Perhaps it’s the weather. The first couple of weeks in Burnham’s Britain have had an escapist, surreal quality. All these announcements of modest tax cuts or spending increases. A £100 million here. A £100 million there. Worth tuppence a week to each of us. Earnest discussions follow about the minutiae over how each item will be “funded.” This is supposedly to ensure it is “affordable.” What? Of course, none of it is remotely affordable. The state is already crazed with profligacy. The National Debt is about to top three trillion. This is being added to by over £100 billion a year. Welfare spending was £334 billion last year and is due to rise to £409 billion in four year’s time. When the gilt yields on new Government borrowing reached five per cent under Liz Truss, it was presented as a financial crisis. It’s now 5.7 per cent. Steve Baker predicts the state will be bankrupt by the mid-2040s. There will be no money in the National Insurance Fund for pensions, and payments will default.
Meanwhile, as we hurtle towards national ruin, we are told that the bus fare cap will be “paid for” by turning international climate finance grants into loans. So everything is all perfectly prudent and proper.
Then we have the Prime Minister proposing spending another £19 billion a year on free social care. Though it would perhaps cost rather more, as on Wednesday he said care workers “should be the best paid people in society, not the worst.” As the Prime Minister is an Everton fan, he probably knows that Jordan Pickford, the team’s goalkeeper, is on £7.8 million a year. Is the proposal to cap footballers’ salaries at £25,000 a year? I suspect Pickford might go abroad. Or is the plan to pay each of our two million care workers a salary of £7.8 million? “I just start with that feeling,” Burnham added.
A “cross-party consensus” is called for to create a National Care Service. When you hear the phrase “cross-party consensus” it is time to watch out for your wallet. When it’s backed up by “both sides of industry” agreeing to some corporatist plan, with the CBI and TUC coming together, then best to consider emigrating. The media love to be consensus cheerleaders rather than offering scepticism. HS2. Net zero. The Exchange Rate Mechanism. Lockdown in 2020. Appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Appeasement (or “detente” as they used to call it) of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Consensus, with dissenting voices ignored or sneered at, has a terrible record.
Kemi Badenoch has made clear that the Conservatives will not support a plan that would require higher tax or borrowing. Critics have said that such constraints would be “unrealistic”. But how realistic are yet higher taxes? On Saturday, there was a report in The Times that “based on the recently published HMRC data, the SNP’s decision to impose a 48p top rate of tax, which applies to earnings over £125,140 from the 2024-25 tax year, is likely to have reduced revenues for public spending by between £15 million and £30 million.” The Laffer Curve has arrived in Scotland.
Why stop with free social care? Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, says that “no one should lose their home” because of care costs. Three-quarters of us don’t end up in residential care, and it is clearly a misfortune for the blameless quarter of us who do. But what of the other misfortunes in the ups and downs of life? What if someone on an annual salary of £200,000 loses his job through no fault of his own – perhaps his firm goes bust, or he is replaced by a robot, whatever. If he can no longer afford the mortage on his £2 million house, should the state step in to pay it? Or should he be forced to sell up? Perhaps getting by with a £1 million house and a £100,000 annual salary.
I sympathise with the argument that if you have worked hard to build up retirement savings and then get Alzheimers, your savings are lost – while those who didn’t save up get their care costs paid by the state. But on the same principle, should those who managed to save for retirement get the same state pension as those who did not? Should Pensions Credit and Housing Benefit be abolished so that all pensioners just get the basic pension regardless of whether they have any assets? I suppose if you roughly triple the basic pension then nobody would lose out.
In any case, why should the state usurp the role of the family? Sir Keir Starmer was never happier than declaring that the state was now providing children with breakfast.
As with politicians quoting their own speeches, it is usually a sign of madness when journalists quote their own articles. Still, here goes. 15 years ago, I wrote the following for this site:
“On Wednesday I was at a meeting discussing adult social care at Hammersmith Town Hall with a group of Kosovan executive mayors. We talked about how the system worked, some of the challenges involved, the immense costs, the merits of personalised budgets, the alternatives of residential and non residential care. How for every three pounds spent, one goes on working out what to do with the other two.
“The Kosovans listened politely as the Albanian interpreter repeated everything. Then they said: “In Kosovo old people are looked after by their families.”
Why does the UK have three times as many old people in residential care as Poland? (Around 250 per 100,000 of the population compared to around 750 here.)
Part of the social care crisis is linked to the housing crisis. The rationing we inflict on ourselves with the planning system doesn’t just mean we have too few homes but also that they are the smallest in Europe. A French home is, on average, a fifth bigger than a British one. So there is less room for granny.
A five bedroom house in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, costs around £250,000. In London it would be about ten times that.
But it is also cultural. Kosovo may not (yet) be as rich a country as we are. But when you grow old and are wrinkled, dribbling, befuddled with embarrassingly extreme views on immigration, you are still (more or less) tolerated by family. You sit in armchair in the corner and watch your grandchild crawling around with their toys on the floor. Isn’t that the better way?