OpinionWelfare This article is more than 7 years oldI, Daniel Blake shows us the virtuous ‘deserving poor’ – how conservative
This article is more than 7 years oldPhil McDuffKen Loach’s film depicts a stoic man mistreated by a brutal welfare system. Yet splitting the poor into scroungers and strivers misses the point
While Camilla Long and Toby Young were rightly pilloried for their privileged and spiteful takes on Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, in the spirit of balance it’s worth exploring the ways in which they actually got a couple of things right.
Young asks why there are no characters like the ones on Benefits Street. Where are all the undeserving poor, the ones he gleefully holds up as proof that the welfare system is a soft touch for feckless wasters?
I, too, have questions. Where are the people who drink too much and get into fights? Where are those who buy scratchcards because they think the meagre chances they offer are still better than the hopeless cycle of underemployment and sanctions? Where are the unemployed who have given up?
The world of poverty in I, Daniel Blake is sanitised. Blake is a good worker. He has no vices. He helps a stranger out of the goodness of his heart. He is the avatar of the deserving poor, and this is the problem. In trying to evoke the sympathy of his audience towards kindly but unfortunate souls, Loach allows the viewer to conclude that the dehumanising welfare system is only a problem if it hurts the wrong people. But this is a fundamentally conservative position: the deserving poor have always been held up as virtuous. The issue is not that the righteous attacks on the undeserving have become so overzealous that deserving people are being lumped in with them. It is that the whole concept is a fraud.
We have successfully divided up the bottom half of the population into scroungers and strivers. Even some in Labour do not want it to be the party of the unemployed. But the Labour movement used to understand that it is the pitting of the reserve labour force against those currently in work that gives employers the power to bargain down wages. Mike Ashley’s power to abuse workers stems from his capacity to point to the food bank queues and say: “Do you want that to be you?”
The deserving and undeserving unemployed, the underemployed and the low-waged are all part of the same system. Poverty is brutalising, and it will sometimes result in people behaving in a way that does evokes not tears from the middle class, but disgust and revulsion. What if, after his ordeal broke the fight out of him, Blake had not sat quietly at home, but had instead crawled into a bottle of gin and a spiral of depression and bitterness? Would he not then be as deserving of his ESA? In pitting the deserving poor against the undeserving, we take the outcome of a brutal system and use it as a rationale for further brutalisation.
I, Daniel Blake shows us an individual who, having worked hard and paid his dues, finds himself stretched to breaking point on a state-sanctioned rack. But we don’t see how Blake’s ordeal is systematically reproduced across the country. We don’t see how entire communities are treated as collective Daniel Blakes, or how the “creative destruction” of capitalism mass-produces poverty as entire industries are made obsolete. We don’t see how this poverty can metastasise in communities like a tumour around the scars left by mass unemployment, spurring a cycle of social cannibalism as drugs and criminality consume them from within. To show that would not fit with the romantic view of stoicism in the face of adversity. It would present the characters as the undeserving poor.
But everyone becomes the undeserving poor, even Blake. Loach shows how men like him can be moved easily from deserving to undeserving, but not that this is the point of the system. That’s the scam that Loach flirts with but ultimately does not fully engage with. In the end it doesn’t matter how good and virtuous a worker you are, if you insist on cashing in what you think you’re owed for all your hard work you become a problem to be solved. Every deserving poor is one act of defiance away from becoming undeserving.
Ultimately the failings of the welfare system come down to a society that is so horrified by the idea of someone getting something they don’t deserve that we are quite prepared to see a hundred Daniel Blakes shiver in their unfurnished homes in order to prevent one “scrounger” getting income support.
It is not even an unwillingness on our part, our hearts hardened towards the unemployed like a Pharoah’s towards the Israelites. It is that we lack the vocabulary required to talk about the unworthy, bad poor as anything other than bad and unworthy. Even polemicists speaking out on their behalf cannot bring themselves to use their names. Instead, we get Blake. He will do for now, but he is not enough.
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