Earlier this week I went on a “povvo safari for the middle classes”.

Earlier this week I went on a “povvo safari for the middle classes”. I hesitate to give further oxygen to the crass and silly words of the Times’ film correspondent Camilla Long, but they do serve to point up the ugly futility of lazy thinking about poverty and desperation.

I, Daniel Blake is a harrowing and powerful film. This is not a film review so I will not undertake a detailed revisiting of the narrative with which many are already familiar. Sufficient to say that the helplessness of Daniel and Katie in the face of the Kafka-like deliberations of the DWP and its unreachable, anonymous ‘decision-maker’ is a disgrace to a society with even the lowest of aspirations to justice and compassion.

It is perhaps a tribute to the power of this film that some feel threatened by it. Camilla Long is not alone: Toby Young’s shoddily inaccurate review of the film has been elegantly and courteously demolished by Bernadette Meaden However, the common factor in these disingenuous responses to experiences so far from the lives of those commenting, is an ignorance of the nature of working class life, and a smugness about the supposed virtues of that part of the middle class so ready to stereotype and condemn.

I can pass for middle class in the dusk with the light behind. I have been well educated and have the confidence which comes with that condition. But I was born and reared in what used to be called ‘the respectable working class’. My parents were quiet, sober, industrious people, as are so many millions in that stratum of society. They might best be described as ‘aspirant’. Respecting and valuing education, they taught me, by sacrifice and example, that what had been impossible for them, was within my grasp.

We were not well off, but we were never under the cosh of unemployment or sickness. We were not oppressed by the bedroom tax nor by unaffordable rents. The middle class people whom we knew – doctors, teachers, solicitors – showed neither disdain for our lives nor an assumption that people in our station had to somehow be contained by punitive authority if we were not to encroach on their status.

Had we fallen into misfortune, as some around us did, I have no doubt we would have been thought to be ‘the deserving poor’.That very term – used to devalue the authenticity of I, Daniel Blake – shows the gulf of understanding and that precarious eminence of judgement upon which some of the more fortunate choose to stand. Because neither of the film’s principal characters are chain-smoking obese couch potatoes, spending their days in front of a wide screen television, they are not the confirmation-bias stock figures of Daily Mail headlines. Nor are the vast majority of working class people. The fact that it has become necessary to say this is an indication both of the self-protective indignation of many middle class critics, and their disquiet at the idea that poor people must always be to blame for causing and exacerbating their own poverty could actually be wide of the mark.

Caricature gives comfort and blinds people to uncomfortable facts. The daily strain of living with deprivation has a deleterious effect on the capacity to make optimal decisions. Many studies have shown that poor decision-making is more likely to be an outcome of poverty than its cause. Commenting on a study entitled ‘Poverty impedes cognitive function’ published in the journal Science in 2013, the American journalist Matthew Yglesias said: “At home or abroad, the strain of constantly worrying about money is a substantial barrier to the smart decision-making that people in tough circumstances need to succeed. One of the best ways to help the poor help themselves, in other words, is to simply make them less poor.”

Such humane good sense does not find a ready hearing among many who hold power and influence opinion. They find it easier to minimise assistance and to surround it with unmeetable, disorienting and contradictory eligibility requirements. The film, in showing the cumulative and disastrous failure of Daniel and Katie to jump through these hoops illustrates perfectly the gradual decline in ‘smart-decision making’ described by Yglesias. “Hold this cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

I am nearer in age to Daniel Blake than to the young mother Katie. But human nature does not change so much. I recognise the rough-tongued honesty of Daniel, his desire to work, his quiet and restorative kindness towards Katie and her traumatised children, and most of all, his utter incomprehension at what is being done to him. I know Katie’s determination to resume her Open University studies, placed on hold as she dealt with eviction, life with two young children in a hostel and relocation to Newcastle from her native London. I know her protective and hopeful love for her children. I know her determination that she will come through for their sake. I know these things because I know people like this and because I have lived among them. Like millions of others, I don’t need to go on a safari.

But for those who have not ventured into terra incognita, please pause and reflect: it is time to travel with humility. Here be no dragons  – just fellow humans who have the same needs, desires and hopes as you, but have not had your advantages.

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© Jill Segger is an Associate Director of Ekklesia with particular involvement in editorial issues. She is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, Catholic Herald, Tribune, Reform and The Friend, among other publications. Jill is an active Quaker. See: http://www.journalistdirectory.com/journalist/TQig/Jill-Segger You can follow Jill on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.co/quakerpen