Wes Streeting has made clear that no action on social care will be taken during this parliament by setting up a commission to report on the issue by 2028, when it will be too late to do anything about it. Is that because he just hasn't got the ability to think about issues this big?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Can Wes Streeting think? I'm not at all sure that the evidence stacks up to suggest that he can. Let me explain.
After 14 years in opposition and six months in government, WestStreeting, as the Health Secretary, has now announced that Labour is going to tackle the problem of social care in the UK, which was known to be a problem when Labour last left office in 2010.
Successive Tory governments looked at this issue and ran commissions. And the latest of those commissions, which was chaired by Andrew Dilnot, came out with a series of recommendations on how to tackle social care, which many people thought were reasonable, including a cap on total contributions that people would have to make to provide for their own care and old age. And Labour has rejected its findings on the basis that there is no money.
So, the one thing we know about the new commission that Wes Streeting is going to set up is that he's going to provide it with no money because he's already set that as part of its terms of reference, by implication, if not explicitly.
And, what we also know is that this commission is going to sit for three years. It's actually going to report sometime in 2028, and Labour has to have a general election by July 2029. In other words, whatever this commission recommends will not happen because there won't be time to legislate on its findings before the next general election takes place and already most of us are betting on Labour going out of office in 2029.
So, what do we have to say about Wes Streeting as a consequence?
First of all, that he's incompetent. With all that time that was available to him in opposition, he could have done the thinking that is required on social care himself. After all, what else did he have to do? Yes, he was a constituency MP, and I know that takes time, but his fundamental job was to be the opposition health secretary. And his next most important job was to prepare Labour for government, because it was fairly obvious some years ago that this was going to happen. But he didn't. He did nothing. He didn't prepare a thing. And the conclusion we have to come to as a consequence is that actually Wes Streeting can't think.
And the evidence that supports that is that he's had to appoint someone else now to do his thinking for him. And what is more, he's appointed them for three years because he thinks it's very difficult.
Let's go back in history for a moment, shall we, and just compare Wes Streeting and his inability to prepare and think to the masters of the past.
Let's think about Lord Keynes, the man who thought up the economics which underpinned the post-war consensus and the creation of prosperity for more people than had ever happened before after the Second World War. Did he do his thinking whilst chairing a commission? No. He sat down in a room at Cambridge University and did it there.
Let's think about Beveridge, who wrote the report that underpinned the social safety net - social security, state pension improvement, and so on - that again contributed to that post-war safety net. Did he require a long commission whilst Labour was in government in 1945 and after? No. He actually wrote his report pretty much single-handed during the course of the Second World War in anticipation of government.
Let's think about Clement Attlee, the man who created that post-war Labour government. Did he get into office and then say, “What are we going to do?” No, he knew what he was going to do.
And then there was Nye Bevan. The man who is credited with creating the NHS. Did he arrive without an idea of how to do that? No, he knew what his job was going to be. It took him three years to deliver, I accept that, but he had the most enormous uphill struggle in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to create the NHS, but he delivered it. in just three years, nonetheless.
And let's think about figures since then, people who could also think. People who came to mind immediately are people like Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor in the 1970s, a man with a very big brain.
And he wasn't alone. Like it or not, Margaret Thatcher had a brain and thought, I don't like what thinking she did, but undoubtedly, she was a thinker.
And she wasn't alone in that regard either, in the Tories, Michael Heseltine could certainly think about what he wanted to achieve and did so before ever getting into government in 1979, and again later on.
These were people who could not only be politicians but who could plan, who could think, and who could act. We lack people like that now.
And Wes Streeting is nothing like that at all. He can't plan. We know he didn't plan in 14 years.
He can't think. We know that because he's outsourced this commission to a person called Louise Casey to do the work for him.
And he can't act because by the time he gets her report, there won't be time to do so.
He really is the definition of the modern incompetent politician. I look back to those politicians who I recall, and there were, by the way, plenty of others who I haven't named, and think, really? Where did they come from? And where did they go? And why is it that people like that aren't attracted to politics any more?
Is it because we now live in a media age?
Is it because 24-hour news has made people so reactive that they have no time to think anymore?
Or is it simply because we've made being in Parliament so unattractive to people of ability that they don't want to go there?
I don't know, but we have to solve this. And we can only do that if we transform the basis of our politics, which does require proportional representation, which does require proper accountability of elected politicians, which does require a real relationship between people and those they elect, and which does require people to actually fight over ideas, which, of course, is the one thing that neoliberal politics has guaranteed that we don't have.
We need those changes because we can't suffer people like Wes Streeting for a lot longer.
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I’m not sure his donors (pay) him to think, truth be told. He’ll just be there to gradually shuffle bits of the NHS into the private sector because, TINA.
SO pleased that our parliament building in Edinburgh has ‘thinking pods’ in the design. I don’t care that the architect was not a Scot. He had such insight into the work of an MSP that noted a need for headspace.
https://www.lizworld.com/thinking-pods/
First Reeves and now Streeting bleating on about having no money; which of course is utter rubbish. Streeting like Reeves is utterly incompetent as neither can read a set of accounts. The Whole of Government Accounts 202/23 show that under the Tories, yes the Tories that HMGs total liabilities owing fell by £1.5 trillion. As such, the UK national debt has fallen by £1.5 trillion; and Streeting like Reeves are idiots who cannot for the life of them read a set of accounts and use the money to reform Social Care and much much more.
Streeting will not think because essentially the thinking has been done by the Labour party’s donors, as Mariner suggests.
The current social care arrangements have shoved the cost of life longevity onto those with such longevity – they/we will be surcharged for existing so long, literally for living, for daring to live that long at all as society does not want to pay the cost apparently. We are going to be punished for daring to believe in better (an NHS) and for not letting nature take its course (helped along by our food industry).
But then again, we know that Neo-liberalism shrugs off the costs of anything decent doesn’t it, it does not want to pay ‘collectively’ for anything? This is why it also hates public transport. Doing anything ‘together’ is an ideological anathema to these bastard sons and daughters of Thatcherism.
We are now truly in an extractive, exploitative age . The result – I wager – will be a ‘life tax’ – yes, a tax on later life, facilitated by the private sector using debt. That is how we should portray it. A life tax. How long before they charge us for the air we breath?
And thus, Tim Snyder’s age of ‘No Ideas’ raises its ugly head again, as does the sceptre of Thomas Hobbes (our lives are to be nasty, brutal and short it seems) as we march towards what was always the intention anyway – a market utopia ran like a fascist state extracting life for those ‘more deserving’ (the rich – of course) who bowed there heads in its service to its orthodoxy.
No thanks.
Labour’s great crusade could have been to use its war powers – essentially the printing of money and investment – to fund a fight back against all this. It is how the NHS and social security was created anyway as far as I can see. Instead, they wish to throw their lot in with the opposition. They have no excuse and that is why I will not vote for them.
And, on Radio 4 last, the ‘great ‘Evan Davis’ seemed to think it was amusingly obvious that the tax payer needed to pay for their own later life – more crafty seeding of bad ideas from the BBC wanting to earn its keep. Bravo!
Politics is now pure theatre. It’s old role of balancing conflicting ideas in society has gone – perhaps forever – as John Warren and even Tim Snyder has suggested (2018). Orwell’s 1984 is with us now, except rather than being a left wing version of hell, we are going to live with a right wing version of it. Who would have thought that, eh?
I do not think I am overstating matters either.
the classic misprint of ‘nasty, brutish and short’ was ‘nasty, British and short.’
It might not be a misprint as things go on.
🙂
Like Rachel Reeves Wes Streeting is a “groomie” he’s been taught what to think by the rich (“There is no money!” for example) and this suits him just fine because he knows this will earn him rewards from the rich just like his boss Keir Starmer! So what Labour Party? It’s just another “Groomie Party” and such parties are like the rich pathological.
A more charitable interpretation is that the problem of social care cannot be solved within the neoliberal “there is no money” context and so Wes Streeting, regardless of how smart he may or may not be, can only kick the can down the road, as other health secretaries, of both flavours, have done before him. Ultimately, the problem is that Labour as a whole remains wedded to neoliberalism.
And neoliberalism will remain until human beings achieve a better balanced control over capital. The use of capital afterall isn’t just about the manipulation of the planet’s resources it’s about controlling the messaging system we use to manipulate them which we call money.
The point is as Richard makes trenchantly clear elsewhere, Social Care has to be paid for – it cannot be free to the country unless you want to run the system like the Southern U.S. states before the Civil War and employ slave labour.
In many ways this ‘slave labour’ is already happening as families take on more of the load in terms of time and finance and it is mostly and unfairly falling on the shoulders so of women.
But it is not simple.
What happens to the social contract between state and citizen? The state wants to use my economic output; wants me to police its society, play by its rules, fight for it if it threatened, put out its fires, take part in its ‘democracy’, support national events and celebrate them? These trade offs, this ‘mutuality’ has existed in societies between the led and the leadership since society existed and were/should/have been the basis of political order. The consequences of this loss of social contract are really serious and can be seen in society now.
If the state looks after me, I’m prepared to do my bit to look after the state = mutually assured survival. Read Michael Hudson, David Graeber and others.
That political order based mutuality however has been upset, disrupted.
One way to disrupt that is the creation of ‘royal subjects’ through sovereigns – Kings, Queens, a hierarchy – a God on earth to whom we all look up to and obey unquestioningly and pay fealty to, upheld locally though the feudal system of local landowners called Dukes and Earls all kissing the ring in allegiance to the King/Queen . But that system was increasingly ‘democratised’ through representative bodies such as parliaments who adopted and collectivised the hyper-individualised sovereignty of monarchs. However,even these monarchs would make provision for the poor to a small extent.
What is happening today is a fight back by capital against democracy – exactly the sort of fight back we have seen in the United States which was set up – apparently – to leave the old corrupt Europe behind who whom did not want monarchies.
However, the U.S. whether it likes to accept it or not has got monarchical leanings anyway through the avaricious millionaires and billionaires created through the more open, egalitarian and meritorious society it has created. The irony cannot be lost here. These millionaires and billionaires do not like to share. The American way has failed completely but still continues to export itself around the world.
Wealth’s funding of our democracy is the new feudalism in our society that breaks down, destroys the citizen’s oldest relationship with the state and reduces that relationship to a mere handful of very wealthy people – it becomes exclusive to them and thus, our governments are less concerned with helping the many, focusing on the needs of the rich few.
Solving the problems of society by government is now just through opening up markets for their funders.
Those problems, those new markets, that exploitation is us. You and me. The rich are going to consume us. That is the new (un)social contract we have blindly entered into. Social Care cannot be allowed exist because it is a collectivised way of paying for something and that is wrong. The Neo-liberal hatred of anything so joined up means that life is going to be more atomised, individualised, disaggregated. They would call this ‘freedom’.
So, their view of the world is that it was our fault that we were born. Nothing to do with them, the state or anyone else. And we are going to pay.
They will shrug us off, like Ayn Rand suggested they should.
The UK is one of the richest countries in the world, on both an absolute and a per capita basis. How can there be “no money” to sort out adult social care? Allocate the funds and tax them back. Simple.
Even the Conservatives could see the need to deal with this. Why have Labour torpedoes their plans? Is it just “not invented here” syndrome?
It is not even a large problem. Total UK public spending is over £1,000 billion per year. The NHS costs approaching £200 billion per year. The Dilnot report measures might cost £10 billion per year. I expect the capacity unlocked within the NHS by sorting out adult social care would be a substantially greater than would be secured by increasing the NHS budget by 5%, and 1% of total public spending is almost a rounding error.
What we have is an absence of political will in the current government to resolve the issue.
Agreed. Entirely.
It’s astonishing that WFA allowance has been taken away from pensioners who possibly are Terminal ill
That will reduce the Numbers the assisted Dying Bill will Reduce Numbers also they are foaming at the mouth at that one
we are in the Middle of Flu epidemic
I am.sure DWP and government have crunched the numbers
and this non thinking Health Secretary (Wes Streeting) has advised broke pensioners to ‘layer up and put the heating on’.
That made me really angry….
This neglectful behaviour of Wes Streeting reminds me of similar behaviour over the pond:-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14157577/unitedhealthcare-united-healthcare-rejecting-claims-ceo-brian-thompson-shot-protests.html
Richard mentions politicians from earlier eras who were able to think and commentators on here point out that the context does seem different.
Certainly Starmer/McSweeney’s Labour politicans are paid not to think, and Labour have explicitly courted dark money from the City and fossil fuel , off shore and private health care sources, while getting rid of thousands of members and their subscriptions.
The Starmer faction mounted a ruthlessly effective campaign to capture the party and then to go on to win election. But they seemed to sow the seeds of their own distruction by boxing themselves into Tory fiscal rules, and pledges on tax.
Presumably Reeves and other politicians do know there are other ways of looking at the economy other than the ‘small state/privatise/monopolise’ perspective but their donors pay them to keep their minds closed. Who knows?
We do tend to look at the past over-fondly – but politics really does seem to have changed for the worse. Could Hennessy get away with his ‘good chaps’ characterisation of UK politics now?
The neolib dismantling of public services/ privatisation project seems to be running out of road very quickly – and with Reeves forthcoming spending review the internal contradictions could come to a head.
You would have thought that even Streeting – and the rest of the Starmer coterie might be forced to think – merely to preserve themselves long enough to reach the next election.
Can Wes Streeting think? NO! However, the problem is not intellectual it is political.
He is right to observe that various options over the years have been proposed by government – any one of which, while not perfect, would have been a decent starting point (Dilnot being the obvious one). However, they were all either shelved by government or torpedoed by the Opposition for electoral reasons.
Cross party consensus is what is needed – or at least that it becomes clear that the non-consenting Parties are being unreasonable – but that does not a new report. Just lock the interested parties in a room and don’t let them out until there is an agreement.
How the hell do you get cross-party consensus in regard to spending on public services when clearly the Tories have spent 14 years imposing cuts on public services that don’t deliver benefits to the rich? I note on the Laura Kuenssberg show today Wes Streeting flogging this line knowing full well this is a great excuse for not taking action on social care which involves spending increased amounts of money not least to make up the cuts the last government made on this public service! Of course Kuenssberg being a Tory didn’t point this contradiction out to Streeting! What a country that allows this sort of one-sided debate grooming!
Wes Streeting is awful. On the plus side, he has appointed Louise Casey, who DOES have a brain and is a very good thinker. I met her once (when I worked in the social housing sector) and was impressed. She will do a good job, and they will ignore her, just as they have ignored everything else she has come up with over the years. She came up with a plan for social housing which would have delivered thousands of affordable homes, but the opposition screeched that it would adversely affect the Green Belt (decreasing it by a massive 1%), so nobody did anything.
I wish I could share your view of Casey.
Surely it’s a measure of how successive governments, beginning with Thatcher (dim enough to assert that the government has no money of its own) have handed wealth creation to big business and finance on the frighteningly flawed assumption that only they will make the whole country rich. In doing so they have created monsters that are now too powerful to control and the ‘Labour’ party has become the first fully formed Single Transferable Party, totally controlled by these monster puppet masters, with Chief puppet Starmer obliged to appoint willing puppet ministers.
I’ve just had a gloomy thought. Streeting and the others don’t think because they imagine that history will just repeat itself. Just as Blair got elected after dreary years of Tory malevolence and corruption, and was then re-elected twice more despite increasingly unimpressive policies , so the current LINO leaders plan for another two election victories, no matter what!
Surely they are better able to assess the situation than that!
I suspect they do think they gave that long. One term governments are virtually unknown in the UK now, so they presume they are in for a decade. They are wrong.
The crazy thing is that even the most rudimentary reforms to social care would save money very quickly in the NHS. At the moment, the lack of good social care means patients are coming in sicker and then can’t be discharged home. Surely he could take a few small steps incrementally to improve things? Our NHS can’t wait 3 years and it will cost us more not less to carry on ignoring the issues. Also Scotland has a better model, so could we not at least copy what they are doing in the short term?
As an ex nurse, I would start by reopening all the cottage hospitals which were great for rehab and getting patients off acute wards. These are much cheaper to run, and for rural areas more local to where people live and enable relatives to visit. Then I would take over several care homes so that so called bed blockers could be transferred out as soon as they are clinically ready. This would be cheaper and much nicer for the patient. Then I would look at once again running home care direct by local authorities. This would be cheaper to run and give better employment conditions for the workers. There is such a deficit in need that this could be done without touching all the private providers. This could all be done without any change to the charges to individuals. How we pay for it is a much bigger issue, but at present it’s the lack of cohesive good quality care that is the biggest issue. And as someone getting older with no children to care for me, the lack of good care is a much bigger concern than having to sell my house tipsy for care.
I utterly despair of Wes Streeting. It’s been clear he has no clue about the NHS or social care from appointment. Surely out of all their MPs they could find someone with some understanding of the needs?
I’m confused.
A few days ago Wes Streeting or was it Starmer? told us he was going to ring fence “elective operation” budgets.
Today I read that his incentive payments to GPs for diverting patients from outpatient departments to community care, are coming out of… the elective care budget. ???
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/05/cash-incentives-for-gps-under-labours-radical-plan-to-cut-nhs-waiting-lists
(of course he can’t use NEW money, because apparently we “can’t afford it” – but he can spend “old” money twice???)
This idea is bizarre
And a total recipe fir abuse if a GP was unprincipled
A pure fisaco
Here’s the link to the Labour plan for “major expansion of RINGFENCED ELECTIVE CAPACITY” – my emphasis.
(See para 4) – sorry I couldn’t find it earlier.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/03/keir-starmer-to-unveil-radical-nhs-changes-to-cut-waiting-times
But not SO ringfenced that
“the £80m cost of paying GPs” their £20 incentives, can’t be “TAKEN FROM EXISTING HOSPITAL ELECTIVE CARE BUDGETS”.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/05/cash-incentives-for-gps-under-labours-radical-plan-to-cut-nhs-waiting-lists
When is a ringfence not a ringfence?
When it’s erected by rogue traders, Starmer &Streeting.
I suggest the reason is fear of the press. Several ministers and prime ministers have come adrift with the reforms needed. Prisons are in a state and need huge investment or a rethink on sentencing like the Dutch have done. We cannot do this because of the need to be ‘tough on crime’.
Any system of social care will need funding and that means tax or some kind of insurance system. We pay a premium through our lives. Some will need it, some won’t of course. The media will fall on this as they have done before with ‘death tax’ or similar. Streeting and Starmer are terrified of this so kicking it into the long grass is all they can do.
Not putting up taxes is a fetish. Note how in the election there were endless questions ‘are you going to put up taxes?’ No one can get elected by answering ‘yes’.