the striking opening conversation between Daniel and a Work Capability Assessment Officer which is conducted over a blank screen, the line of questioning takes such a surreal twist from how does your heart attack affect your ability to perform everyday tasks to can you press a button, can you touch your head as if putting on a hat and do you suffer from “extensive evacuation of the bowels”, that Daniel fires back in a fit of comical exasperation: “Can’t we talk about my heart? Forget about my arse. That’s working a dream.”

In addition to humour, the compassion between Daniel and single mum Katie – who was forced into a homeless hostel after her private landlord terminated her tenancy when she complained about a leak in her son’s bedroom, uprooted hundreds of miles from her family and friends in London to Newcastle because of the lack of affordable housing in the capital city and sanctioned by the DWP because she failed to navigate her way through an unfamiliar transport system and as a result missed her appointment by a couple of minutes – is both heart-warming and life-affirming. But my abiding thoughts are tinged with anger, frustration and sadness in that good and honest men like Daniel Blake who have paid their dues, “never a penny short, and was proud to do so”, are like the system they are reluctant to turn to for help and support: broken.

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Peter Callaghan
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