'Always Look On The Sour Side of Life'

How Ken Loach Renders Reality on Film

Reviewing  'I, Daniel Blake' & the impact of 'Social Realism'

by Brian Bamford

Reverend David Grey, a former friar, at Ashton Jobcentre

THE film Ken Loach's 'I, Daniel Blake' had the biggest domestic opening of its director's career with receipts of more than £2 million after its first three weeks.  Audiences predictably have been massive in Newcastle where the film is staged.  But also on social media, where the hashtag #iamdanielblake took off.   It is to be released in the USA on December 23^rd.

The Euro-septic MP, Iain Duncan Smith at one point complained that the film was unkind to the staff at the job-centres and benefit offices, who were enforcing the sanctions which is central to the film's message.

As things turned out audiences in this country have been flocking to see the film, which portrays the difficulties experienced by a Newcastle joiner with an heart condition trying to make sense of the British benefit's system. 

Working class culture has a rich tradition in many post-war British films.  In 1996 I interviewed Jim Allen, one of Ken Loach's screen-writers and a former building site worker, who had just collaborated with Loach on the film 'Land & Freedom' about the Spanish Civil War, and had previously worked with him on 'Raining Stones' (1993). 

At that time in an essay entitled 'Rendering Reality on Film: art and the emotion racket' (The Raven, Spring 1996), I wrote:   

'... in Raining Stones in 1993 (based on a council estate in Middleton, Greater Manchester), they are  concerned with the problems of survival on the dole in Britain today.  How to get by on a council estate amid the loan sharks and drug pushers.  Making out and leading a decent family life, in the aftermath of an era of social blight and desperation for the poor that shows  no sign of ending in the near future.'

Loach himself is uneasy about being identified with 'social realism' because he thinks it pigeon-holes his films puts off the public, he has said:  'It's a way for critics to isolate someone's work... As a film-maker you just want people to come with an open mind.'

Some doubt the accuracy and truth of the events in the film, although Mr Iain Duncan Smith has given a radio interview in which he said:that the film showed 'the very worst of anything that could happen'.

The benefit agencies and jobcentres have long been held responsible for inflicting suffering upon people at the bottom of society's pile.  Only last week the National Audit Office which found that  the Government spent £147 million more on administering the system than was saved through sanctions.  In my capacity as a Trade Union Council Secretary in Tameside, Manchester, I recently wrote to Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the PCS union that represents jobcentre workers:

'...  the protests at Ashton Jobcentre are now in their second year...  During the last two-years, staff working at Ashton Jobcentre, have made numerous complaints that they have felt threatened by protests taking place outside Ashton Jobcentre.  While this has often led to police intervention, no protestor has ever been arrested, cautioned, or rebuked in anyway.  The police have often considered these complaints, as time-wasting or baseless...  You may be interested to know that on one occasion, the Reverend David Grey, a former friar from Gorton Monastery, entered Ashton Jobcentre dressed in clerical vestments (see picture) to offer staff spiritual guidance and counselling..  We were later told that the Jobcentre had summoned the police on the pretext that staff felt threatened and intimidated by this man of God.'

This kind of corny confrontation between the British benefit bureaucracy and the claimants has been going on for as long as I can remember.  It's an authentic long-running farce played out daily up and down the country.  Towards the end of the film, Daniel Blake asks to sign-off as a claimant saying that applying for work with a heart condition like his was just wasting everyone's time and only served to humiliate him as a claimant.   The film critic Antonia Quirke has written:  'Very few people can hit you in the thoracic cavity like Loach.  Of course I cried, as I always do...'.

This is what my mother would have called a 'tear jerker' or Bertold Brecht the 'emotion racket', but while social realism may scare some off the cinema Danny Leigh in the Financial Times suggests:

'That is the essence of modern social realism – a place on the screen for people often seen as statistics'.

The film has already won the Palm d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and has scored as  a hit at the British box office. 

"Okey cokey pig in a pokey" - Ashton Jobcentre gets uppity over protesters placard!

The weekly protests outside Ashton-under-Lyne Jobcentre, have attracted the attention of various media organisations, but not the local press in Tameside. The only local newspaper now in business in Tameside, the Reporter and Chronicle, is owned by the housing company, New Charter Housing Trust Ltd under the guise of 'Piccolo Communications'. The housing company, which has close links to Tameside Council, also owns Tameside Radio and are involved in delivering the 'Troubled Families' agenda with the council. Under this initiative, the Conservative Government have identified 120,000 'persistently anti-social families'. However, it later emerged that this figure was actually a measure of social deprivation and not behaviour. Unemployed single-parents, have been designated 'troubled families' by Ashton Jobcentre and referred to the scheme because they were not considered to be doing enough to look for work.

On Thursday, researchers from NINELIVES.media.co.uk, called at Ashton Jobcentre and spoke to protesters. They are making a television documentary for Channel 4's 'Dispatches', about welfare and benefit reforms and want to speak to people in receipt of in-work state benefits about how reforms are affecting them. Anyone who is receiving JSA, Universal Credit or Working Tax Credits, and wishes to speak to 'Dispatches' on a 'confidential basis', should contact - Jessica Bell or Jane Drinkwater directly on 0161 832 2007 or jessica.bell@ninelivesmedia.co.uk and jane.drinkwater@ninelivesmedia.co.uk

Many people are often unaware of the extent to which state welfare is being used to subsidise poverty pay in Britain. Today, only one-in-eight people who are receiving housing benefit, are not in work. In other words, people who are in work, are often unable to pay their rent because they are not paid enough. State benefits have become the prop for the failure of capitalism to deliver decent jobs and wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three-times the post-war rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs, has doubled to over 20%. Britain is the only country in the G7 group of leading economies where inequality has increased this century. (Credit Suisse - annual global wealth report - October 2014, P.33). Yet, while many of us have got poorer, this has coincided with a boom in the number of rich and super-rich in Britain. Those people who can least afford it, have paid the price for the man-made financial crisis caused by the bankers and politicians.

Even people who work in the Jobcentre are not immune from poverty pay. According to Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS trade union, some 40% of his members who work in the Jobcentre, do qualify for the state handout Universal Credit, because they are "fantastically low-paid." Yet these very same people who are in receipt of state benefits, are often the ones, who vilify claimants and stop their benefits in order to meet government sanction targets.

With the introduction of the Tories 'Universal Credit' (UC), things are likely to get a lot worse in terms of personal scrutiny, regulation, and control.  One aspect of Universal Credit, is what is termed 'conditionality', and this will have implications for anyone who is in work and is claiming Universal Credit, JSA, or Working Tax Credits. As with the unemployed, people in receipt of in-work benefits, will be required to attend regular Jobcentre interviews and could face sanctions (loss of benefits), if they fail to carry out directions given to them by the Jobcentre, such as being required to look for better paid work or to increase the hours that they already work.

Some Jobcentre staff in other areas of the country, have been disciplined for not sanctioning enough people on benefits and opposition to the Government's harsh sanctioning regime is growing. At the last PCS conference, it was agreed that PCS members would be encouraged to support local groups campaigning against sanctions and would support initiatives that sought to undermine and expose, the draconian sanction regime that exists in Jobcentres. However, this is unlikely to make much of an impression on staff working at Ashton Jobcentre, who have been heard boasting in the local Caledonian pub in Ashton, about the number of 'dole-ites', they have sanctioned that week.  On Thursday, one diminutive and stroppy female member of staff, came out of Ashton Jobcentre accompanied by a G4S security guard and admonished a demonstrator, for carrying a PCS placard, which she objected to. "I know who your are" she told the burly protester. With hardening attitudes like this, it seems likely that these protesters are in it for the long haul. 

PCS MEMBERS CALL ON THEIR UNION TO SUPPORT UNFAIRLY DISMISSED PCS REP!

Rank and file union reps and members of the Public and Commercial Services Union have sent an open letter to General Secretary Mark Serwotka demanding greater support for reps and members in employment tribunals.

The letter, published online here, was initially motivated by the case of John Pearson. John was a PCS rep at Hewlett-Packard, who was sacked as a result of his trade union activities during a dispute over job cuts.
John was forced to pay the Employment Tribunal fees and engage a private solicitor to fight his automatically unfair dismissal claim, after union officials refused to support him, asserting that his claim had ‘no reasonable prospect of success’. The tribunal vindicated John and his supporters by finding that he had been unfairly dismissed and that the principal reason was his activities as part of an independent trade union.


Following on from the verdict, the open letter to Mark Serwotka demands: “Full support for John from PCS as he pursues reinstatement following his ET verdict, and full recompense for the legal costs he has paid at his own expense” as well as “A written guarantee that reps and activists victimised by their employer will receive full and unwavering support when fighting that victimisation, by all available means including ET, as a point of principle.”