Tories should all watch Blake film
FINALLY caught up with Daniel Blake the same day that Theresa May missed him.
“I, Daniel Blake” is film director Ken Loach’s raging indictment of Universal Credit, the government’s final solution for the welfare state.
It portrays in harrowing detail the nightmare bureaucracy of a benefit system apparently designed to crush the human spirit.
Friends have long urged me to see the film, but I haven’t been to the cinema for donkey’s years.
My chance came last weekend when it was screened by the BBC, and on his Sunday show presenter Andrew Marr asked the Prime Minister if she had seen it too.
“I didn’t,” she replied, with a face like a set-pot.
Had she bothered, instead of moithering about Brexit, she might have said: “Yes, and I was moved almost to tears by the plight of Daniel Blake vainly trying to fight his way through the system, and the single mum caught in a sanction trap.”
In her ignorance, she couldn’t. Instead, she trotted out the familiar mantra that Universal Credit [UC] is getting people back into work, work that pays. Which is untrue, because most people on these benefits are already in work – work that fails to pay the bills because their wages are too low.
Mrs May had nothing to say about the human misery caused by the long, slow agony of Universal Credit roll-out that has slashed living standards of the poorest in society and boosted demand at food banks.
And this was on the very day that
Mrs May had nothing to say about the human misery caused by the long, slow agony of
Universal Credit