So says Polly Toynbee in the Guardian this morning.
And she is right, of course. It's a message I also deliver in The Courageous State (see right). As she puts it:
Good care has to be paid for: pay independently and it will cost more for less. Pay collectively and everyone can have good enough care, with no one losing all their savings.
That is glaringly obviously right and the need is so universal there is no room for a market either: as I again argue in the Courageous State, when there is universal need markets are simply a mechanism for capturing the revenues of the state for private gain.
This is something that our politicians have to realise. It would appear obvious. I just wish it were to those with the ability to decide that this is the right way to go to ensure everyone has a dignified old age and that those who care for them are themselves properly cared for. Each is important. Both are neglected at present.
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You are so right. Dealing with this for my mother now.
I too have personal experience
“When there is universal need markets are simply a mechanism for capturing the revenues of the state for private gain.”
This bears repeating. It’s the crucial distinction many on the right (including Niall Ferguson), and even in this blog, don’t get. They fail to distinguish between universal ‘needs’; health, basic education, social care, policing, prisons, retail banking, water – you name it, and personal ‘wants’ over which individuals have a genuine choice. Markets have an appetite for profiting indiscriminately from any and everything they’re allowed to get their hands on, including ‘universal needs’. Michael Sandel (What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’) is very pertinent on this distinction. He argues we no longer have just a market economy but a ‘market society’, where everything has a price put on it, e.g. places in a queue for tickets, organ donation, admission to elite universities, dying, etc. etc.. This insidious process is particularly well advanced in Anglo-Saxon economies. It’s time for the right to discover those things called ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ that used to regulate their untrammelled and often anti-social ‘freedoms’, and for Labour to ditch the ‘New’ and seize a thing called ‘the moral and ethical high-ground’ and turn ‘all in it together’ into more than a smokescreen slogan hijacked by the right to cover their ‘profit from everything, greed is good for you’ agenda.