I Daniel Blake by Ken Loach

Saw it lasty night.  It's good: pretty much the usual Loach/Lafferty fair: it's not full blown propagandist, but realist art, and subtley understated.  Outside the cinema there were people holding a banner depicting the faces of those who have died as a result of the benefit crack down, I don't know if they have been there every night.The big question I have is: since when have Geordies qualified for human rights?

Just to put things into historical context, The Kingdom of Northumbria was considered the cradle of Western Civilisation, that was at the same time as you silly buggers in the south were running around with your faces painted blue!

I think it is a lot worse than it used to be in the 1980’s when I did the life of and love on the dole thing. When there was 3 million us plus, as the figures where fiddled downwards then. Then you would sign on and leave you alone although I had no experience of the disability system direct or otherwise. pretty much mainly chasing after people who were working in the gray economy and co-habitors. People who were shacked up together which deserved a deduction. Now they are using the workhouse kind of system of picking oakem and breaking stones, or in other words proving that you are applying for loads of jobs that you have no hope of getting to avoid ‘sanctions’. And the problems of the bedroom tax that makes the security of the hovel over your head that much less secure. Then there is also apparently the problem of being driven into temporary work and not having the financial reserve to carry you over between when it ends and the payments come through on your next application. There has been a novel explosion of people living on the streets, in tents etc, and begging in Manchester which I have not seen before. They are not all old wino’s by any stretch of the imagination either. They was a ‘jungle’ like camp site set up on a major thorough fare in Manchester on Oxford Road under the Mancunian Way, a motorway fly over, and the centre of the Manchester universities complex with its lucrative foreign students business, making the place look like the third world. I cycled past it going to work when they started clearing them out with a few police and regiment of private security guards. It was probably an accident that I was there again a bit later going home; it could have been a Saturday. Clattering along oxford road going north was a black limousine with a dozen or so police motorcycles as escort with blue flashing lights and all that paraphernalia; which is exceptional in Manchester. They had actually already cleared the road totally but I sneaked on my bike only to be driven off the road by the cavalcade.  I swore and V signed at what I assumed was one of the 0.001% , when the pigs were out of site.Not realising, before a google search that it was a fellow traveller and brother Mr Xi, the communist president of China   http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/live-chinese-president-manchester-visit–10317062  He sort of also demonstrated a rather un-diplomatic partisanship in only visiting the Manchester city ground. I live next door to the Manchester United ground and my work place is next to Manchester cities ground which; is pretty crap for a cultural heritage scouser, no peace. Football is crap now and is just a brand. I think it used to be a bit of ‘cultural’ space where the working class could congregate and bond together in some shared space, the terraces, to the exclusion of the ruling class etc. With a possibility bit of brain dead regionalist xenophobia thrown in perhaps.   There were ‘toffs’, or sometimes a well off ageing relative sat down in the stands but we were all from the same soil. Engels in the housing question seemed to think that oxford road ran east-west but he did remember the ‘elevated railway’ that crossed it and is still there.

I think it is interesting to compare what it used to be like to now. Unemployment in the UK started to rise in the mid 1970’s reaching about 5% which is roughly the level it is supposed to be now. But I think the general political attitude towards it was more sympathetic then and it was less a matter of scroungers than a failure of the system. To give it a context there was a BBC TV play at the time. It must have reasonably good as I can still remember it ; not watched since or again although it has been made available on DVD 30 years later.  https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephants%27_Graveyard_(1976)  There are several other things that are different now from the 1970’s for those at the bottom of the heap. It not so much the minimum wage as the ‘intensity’ of work that is expected for it and the associated zero hour contract ‘flexible’ working. There is also the general precarious or non permanent basis of employment; the idea of starting working in a place and still being there 20 years later is quite strange now whereas it used to be almost the norm. And then there is the deterioration of housing (benefit) security system, loss of ‘affordable’ state provided  housing; and there is the cost of accommodation in general experienced as rent and mortgage interest payments etc. It isn’t unusual now for double income earners to paying up and over 50% of it to keep a roof over their heads. I would be interested to know the historical data or personal experience of that from the 1970’s say. I think the average ‘house price’ in the UK is about 200K and the monthly interest only payments on that is about £800 which gobbles up more than half of the take home pay of an average salary of 27K. Theoretically its interesting as according to Karl there were three classes in ‘capitalist’ society as the volume III joke says. The ‘manufacturing’ capitalist class that directly squeeze out of the working class surplus labour; that is unpaid labour that they pay to themselves. And the ‘landowning’, house-owning  or rentier class will cream off some of that out of the system for themselves.  And that the interest bearing, finance and rentier  ‘capitalists’ were effectively parasites living off the back of the parasitic profiteers of enterprises. Whereby the “profiteers of enterprises” have to hand over a lot of their surplus value (£800 a month is a lot of surplus value)  to the wage slaves  so they could pass it on to the ‘non productive’ rentier class. There are some interesting historical examples eg the living out system in the slave system of the USA. Where ‘proper’ capitalists would employ slaves under a direct wage labour system and the slaves would then either themselves pass on a proportion of their wages to the slave owners or the capitalist employer pass on a premium to the slave owners. In Russia, with seasonal agricultural production, the serf owners would send their serfs off to work for capitalists (typically mining, and lumber and stuff like that) for a fee.  I think there was a certain degree of hostility between landowning class and ‘productive’ capitalist class which had as much to do with their historical base. Now they seemed to have fused together somewhat. However there now are some very much non Marxists who are comparing the increasing part played by interest bearing and rentier ‘capitalism’ to a return to ‘feudalism’ as they would put it. There is food for thought wiki entry on it.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism

I recently saw a Labourite on twitetr complain that public schools are the biggest cause of inequality.  She was right, obviously, the Duke of Weswtminster is only rich because he went to Eton…Also, a review from Class War:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xOZuWLpFUVery much criticising the film for not being a different film.  He's right that unlike other Loach works, there is no struggle (nor one of his traemark debate scenes).