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You quickly went from saying that, according to the film, "Everybody who works in a benefits office is an ogre" to saying that you were talking about how one person, Sheila, is portrayed.
What percentage of the total number of benefits/job center workers in the system have you personally interacted with? How can you be so sure that none of them are actually like Sheila or the guy whose name I'm forgetting? The experiences you cited are only those of one person, so hard to see how another perspective is manipulative because it differs from your own experience.
Anyway, the example I gave shows that not "everybody who works in a benefits office is an ogre" according to Loach's film, which is what you'd claimed.

He shows his hand from the first piece of dialogue and there is no doubt where the film will go from that moment on.

He shows his hand from the first dialogue in the film, where the woman named Amanda is patiently trying to get Blake to answer simple questions about his health for a questionnaire and he's cursing at her and already being recalcitrant? How does that show a black-and-white version of things, where civil servants are evil villains?

And Loach hardly stacks everything against the two main characters. For example:

Spoiler

when both of them cross the line into illegal actions, both are shown mercy rather than being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I was impressed with this when I first saw it on a seat-back screen during a trans-oceanic flight. It was even more impressive when seen at home on the Criterion BluRay.

I am surprised that Lost Highway cannot believe that bureaucrats like Sheila exist. I spent my life as a bureaucrat in a social service agency (albeit in a regional office -- in the US) and have in-laws who worked in field offices. They told bloodcurdling stories about colleagues. I see no reason to doubt that cruel and indifferent field office workers also exist amongst our UK brethren (and sisters). Perhaps, there are indeed more kind and concerned workers than heartless ones, but it is a matter of luck of the draw. It is possible to find whole offices that are "problematic" -- where genuinely good employees are considered "unreliable".

Note: I have only "observed" client - adjudicator interactions via written transcripts -- but I can assure Lost Highway that the interactions portrayed in Loach's film are definitely not more extreme than some of those (a minority, than heavens) I read during my 29 year career.

In any event, I did not find this even slightly "over-manipulative" -- but rather quite believable (and magnificent).

Gregory -- the questionnaire Blake objected to is apparently quite problematic. It is totally generic and full of trivial questions (which was what was bothering Blake) -- and is set up to justify suspending temporary benefits to people merely because they remain able to do extremely light everyday activities that are compatible with little more than a sedentary lifestyle (and not at all indicative of the ability to do even rather light work on a sustained basis). Also, it allows non-medical personnel to make essentially medical decisions.

I (still !) haven't seen the movie but have a question about this point (because that's the point that so far refrained me from watching it) : isn't the issue not about how such bureaucrats exist but to choose specifically to show some as to make a more general negative point about the current UK welfare system ? It would be cherry picking the persons that allow to support such a point but forgetting how they might not be representative of the system as a whole, which would just be a sophism (non representative sample).
I'm afraid the movie does that, and I've seen other movies (especially a French one) doing this for an awful result.

When a heartless policy is adopted, younger personnel (particularly ones that have little or no recollection of "olden days") are likely to internalize the attitude which underlies the policy. Notice that the kindest employee was the one who would have internalized values that were far more humane. My relatives told me that (in the US) new employees were much more likely to see their role as just a job that involved enforcing ever more stringent rules.

I think it's worth stressing that the current system is deliberately heartless. When David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010, one of his aims was to repair the public finances (clobbered by the 2008 crash) by cutting as much from the government's overall budget as possible, and social security was one of the biggest drains on the public purse, and therefore the area that demanded the biggest cuts. Hence a system that, as Michael K points out, is intentionally designed to deprive people either temporarily or sometimes permanently of social security support over what might well be a trivial issue such as ticking the wrong box on a form or answering a questionnaire the wrong way. If you deprive hundreds of thousands of people of a few weeks' benefit on a technicality, that can add up to a substantial saving.

A similar process led to the recent Windrush scandal, in which a policy that was also instituted by the Cameron government with the aim of reducing immigration ended up deporting people who, even if their UK citizenship wasn't firmly established on paper, had every right to live permanently in the UK because they were from the generation that came over from the Caribbean in the 1940s and 50s to help rebuild the country post-WWII. And I'm rather cheered by the public revulsion over that (which ultimately cost Home Secretary Amber Rudd her job, although her predecessor Theresa May was far more directly to blame), because it shows that even though we keep voting these bastards into power we haven't quite lost as much common humanity as they sometimes like to pretend.

(Now having been retired for a couple of years, I can say things I couldn't before).

The Windrush scandal was particularly shocking because it seemed to reveal that nobody had thought policies through (or even done the slightest bit of consultation where a really obvious issue such as that one would have surely been brought up) before implementing them, and the one thing you hope that government ministers actually have to be able to properly function in a position (though I recognise that my view is likely naive in the extreme) is some sense of wider context in which their actions take place!

Though I suppose this speaks to Michael Kerpan's previous point about younger personnel and the way that constant turnover might be intentional to prevent problematic behaviours, such as competence and compassion, from becoming ingrained!

colinr0380 wrote: Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:26 pm The Windrush scandal was particularly shocking because it seemed to reveal that nobody had thought policies through (or even done the slightest bit of consultation where a really obvious issue such as that one would have surely been brought up) before implementing them, and the one thing you hope that government ministers actually have to be able to properly function in a position (though I recognise that my view is likely naive in the extreme) is some sense of wider context in which their actions take place!

Though I suppose this speaks to Michael Kerpan's previous point about younger personnel and the way that constant turnover might be intentional to prevent problematic behaviours, such as competence and compassion, from becoming ingrained!

The Windrush scandal was a direct result of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy when she was Home Secretary.

Still waiting for the first film about the separation of families because of the £18.600 income threshold to sponsor your partner on a visa, let alone the extortionate fees the Home Office now charges for visas and surcharges, which are solely designed to milk families for as much money as possible. I loved getting married, then coming back to the UK and living without my wife for the best part of a year. I genuinely despise my country to a large extent due to how it treats me and my wife, as a source of potential income, and how in contrast any EU country would welcome us without asking for a penny. Just another minimum of £3629 next year for indefinite leave to remain, naturalisation and Life in the UK test. Add another £459 minimum on if we want an answer within a period of weeks rather than six months (or years) surrendering our ability to travel.

This all ties into Windrush, because everything has done to keep net migration as low as possible, whilst generating as much revenue as possible, without attracting the gaze of the wider public.

Oh, that's why the title is trending on Twitter.

Yeah, he's been unsurprisingly rallying around it, well, since it won the Palme, I think. I always wished Criterion included Loach's adverts for Corbyn's genuinely inspiring efforts during the 2017 general election for posterity's sake. Perhaps they'll have more to work with if they end up with Loach's film due later this year (likely debuting at Cannes).

Drucker wrote: Sat Jan 05, 2019 10:47 pm Future Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn is a fan!

Jeremy Corbyn is never going to be Prime Minister. His approval ratings are lower than his Labour party's and historically no candidate running for PM with a lower approval than their party's has ever won the vote before. Not to say that Corbyn couldn't break historical precedent but this is the most incompentent and cruel Tory government in many people's lifetimes and Labour are TRAILING in opinion polls and have been for some time. It doesn't help his ambitions that increasingly more people are now aware that he doesn't want a second EU referendum and that he is favour of (a soft) Brexit. Even if there was another general election, the Tories would be widely expected to be re-elected because Labour under Corbyn simply don't offer Remainers in England an alternative.

This has been sitting around unwatched for quite a while now. I was building up the courage to watch it last year, but then the awful Sorry We Missed You reminded me how much I’ve disliked recent Loach films.

Well, let’s see if this much-praised film bucks the trend.

Okay, it’s not even three minutes in, we haven’t even had the first image, and I already hate it. What did it for me? That kneejerk invocation of the “big American corporation” bogeyman. And it carries on in the same predictable rut: our (hopelessly naïve) heroes are martyrs to big-C Capitalism and little-G government. Can Anybody guess whether Our Dan’s Dicky Heart will give out before he ever sees justice from Faceless Bureaucracy? Has Anybody ever seen a Ken Loach film before?

The really annoying thing about Loach is that he manages to get consistently terrific performances for his consistently terrible scripts. This is why I’m tempted to lay a lot of blame for the weakness of his recent work at Paul Laverty’s door, and why I keep going back to see if the fire is still hot. I know Loach is capable of the harrowing Family Life, and also capable of getting performances as good as Crissie Rock’s in Ladybird, Ladybird that could paper over the schematics of any script.

You have only to look at pretty much anything written by Jimmy McGovern to see where Laverty’s scripts fall short. Unlike Laverty, McGovern consistently believes in Jean Renoir’s maxim “everyone has their reasons”, and even the most morally bankrupt character in a McGovern script will be complex, often intensely charismatic, and with a messy backstory that might run the risk of attracting audience sympathy - but it’s risks like that which make for compelling drama.

Unfortunately for his international reputation, McGovern works mostly in British television - a bit like Alan Clarke, who makes for a similar comparator with Ken Loach that isn’t in Loach’s favour.