At the age of 80, Ken Loach returns to an arena of British social outrage he first occupied with pictures such as Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home; he and screenwriter Paul Laverty take up the idea that the benefits system has been repurposed as the 21st-century workhouse in our age of austerity: made deliberately grim, to deter or design out all but the most deserving poor. This movie won Loach his second Palme d’Or at Cannes, and has already become renowned for a brutal scene showing the secret visceral shame of a food bank. Maybe, in years to come, this sequence will become as famous as Charlie Chaplin and the edible shoe. But there are no laughs, only horror and anger.

In a pre-election interview, David Cameron revealed that he hadn’t the smallest idea how many food banks there were in Britain, and it isn’t clear if Theresa May has been briefed any better. Either way, Loach’s film positions itself in the middle of the eating-or-heating dilemma: the story of a fictional benefits claimant (whose situation Laverty has based on real-life research) called Daniel Blake, played with honesty and humanity by standup comic Dave Johns. He is a skilled labourer and carpenter in Newcastle who can’t work following a heart attack.

Kafkaesque bureaucracy deems him ineligible for sickness benefit; as a middle-aged web neophyte he finds online applications for jobseekers’ allowance an ordeal, but, having embarked on this frustrating, humiliating mission to prove his respectability, he can’t accept jobs that come up. All his hard won expertise and knowledge of the world are now valueless. Daniel befriends an angry, lonely single mum from London in a similar situation: Katie, tremendously played by Hayley Squires, who has been relocated to the north-east. Widower Daniel becomes a kindly quasi-grandpa to her two children and a good friend to her. He is witty and wise, with real practical knowledge, but, like Katie, as innocent as a child about the new world of welfare non-provision.

On revisiting this movie, I was struck again by its radical plainness and simplicity. Loach is the John Bunyan of cinema; a bringer of parables. It has been said of Loach that he would do without the camera if he could, and that doing-without aesthetic is absolutely right for the unfashionable, uncompromising seriousness of what he has to say. There is humour in his work, but clear and straightforward humour. He and Laverty are utter strangers to the irony and cynicism that are pretty much integral to the language of almost any other kind of cinema. Loach avoids smart-alec stuff the way an Amish farmer dislikes buttons and bows.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An innocent in the world of welfare non-provision … Hayley Squires as Katie

Another kind of film would get Daniel increasingly involved in crime or scamming to survive, and, in fact, Daniel is exasperated to be vaguely drawn into his next-door neighbour’s lairy scheme to import cheap trainers from China and sell them on street corners. But even here there is no outright wrongdoing. His neighbours are likable lads with no side to them. As for Daniel and Katie, their friendship is to be ultimately tested by the obvious question of how she could make some serious money if she wanted; the resulting drama is put together with a kind of robust naivety – and perhaps the narrative reveal could have managed with less of a clunk. It is a bit like the bookcase Daniel is putting together: nothing fancy, but conceived with candour, delicacy, and lack of prurience.

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The labyrinthine nightmare of the system seemed even more painful when I revisited the film this week: a system in which the claimants are told their fate will be settled by the horribly titled “Decision Maker”: the modern-day beadle. It is a system that is almost deliberately planned to create just those desperate, futile shouting matches in the benefits office that lead to “sanctions” and punishments. When Daniel fails the initial test by just a few arbitrarily conceived points, you find yourself thinking, ‘If only he wasn’t so honest, if only he had the wit to trick the system, just a little bit.’ But in so doing, he would become precisely that kind of TV stock figure, that Shameless or Benefits Street cheat whose presence in black comedy and reactionary political gossip justified the whole setup to begin with.

This film and its pairing of Hayley and Daniel makes me think of a line from Dickens’s Bleak House: “What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.” Loach wants to expand and ventilate that knowledge, and show us that poverty is not God’s business but ours. We can understand it and do something about it.