On February 12th 2017 the director Ken Loach accepted the best film Bafta for I, Daniel Blake. He used his acceptance speech to slam the Tory government for the "callous brutality" with which they continue to treat the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.
Of course right-wingers want to believe that the horrifying scenes portrayed in I, Daniel Blake are pure fiction with no grounding in reality, but anyone who has had any experience of the savage welfare policies the Tories have been administering for the last seven years will either know how disgusting the system is.
Two of the most appalling aspects of the Tory welfare system that are explored in I, Daniel Blake are the Work Capacity Assessment regime for people with disabilities and illnesses, and the sanctions regime that is designed to strip the most vulnerable people of their benefits and plunge them into total destitution.
Anyone who knows about the workings of the WCA regime for disabled people or the sanctions system understands how bad it can be, especially if the people being forced to jump through all of the hoops suffer from debilitating disabilities, mental health conditions or learning difficulties.
What a lot of people don't know is that both the WCA regime and the Sanctions system actually cost far more to administer than they will ever save in reduced benefits payouts, thus the Tories are actually using the money we pay in taxes to subsidise their barbaric mistreatment of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.
We've known for over a year that the outsourcing corporations who administer the Work Capacity Assessment regime rake in far more in fees than will ever be saved by turfing sick and disabled people off their disability benefits.
Additionally it has been revealed that the Tory sanctions regime also costs far more money to administer than is saved by stripping people of their meagre benefits (often for the most ridiculously trivial reasons) and subjecting them to absolute destitution.
Ken Loach is absolutely right to decry the callous brutality of the Tory mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable, but it's always worth pointing out that not only is their treatment of vulnerable people a disgrace in its own right, it's also a demonstration that the Tories are so keen on inflicting suffering that they expect the taxpayer (you and I) to actually subsidise the dehumanising and abusive systems they've put in place.
Of course some Tory tribalists will be delighted to see their taxes used to bully and harass people that they consider to be below them in the social hierarchy, but we have to believe that most people simply aren't that sadistic.
Most people would be horrified to know that their taxes are actually being used to subsidise the infliction of stress, suffering and absolute destitution on the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. The problem is that they just don't follow what is going on closely enough to understand the absolute horror of it.
We have to hope that most people are passive because of ignorance, rather than actually believing that tax money spent on the abuse of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society is money well spent.
If ignorance (rather than widespread public spite) is the is the problem, then films like I Daniel Blake, and severely critical Bafta award speeches are part of the solution.
We have to believe that people don't oppose these policies because they just don't understand the extreme callousness of them. To believe otherwise is to believe that Britain has become a place so lacking in basic human decency that British taxpayers actually enjoy the fact that their taxes are being used to actively inflict extreme suffering on hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen. And to believe that is to accept defeat.
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