The Man with the Plan is an urgent film for our desperate times

On a cold and bitter December night, the week before Christmas, I made my first visit to Rotherhithe in 35 years. I was not happy with the idea of going and expected to get lost. I took the recently renamed Windrush Line from Whitechapel – and sure enough was confused when I stepped out onto the streets.  

If you know your history you’ll remember the name Windrush as the boat that brought West Indians to our shores after WWII. And there, as if waiting for me, was a descendant of those intrepid travellers. Lawrence directed me to the quaintly named St Marychurch Street, with me feeling I had fallen into Dickens again. But I was in no mood for this trip. I was tired and on the morrow I had to go and see a friend who has descended into the dungeon of Parkinson’s. I was feeling sorry for myself.  

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I found the warehouse of the Sands Film Studio and a reviving cup of tea set me straight and brought me out of my grumpy old man’s torpor. And I sat and watched The Man with the Plan. The film is about Sir William Beveridge, who in 1942 wrote a report called Social Insurance and Allied Services. Later called the Beveridge Report, it led to the creation of the welfare state in 1948. It was truly transformational. Presenting us today with the badly made bed we call modern British society: lumpy, uneven and only partially functioning in giving the poorest among us the chances and opportunities to thrive.

I was captured the moment the cinema lights went dark. And for the next hour and a half was a full-blown exposition on why, if we had done what Beveridge advocated, we might be in a better place today. A young student played by Sophie Jenkin takes us through a kind of Alice in Wonderland journey through our contemporary woes; through government ineptitude and distortions of Beveridge’s message. Simon Callow plays a powerfully presented William Beveridge – the anchorman blazing a trail of good sense through the whirligig of poor social governance.

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The film is in its final stages before launch this year. It documents dramatically what many of us have been saying for years: we need to reinvent the welfare state for our modern times. Beveridge has to be rescued from history and made anew. With an economy dominated by poverty, with 40% of government expenditure spent on maintaining people, you can see how the welfare state has been distorted into its opposite. Instead of being a springboard to a better life, it has become a concrete safety net that once you hit it you’re fucked. 

One of the key words Callow said hit me forcefully when uttered: “patching”. Patching, like patching a bike wheel that really needs replacing. Never realising that a bit here and a bit there creates the millions of children in poverty, and their parents left behind. Warehoused and waiting for the bus of opportunity that never arrives.

One of the finest of scenes in the film was the government policy blizzard. A snowstorm of committees and initiatives and undelivered good intentions. The film captures brilliantly that sense of talk and rhetoric that is soon dumped or replaced with another piece of poor delivery; until a new report is given some new posturing that fails like the blizzard before it. A metaphorical bonfire of various governments reports and policies would keep us warm in the coldest of winters, were it not for the paucity of thinking. But what the film more than anything says is that whatever government thinking has been is not enough. 

My passion for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention to coordinate our energies is to stop poverty destroying the ambitions of government departments. That for all the ambitions of our health, education and social government departments, they are undermined by poverty. When 50% of our school teachers have to deal with the effects of poverty invading the classroom, when 50% of hospital patients suffer from nutritional issues, coordinating poverty’s ending is essential.  

The Man with the Plan is not a nice bit of eulogy to a civil servant who was once important. It is an accusation against not taking his grand plan and using it fully. This film is for today. As poverty and want stalk the offices of government and the benches of parliament, the blizzard of governmental waffle continues. Alas. It was poetic for me that I came to see The Man with the Plan on my first journey on the Windrush Line; a reminder of our postwar world that Windrush represented. And also that echo of the postwar era as the welfare state came to being. I hope you get to see this important aid in our fight against poverty’s predominance. Go here to check out where it’s at.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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