I won't be going to see the new Ken Loach film, I, Daniel Blake.
It's difficult in any story to know how much weight we should load onto a character. The vicious Indians in Larry McMurtry's wonderful Lonesome Dove, the treacherous Portuguese Jews in John Buchan, feckless Bertie Wooster, conniving Shylock, angry Othello - these are not intended, we tell ourselves, as exemplars of their race, religion or class. To see them as such is to rob the characters of individuality. And yet our suspicion remains that they stand totemically, inviting us to draw unappealing conclusions about their offstage peers.
In Loach's new film the eponymous hero is a good man recovering from a heart attack, who falls through the cracks of the benefits system despite his inability to work. According to the Times' four star review, Blake meets at every turn "pusillanimous jobsworths who can’t see beyond spreadsheets and questionnaires. They impassively grind him down, forcing him into a Kafta-esque form-filling nightmare and ultimately denying him his rightful state support."
What exactly is Loach's point? Is it that all benefit claimants are good and deserving? Possibly not. That Blake or the single mum he befriends are deserving may not be intended to reassure taxpaying cinema-goers that their money is well-spent. But if this isn't the aim, what is the point of the drama? To show what happened to these people and these people alone?
That seems unlikely, because the baddie in Loach's scenario is the benefits system itself, and the way that medically unqualified staff are cutting off the needy. Whilst you can argue that a bad screen Muslim, for example, does not stand for Muslims generally, the portrayal of a bad UK benefits system is effectively an allegation that our actual benefits system is bad. That's certainly what the Guardian thought Loach was doing. Peter Bradshaw's four star review thought the film showed "a system that is almost deliberately planned to create just those desperate, futile shouting matches in the benefits office that lead to sanctions and punishments".
And that may be so. I don't know, because I don't have any dealings with it. But I do know that some people defraud the system, and I know personally some people who have been on health-related benefits for years and who are cheating the rest of us. She is said to have an untreatable hernia. He is said to have an incapacitating back injury. In fact both are active, hale and hearty, and enjoying an early retirement at our expense. I should report them, I suppose.
I don't believe these are typical of the majority of benefit claimants. There will be some cheats always. But firstly our system, tight-fisted as it may be, has not yet succeeded in finding these two out. It will be even less able to do so when, partly because of pressure by the likes of Ken Loach, the government stops testing the long-term sick at all. Secondly, benefit tests are stringent for a reason. It is that Britain cannot afford its public spending. We are currently borrowing about one and a half billion pounds every week just to stay afloat. We cannot afford to pay people benefits who are not eligible for them.
What does Loach's film have to say about that? Does the budget deficit get a mention? Does Loach show any of the undeserving poor? Does it tell viewers that there are some areas of Glasgow where, extraordinarily, the majority of the working age population are on sickness benefit?
As I haven't seen the film I don't know. But I believe Loach doesn't show his protagonists having a drink. Or a smoke, or a bet, or an expensive satellite TV contract, or a mobile phone. I'll bet Loach keeps these things well away from the screen.
But back to The Merchant of Venice. Just as Shylock, Shakespeare might argue, doesn't stand for all Jews, the characters in I, Daniel Blake, Loach might say, don't stand for all benefit claimants. This argument is much harder to sustain where the institution grinding Blake's face into the dust is a real one. For if the benefits system Loach depicts isn't genuine, what is the point of his film? Daniel Blake was made to show that the system we have is farcically inhumane, and by failing to set out the economic context in which it functions, by failing to acknowledge the difficulties of restricting sickness benefits to those entitled to them and by showing benefit claimants as the bien-pensant middle class would love them to be - thrifty, sober, continent and hardworking - it surely loads the dice too predictably in Loach's favour for good art.
Please someone who has seen Loach's film write in and tell me I'm wrong. He isn't getting a penny from me.
P.S. "When Daniel fails the initial test by just a few arbitrarily conceived points", writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "you find yourself thinking, If only he wasn't so honest . . . But in so doing, he would become precisely that kind of TV stock figure, that Shameless or Benefits Street cheat whose presence in black comedy and reactionary political gossip justified the whole setup to begin with".
It's worth noting that Bradshaw's concern is not that Daniel should cheat, but that he should risk becoming a "kind of TV stock figure" in doing so. What are these stock figures? Shameless was fiction (although probably no less accurate than Loach's own fiction). Benefits Street showed real people. What is Bradshaw's point? Is he saying that there aren't any real benefit cheats? Or is he saying he doesn't want Loach to show anyone cheating in case people get the idea that, you know, there might be people actually out there doing it?
P.P.S. When I read that Loach's film was co-produced by BBC Films, I wanted to sink to the floor in despair. Am I the only person to think that the BBC would never have funded a film which focused on benefit cheats? That in an era where the Corporation is struggling to fight off a reputation for left of centre bias putting money behind Ken Loach's mouth might not have been the greatest of ideas?
