Avoiding "common cause"

  Avoiding "common cause"

 

 

One of the problems about dissent in any form is that the 'powers that be' usually stay stum, rarely comment and usually wait out the storm until the rage dissipates.

Watching the Ken Loach film, "I Danial Blake" about a 55 year old man who having had a heart attack is waiting to be signed off sickness disability so he can find work by applying for a job seekers allowance. The only problem is the job seekers say he must look for a job but he can't look for a job until the doctor says he can. He falls between the proverbial cracks of an unwieldy bureaucratic system.

Of course a film maker like Loach has a story to tell and a point to make. 

His depiction of Job Centre staff as stereotypical, 'jobs worth's', 'uncaring', mindless people who are following the rules laid down by government, irrespective of the trauma of the people in front of them is debatable and if there is a demon in the system it's the politician. 

Iain Duncan Smith under David Cameron and George Osborn the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's obsession with deficit reduction, had promised to modernise the Welfare payment system and get closer to a single, much simplified overarching payment. The difficulty was in merging the various categories for consideration there were winners and losers. The bureaucracy meant that to capture the individual claimants  picture required pages of questions, many of them not pertinent to the actual individual. The method of capture and correspondence was through a government web site but of course many of the claimants we not computer savvy. The assumption by the 'think tanks' that formulate policy had little or no concept of the conditions on the ground. The claimants inability to access, still less their understand how to manipulate the computer meant that large numbers of claimants were invisible.

The gap between the comprehension of what the privately educated designers of the paperless application system thought they were dealing with and actuality, led to enormous suffering and in a number of cases death through suicide as people lost their self esteem by being treated as less than human.

The award winning film made in 2016 made waves but didn't cause enough of an affront within society to make the government soften its stance. The deep seated resentment towards the unemployed, fed by the tabloid press and repeated on television with many turgid depiction's of the worst scrounges were revealed as if they were typical of all welfare claimants.

For a Berger flipper at MacDonald's on the minimum wage (£7.50ph), under 20 (£5.60ph), the thought of someone getting the equivalent income plus a range of other benefits is galling and the use of divide and rule and was again successfully used by government to avoid "common cause".