The Welfare State and Me.

Last night, I went to see I, Daniel Blake. Responses to this film are predictably polarised. Left-wingers see it as an indictment of Tory Britain. Right-wingers see it as gross exaggeration, if not a complete fiction. A journalist in the Daily Mail has posed the question of why there are no characters like White Dee from Benefits Street in this film, and why everyone is portrayed simply as a good, honest, caring person who has fallen on hard times. 'It just doesn't ring true,' the journalist says. I went to see the film with a friend of mine who is a GP in the area of Newcastle where it is set and who is also carrying out research into health inequality in Britain. For her, the film rings very true indeed.

The main female character has just come to live in Newcastle, having been sent out of London because capital rents are too much of a drain on the housing benefit system. She has two children. Her benefits have been sanctioned because she got lost while looking for the JobCentre and ended up late for her appointment. She has no money and no way of feeding herself or her children, except through the food bank.

I discussed this with a friend of mine, who said something along the lines of, 'But how did she get into that state in the first place?' The implication here was that Katie must have brought her poverty on herself, most probably by refusing to work, or by making what the government refers to as 'bad choices.' We never do find out how Katie ended up in that situation, and perhaps we don't need to. The important thing is that in this country, there is enough food to go round, and those who are hungry need to be fed without judgement.

Katie's circumstances made me think of someone I knew a long time ago, when I worked in a children's home, where three young people under sixteen lived. These were the children who couldn't live with their parents and whose foster placements had all broken down. They had all been excluded from mainstream school and instead a teacher used to come to the house to help them with basic literacy and numeracy. They were what many people refer to as 'the dregs' - the children whose backgrounds are so horrific, they cannot function in wider society. No one wants to look after these children because their behaviour, on the whole, is deeply unappealing: theft, assault, self-harm, running away and prostitution are among some of the things I dealt with.

There was a girl at the home. Let's call her Frankie. Frankie was fifteen years old. She'd lived away from her mother on and off since she was removed from her care at the age of six because her mother was a violent alcoholic. No one knew where her father was. Over the previous nine years, Frankie had been to five different foster homes, two secure units and three children's homes. Staying at the home I worked in was her final chance: if she ran away, or stole, or did anything else against the law, she would be back in a secure unit. She wanted to give it a go, and for three months, she managed it. She got out of bed before eight every day, she went to her lessons, she did extra work, she didn't drink, or self-harm. She was co-operative with staff, she spoke openly about her problems instead of smashing up furniture and she was, in so many ways, a delight to be around.

At the time I met Frankie, her mother was two years into a ten-year prison sentence for manslaughter of Frankie's younger brother. The story goes that Frankie's mother was a recovering heroin addict and had been prescribed methodone. She left the drug on a table and her two-year-old son took it. Afraid that he would be taken away from her, she didn't call an ambulance and he died later that day.

To fund her heroin addiction, Frankie's mother worked as a prostitute. She had a pimp who persuaded her to rent out Frankie as soon as Frankie turned twelve. Soon after the death of her brother, Frankie was removed from her mother's care again and sent to a foster home. She ran away many times, back to her pimp, and eventually was sent to a secure unit. Later, she was released from the secure unit and came to the children's home, where I met her. I was her keyworker and worked closely with her for three months. Things went well. Then they didn't.

One Sunday morning, I arrived at the home at 10 to start my shift. The handover staff told me that one of the other children had run off in the night (by climbing out of an upstairs window) and returned with alcohol, which he shared with Frankie. She got drunk and hurled all her furniture around the room, then took a knife from the kitchen and slashed her arms so badly she needed hospital treatment.

Soon after this, I left. There were many reasons why, the main one being that I knew there was no way I could make a difference to Frankie. The damage had been done, a long time ago. The last I heard of her was about fourteen years ago, when a colleague from the home told me she'd run away, had a brief stint as a prostitute again and was back in the secure unit. She was not yet sixteen.

Since then, I have often wondered what became of her. The outlook for children like Frankie is bleak. Care leavers are among the people most vulnerable to homelessness. Young women are likely to enter abusive relationships. They are also likely to commit suicide. What they will almost certainly never do is enter steady, regular employment. They simply do not have the mental strength for it. Neither do they have the education. Frankie didn't have a single GCSE. For children like Frankie, ambition is an alien concept. The role of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the ins and outs of Pythagoras's theorem are all meaningless to a fifteen-year-old girl whose main aim is simply to get to the end of the day without a middle-aged man sticking is penis in her mouth.

If she is still alive, then the very best that can hoped for is that Frankie has a roof over her head, paid for by housing benefit, and enough other state money to keep her warm and fed. That is the very best scenario.

When she was fifteen, if you asked Frankie what she most wanted in life, she would answer, 'A family.' She wanted a baby. Those of us who knew Frankie knew that having a baby would be a disaster for her. She had a good heart, but not the first idea of how to look after another person. She could barely cope with the smallest levels of self-care. She didn't have the self-worth for it.

But she wanted a baby because she wanted someone to love. It is very likely that she had a baby as soon as she could, perhaps when she was sixteen, perhaps a little older, but she will almost certainly have had one. She will almost certainly not have had the finances or the emotional strength to care for that baby.

There is a school of thought that says, quite simply, that if you can't afford a child, you shouldn't have one. There is some material and social sense in that. But Frankie was a child, and she was ill. She was far more fragile than most and therefore more prone to making mistakes. Ultimately, Frankie was human, and to my mind, that is the root of why we fail people like Frankie. It is because we fail, at some very fundamental level, to grasp the fact that other people are as human as we are.

So as a civilised, affluent country, what do we do with people like Frankie? A Tory MP has recently argued that homeless people need to be 'eliminated'. He didn't say how he thought this elimination should be carried out, but I am willing to bet that it won't be by providing them with houses, which would probably be the most straightforward method.

It is easy for those of us who are hard-working parents who do only what is right for our children to completely fail in our understanding of what life is like for those children whose parents have failed them. Unfortunately, there will always be arseholes in the world. There will always be parents who abuse their children and children who therefore grow up without the ability to survive in a tough world. Their best chance at remaining safe is simply for the state to provide them with housing and food until their (usually) short lives are over. By removing or cutting their benefits, people like Frankie or like Katie from I, Daniel Blake will not miraculously go out and get jobs. They simply cannot do it. Instead, by removing or cutting their benefits, the government takes one step closer to rendering these people homeless, and brings the end of their lives ever closer.

For this, and many other reasons, I will always, always, vote for a government that will rebuild the welfare state and leave it intact.