As Politico notes this morning:
Health Secretary Wes Streeting is kicking off the government's first round of morning TV and radio interviews for almost a fortnight as the festive lull ends with a jolt. He wants to talk about one of Britain's most un-festive subjects — the social care crisis. Streeting's promise to drum up a long-term plan splashes a couple of the papers, and will be a very big moment when it lands in *checks notes* 2028. Just hopefully not like the big moment before it, or the one before that, or the one before that.
The cynicism is appropriate.
Labour had fourteen years in opposition to work out what to do about social care. Now, it is going to take four years in government to do so. Nothing will happen before the next election, which, on current form, it will lose.
Meanwhile, the NHS crisis will continue, aided and abetted by the simultaneous crisis created by ultra-processed food, which is creating much of the demand for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, metabolic disease and dementia care, all of which feed into the demand for social care, which fact will, I am sure, be beyond the scope of the Commission being set up to address this issue.
Labour really does not know how to govern.
Nor is it clear it knows how to do politics.
Come to that, decision-making above and beyond expelling anyone who is not archly neoliberal appears to be beyond it.
How did we reach the point where this lot were able to win a landslide? And don't say it was because the Tories were worse, although that might have been true. It's the total intellectual vacuum amongst all these politicians to which I am referring.
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Richard,
If Boxall & Co looks like going belly up and I call you in to sort it out then I might reasonably expect that you wont know anything about it until you arrive.
On the other hand if Labour have been in opposition for the last however many years they have had plenty of time to see whats happening in the Country, access to the Civil Service etc etc then they should know what the issues are and the potential, even if only short term fixes might be.
At the expense of a slightly unfair cliche – in my experience anyway, we might have been better off appointing the proverbial taxi driver as PM who at least has ideas about what needed to be fixed and what to do about it.
🙂
Vacuum? That is because politicians are no longer politicians; they are Public Relations operatives. They are there to keep the public quiet, so they are more easily ripped-off by neoliberalism. That means very quiet, because neoliberalism is running out of road, having robbed the public for so long, and of so much.
This is a bad joke from the government, really, for several reasons.
First, the ConDem govt of 2010-15 already produced a commission on social care (the Dilnot Commission). A version of the Dilnot recommendations (basically a lifetime cap on social care costs) were scheduled to be implemented in 2026 but the Labour Govt scrapped it as “too expensive”. If the govt thought the previous proposals were too expensive, how on earth is the new commission going to produce something that is workable within the govt’s daft “fiscal rules”?
Secondly, the commission leader Louise Casey is a notorious loudmouth who has never (IMO) made a useful contribution to policy debate. Her main ability seems to be to offend anyone within earshot.
Third, we already know what needs to be done to fix social care: integrate it fully into the NHS, and make it free to care recipients. Expensive? Yes, but we have plenty of options for funding the additional expenditure (for example the reforms Richard recommends in the “Taxing Wealth” report.
This Commission is going to produce a set of recommendations which will be handily ignored by whichever govt wins in 2029 (probably a far-right coalition, based on current polling).
Deeply sad stuff from a government which is already in a hole and now looks to be digging deeper!
Much to agree with, Howard
“How did we reach the point where this lot were able to win a landslide?” Long term grooming of a large part of the population.
Got a flavour of it last night. Small party @ friends house. Let’s call him Adam – lawyer – Brit known him for some years (10 – 15?) Bx based, speaks a couple of languages. Kicked off with macron and moved rapidly to neo-liberalism. “Countires have got to balance their books” – no Adam countries are not run like companies, “where does money come from Adam?” – “Yes but printing will cause inflation” – not if the country has the capacity to absorb the money – “yes by Liz Truss tried that” – & yes Weimar came up… FFS.
A bright but somewhat incurious person had been groomed (probably too much reading of the Economist and the FT) . I would have got more sense from talking to a squirrel. The distrubing thing? He did not want to consider a different narrative. Ditto the current circus in gov.
‘Intellectual vacuum’?
Hmmmm………………………
How about moral vacuum?
What me might be seeing is a non-aggression pact with the Establishment by Labour to be granted the right to rule. Labour has perhaps said that it will not spoil any of the nice little income streams that capital have been able to set up over the years – turbo charged by the Tories since 2010.
This attitude is exemplified by people like Darren Jones, the current Labour Secretary to the Treasury who told his R4 audience that good politics was about ‘accepting the world as you find it’. How you can boast of and affect change to win votes and ‘accept the world as you find it’ at the same time is beyond me but rather telling. Such wisdom! My view is that it is utter garbage.
Labour’s moral vacuum is because of the crisis in liberalism itself. My view is that liberalism used the Left as an anchor initially to balance the individual with the state and larger society. This is what gave us the NHS and other wars on poverty and bad education and worklessness in the immediate post war period.
Labour’s repudiation of the Left – whether you think it justified or not – means that that anchor has been cast off.
The only point of reference now is the extreme form of hyper-individualised liberalism which is of course just a popularised version of the world seen through through the eyes of the rich and their money-power which they have sold to us at scale.
This is then presented to us as ‘grown up politics’ which even people like James O’Brien in his book ‘How They Broke Britain’ (2023 although riding on the coat tails of Sam Bright, Aeron Davis and Peter Obourne) tells us is the real deal and not ‘student politics’.
O’Brien who is brave and whom I have a lot of time for, chose to name Jeremy Corbyn as one of those who ‘broke Britain’ without really pointing his liberal finger at the Labour Party itself who went to war on Corbyn rather than the Tories in power (also choosing not to look at the voting records of the Labour wing of the Single Transferable Party and ignore comments attributed by Peter Mandelson about how hard he had worked against Corbyn).
The crisis – as pointed out by John Gray – is in Liberalism, not necessarily just the Left. Labour’s liberalism suffers this crisis too, which is why this Labour government will not help us and why liberalism is dead in the water for the majority of us until it remakes its alliance with the Left.
Some hope…………………..
Richard asks how did we reach the point where this lot were able to win a landslide?
Answer – poor education.
State schools do almost nothing to ensure that by the age of 16 every pupil knows much more about the economy and the political system than they actually do. As a result, they continued to be influenced by their ill-educated parents, mix with the peer group they find themselves in and are taught by teachers struggling in a failing system.
https://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/media-centre/house-of-lords-media-notices/2023/december-2023/education-system-for-11-to-16-year-olds-is-failing-pupils-says-lords-committee/
So how can we expect the man on Richard’s Clapham omnibus get to grips with the reality of how badly we are being governed and, more importantly, why it is like that, especially when the MSM and the rest of the social media have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Without a better education, it’s inevitable that most people can’t see how deficient the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system is and it’s no wonder that proportional representation (PR) has so little traction.
It’s also no wonder that voters can’t see how poor their prospective MPs are and how little they will probably do for them. After four or five years of disillusionment of course they use FPTP to just vote the other lot back in.
The Beveridge Report was published in 1942 (all 299 pages) and it was a blueprint for significant social change. The left-wing newspapers made sure that voters knew what was on offer by writing articles and printing pamphlets. In July 1945 the voters were ready for a significant change which could be delivered by a willing and competent group of MP’s of significant stature.
Voters received their information through newspapers, radio documentary films and through discussions in the workplace. There was a thirst for change and an end to the system which had created the social conditions he had experienced between the wars. And there was no TV and no social media
However, there was a lot of resistance to the socialist experiment which Labour put in place from the old right-wing order and it was they who worked hard to seek ways to demolish what was achieved.
And of course the public school system was not abolished and remained the bastion of an excellent education for the professional and managerial class (PMC) in order to maintain their position as the enablers of the power structure which we now call neo-liberalism.
And in case you ask how we affect change, we just have to keep talking about better ways of doing things, challenging anyone who can’t see that there must be something better than what we have now and if we are young enough – be ready to take to the streets.
Could it be that the problem is that nobody with an ounce of sense would go into politics? A job which is not particularly well paid by modern standards (we can argue later about why an MPs salary is not considered good), from which you can be unceremoniously fired at the whim of the electorate, leaving you potentially with no income? A job that has the most ridiculous interview process involving huge expenditure of money, time and energy with in many constituencies only a chance of success? No wonder the system selects only the most arrogant and power-hungry people to govern us!
Compare and contrast Jonathan Gullis and Jeremy Corbyn.
A Commission reporting in 2028 is an excuse to do nothing that will produce significant material effects now. It is part of the policy of planned decay that we have been operating for the last fifteen years. Austerity has produced an ideology of planned failure.
If you want an insight into how the 2028 Report will end; it will probably be late, and when it does report it will be promised to be implemented; but we can’t afford it now. Then it will be implemented late, but only in part. and then, like the blood scandal or the Post Office postmasters compensation, it will not be implemented as promised, and the money will not be spent. Then like the WTF, it will be withdrawn. Then, like the WASPI women, it will finally be said that the promise should never have been given in the first place.
There will then be an election, and an outraged electorate will sack the Government. The Single Transferable Party will then be put in power; and we will go through the same process again. Rinse and repeat.
This is Britain. This is how it works. Forever.
For friends who follow the US Robert Reich is starting to do what Richard does with his videos.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1121677599402349
But yet Streeting has had a report eighteen months ago from the Fabian Society on the issues faced. Why are we waiting four more years for much of the same ?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/08/labour-unveils-plan-to-fix-social-care-better-pay-and-free-short-term-support
There has been a report a year fir the last twenty five years on this issue, but apparently Labour needs another ine.
Very apt Richard.
In his interview on R4 Today – Streeting sort of said that ‘we were going to do xyz .. but found there was no money ‘ so quickly you could hardly catch it and of course no curiosity from interviewer as to what they had intended to doabout social care , or what it would have cost or whether there really was no money.
But politicaly they really seem to be running out of road – whatever they do or say seems to make their credibiility popularity nose dive even further.
Even Sweeting seems to be less bullish than he was six months ago.
The contradiction between what their ‘donors’ have paid them to do – and what their economic model can no longer deliver has come far quicker than expected.
And it will get worse by the month – especially with Reeves spending ‘review’, but it seems impossible that this parliamentary Labour party will rethink and/or revolt and fill the vaccum Richard points out.
Westminister clearly now the “grooming” headquarters for imposing the will of the rich! Mainstream media of course not interested in investigating in any detail the economic and monetary methods being used to impose this will!
I’ve known quite a few politicians in passing over five decades, some of them fiercely intelligent, a few of them truly moral beings, the majority were and are power-mad shits with the moral compass of a starving tiger. Among my better encounters were pints with Dennis Skinner, who would’ve rather been Elvis; a pleasant train chat with Tony Benn; a community worker cum politician then green, Alan Simpson (who RM knows I think). Such people are very scarce in politics.
Alan and I have been in touch in. the last hour
Tony Benn was great – we met for a whiole towards the end of his life
Others include the late Michael Meacher with whom I got on although he was not a great thinker, and Caroline Lucas of course.
And at one time John McDonnell and I got on well
Meanwhile elderly patients with Dementia in hospital due to flu are being discharged before finishing antibiotics to go home into the care of their elderly partner having been told they do not need a care package.
This will continue at pace throughout the winter without a doubt.
But hey , who cares , they’re elderly, they’ve had their life…….
You are right
I went looking for Corbyn’s 2017 policy, because I remember it as the incorporation of social care into a National Care Service, equivalent to the NHS. I found references to it: it promised spending to deal with “the immediate crisis” and then restructuring, spending £8 billion over the life of the parliament with emphasis on ending the 15 minute care visits, and paying staff travel time between appointments.
Perhaps if I’d looked for longer I’d have found the actual manifesto. There was a link to the Labour party website but that page seems to have been taken down.
As to why there was a landslide, this is presumably a rhetorical question. How could we? But as Professor Murphy has written previously, there was actually slight decrease in the Labour vote with FPTP doing the rest. Labour will not change FPTP so the cycle continues.
https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2017/localpdf/Labour.pdf
And PS, I prefer Richard to Prof Murphy. The title has its uses, but I rarely use it, especially in any exchange.
Archive.org is your friend
https://archive.org/details/labour-manifesto-2017
and
https://archive.org/details/labourmanifesto2019
Both downloadable
Also, the lack of money, black hole, can’t afford it – it doesn’t seem to apply to arms spending. I don’t see politicians being questioned about this. Add the passivity and group-think of journalists to the list of problems.
House of Commons library, in the 2023/24 financial year, the UK spent £53.9 billion on defence.
Apparently this is 2.2% of GDP. Labour promises to increase it to 2.5%. So no cuts there.
It shames me to say it, but Wes (kick the social care can down the road) Streeting is a prominent
member of Christians on the Left (formerly Christian Socialists), of which I am a v passive member (you don’t hav to be in Labour).
Maybe I need to get a bit more active, although I suspect I know how that will turn out.
I cannot remember a time when an incoming (elected) government hit the wall so early after the election, due to intellectual, political and moral bankruptcy.
There IS a huge black hole, but it isn’t in the economy.
There are in fact 2 huge black holes, one where their hearts used to be, and the other, between their ears.
Yet all this was evident long before the 2024 election – its been unfolding for several years – almost a decade, if it’s Labour we’re looking at.
Well said, Richard.
However, it is rather late to get angry at Wes Streeting and his colleagues or even the current generation of politicians… The problem is far, far deeper and more serious than the current Health and Social Care Secretary.
There has been an intellectual vacuum at the heart of UK Politics for the best part of 30 years!! Even the great reforming original New Labour project was more of the same centrist, soft conservatism in more pleasant tones. They were the champions of neoliberalism and provided very little resistance to the ‘Thatcherites’. Presumably you have read Simon Jenkins’ brilliant ‘Thatcher and Sons’ as well as Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain update – ‘Who Runs This Place?’.
Most of the Blairites were not great intellectuals who care deeply about morality and philosophy. They, as Lord Mandelson famously said were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.
The Tories dropped any sense of an intellectual spine in the late 1970’s with Keith Joseph and the dour Geoffrey Howe. Many hated those Tories but at least they read books and genuinely believed in what they were doing.
General Educational standards have been deliberately dumbed down for over fifty years in order to make the population more compliant and subservient. Grade inflation was officially made de rigueur in 1988 after the introduction of GCSEs and we have all suffered as a result of this. In defence of the UK, this destruction of Educational standards is a process that is not unique to Britain, but has been shown to be true across virtually all advanced OECD nations.
We need a serious revolution in the way that people think in general. There needs to be a rapid turnaround in the amount of reading that children and adults do. Teachers need to be focusing on comprehension, understanding, writing and face-to-face communication. The rise of the smartphone since 2012 has literally made the entire human race dumber and more subservient. Educational attainment has collapsed in front of our eyes despite the more widespread dissemination of ideas and information. We are all super saturated with “News”, celebrity gossip, controversies, entertainment, conflicts and anger online. Even reasonably well-educated adults are not immune to it and can barely remember what happened five or six months previously. Many adults cannot determine reality from fantasy. The culmination of this madness is that a senior MP has broadcast live, in all seriousness, that Italy shares a land border with Turkey which she visited!
Children are extremely vulnerable to misinformation, celebrity tittle-tattle, peer pressure, and very poor explanations of how the World actually works. This has had a detrimental effect on their cognitive and emotional development. Subsequently rates of mental ill health have genuinely rocketed, more than can be suggested by social acceptability, increased reporting and better recognition.
The more recent interest in teaching ‘oracy’ [https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/blogs/what-is-oracy-and-why-does-it-matter/] is a first step but it is only a minor sticking plaster.