I did not vote for the political party currently in power in the UK — the Conservative party. I have four strong objections to their modus operandi, which are these:
- They are inherently dishonest — lying and deceit are routine in this party. I know there's a tendency for this always to be true in the corridors of power, but this government has taken this grave social problem to a whole new level.
- They are corrupt to a degree that hobbles the society they are meant to govern. In the course of pandemic expenditure, about thirty seven billion pounds went on deals not fit for purpose and massive payments into the back pockets of political friends and donors. The responsibility for balancing the books in respect of this expenditure has fallen not on those who so mishandled the finance, but on ordinary people — including the poorest, whose income has recently been substantially cut.
- They are committed to pursuing armed conflict as a business opportunity. Armed conflict is one of the two great drivers of the growing worldwide refugee problem (the other being climate change). Not only is war of itself a severe social scourge, but the UK government has a monstrously cruel attitude to those seeking asylum — while continuing to fund and escalate a primary root cause of refugees' destitution and flight from their homeland.
- Above all, I have a profound object to the UK government's frivolous response to climate change. It is woefully inadequate. This is not just one problem among many we have to consider, it is a problem so frightening, vast and humanly universal that we must tackle it with all the strength we have. The survival of life on Earth and all human wellbeing depends upon it. Climate change should be front and centre of our political effort. In the UK, it is not.
Those, then, are my objections, and until I see some change on those fronts I will never vote for that political party.
In the UK, the current govt is rightwing, and the political Left is in opposition.
In the last week, our govt has brought into law new regulations about health and social care, which have provoked a howl of outrage from the political Left. In this particular matter, however, my sympathies are not with the foundations of objection, and I wanted to use this space to explain why. My apologies to overseas readers, to whom this may be tediously parochial — I just needed to write more than would go on a Facebook post.
Under the new regulations, the first £86k of care costs must be funded by the recipient. After that, govt steps in with care provision.
The objection from the Left is that the rich are the ones who benefit from this because £86k may scarcely dent their resources, while it may completely clean out the poor.
In particular, the issue of UK house prices has featured in this discussion.
The point has been made that in some parts of the UK (perhaps the NE) a small terraced house (US 'row house') might be worth, say, £90k, where in the SE the same kind of house would sell for £300k. Therefore, the argument goes, those in the NE are unfairly affected by the new regs, because if an elderly person has to sell their home to fund care costs (presumably moving into a nursing home) the £86k will leave them only a paltry £14k left over to leave their children, while those in the SE facing the same situation would have £124k left to pass on.
£86k would buy one person about 18 months in a residential care home, which is where you'd have to be if you had sold your home to pay for care and had nowhere else to go.
But I am puzzled by the logic of the Left in this instance, and I wanted to explain why.
Let us leave aside for the moment the rich, who have large funds at their disposal — obviously they will benefit disproportionately from this, because the rich benefit disproportionately from everything; that's what being rich is all about. The only alternative is Communism, but that is an unattractive option which brings its own (mainly bureaucratic) inequalities. I personally have no objection to people being rich — wealth can be used for good as well as ill, and can fund imaginative and innovative projects that would otherwise never see the light of day — I just have a concern that those who are poor and struggling should be rescued and assisted from the public purse.
What bothers me about the response of the Left to the new health and care regs is that they are lumping together with the fabulously rich everyone who is not grindingly poor and — in particular — everyone who lives in the SE where property prices are higher.
To make my point, I'd like to imagine two identical families living in different parts of the UK — one in the NE, the other in the SE on the outskirts of London.
Each family is made up of a husband who is a teacher in the state sector, a wife who has been the main carer for their children and also works as a care assistant to make the family income go further, and two children. Miraculously, these people have escaped divorce and are with the partner they started with.
The family in the NE has to find, say, £90k to buy their home. For this, they have to put down a deposit of 10%, so they have to save £9k before they can start. This takes a while and they may need help from their family, but they manage it. The mortgage they need to take out will therefore be for £81k, and perhaps their repayments will be about £400 a month (I'm not sure of amounts but exactitude doesn't matter too much for the point I want to make).
Some costs in life are region-specific, others are national. Care assistants are paid minimum wage wherever you live, and only those teachers who work in central London get extra for regional costs — otherwise the wages are equal across the country (as far as I'm aware; correct me if I'm wrong).
So the income of these two families is identical, but the costs are not.
The couple living in the SE, on the same income, has to find £30k deposit for their family home of the same size, and has payments for a £260k mortgage to find, which may be about £900k a month. They live where they do because that is where they grew up — where their friends and family and sense of belonging and their roots are. I cannot for the life of me see why the political Left thinks these people are better off than the ones in the NE with the same wages but much less to find to fund there homes.
Not only that, but one of the costs that tends to be regional rather than national is building maintenance and repair work — it costs a lot more in the SE. So the couple living in the SE, on the same income as the couple in the NE, is only just scraping by, where the couple in the NE can live relatively comfortably — in the same kind of house on the same kind of income. This means the couple in the NE has better opportunity to save for their old age than the couple in the SE. Even if they save £86k each to cover the costs of care up to the govt cap, they still won't have any greater outlay than the couple in the SE if that couple (in the SE) can save nothing.
Let's say each couple inherits £100k on the decease of their parents. If the couple in the SE use it all to clear their mortgage they still have a substantial monthly amount to find for the residue owed. The couple in the NE, by contrast, can clear their mortgage and put some by in savings towards the care costs of their old age.
They pay off their mortgages and they grow old.
If neither couple has put any in savings, and both couples need to sell their homes to pay for care costs, it is true that the couple in the SE will have more to leave their children — but look, what sacrifices they had to make along the way to get that nest egg together! The couple in the NE have less to leave, it is true, but still the value of the house is enough to cover the cost of care and leave a little over — enough over to fund a substantial contribution towards a deposit for a home in that area, for their children.
I simply cannot see why people are saying it is the couple in the NE who is suffering from this arrangement. Both couples will have to sell their family home to fund the care, but the children of the couple in the NE have less to find to set themselves up with their own home, and the couple in the NE have had much greater opportunity to save for their old age than the couple in the SE. And both couples have the shelter of govt provision to fund their care after the first few months in a nursing home.
Further, if the issue is (as the political Left is saying) about leaving one's home as an inheritance to one's children, then do not those children also bear some responsibility, and have some opportunity, in this scenario?
The (now adult) children in the NE have had the same disproportionately advantageous opportunity to buy a cheap house, so are less likely to need help from their elderly parents' property investment.
And couldn't the adult children help with the care of their parents, and so reduce costs, and maximise the amount of inheritance left over?
Where the cost of living in a nursing home is about a thousand pounds per person per week, a carer will usually charge about £10 an hour. So for £140 a week, a carer could come in for an hour morning and evening to help with dressing and washing and putting a meal ready in the microwave, while the adult children could look after house and garden maintenance, getting in groceries, and clinic visits. As this will result in a hefty inheritance, that seems reasonable to me.
Since the adult children's own children will now have grown up and gone into the world, there is also the option of taking the elderly parent into their own home, thus further reducing the cost of care and making 100% of the sale of the old people's home available to the family.
I do know there are all sorts of reasons — divorce and step-families being a primary one — why people don't want to follow this course of action; but surely that's on them, not on the government?
It comes back to the same old thing — sharing our resources makes them go further; helping each other enriches us. Yes, we rely on government to create a compassionate society in which people can flourish, but we also have considerable personal opportunity to make our lives work — and that inevitably involves sacrifice, difficult choices, and spending time with people we may not like.
I personally don't regard that as government responsibility. that's the bit I have to do for myself. I want government to get on with carrying out its duties with transparent honesty, working to establish world peace, and creating strategies to tackle climate change.
