Laying bare the care scare

Veteran activist and academic Mike Oliver says it’s time to debunk a few of the myths currently being pedalled by politicians of every stripe

Over recent weeks in the run-up to the General Election we have seen all three parties announce their plans for care in respect of elderly and disabled people. One lot have already ratted on their promise to provide free care for all; another propose a voluntary insurance policy of £8,000; the third a compulsory payment of £20,000.

It is impossible to make sense of any of this however because it is difficult to detect any serious thought or sensible policy behind all the posing of our politicians. Perhaps it’s time to remind our political masters that these issues are too important to us to be reduced to political opportunism and juvenile behaviour more appropriate to a public school debating chamber than a supposedly democratic society.

It is not as if people being forced to sell their homes to pay for care is anything new. Local authorities have been selling people’s homes against their or their relatives’ will since 1948. I know when I worked for a social services department in the late 1970s, we were “at it”. Local authorities are still selling people’s homes today too and nobody is even talking about it.

Nor are we suddenly going to be hit by a tidal wave of dependency; an elderly tsunami if you like. When I was a student 40 years ago we were taught about the ageing population that was going to pose issues for future economic and social policy and it has been talked about constantly since. The tide has been coming in slowly so why have successive governments not been planning for it?

Most dangerous of all we are constantly being told by politicians, economists, media commentators and the other self-appointed experts is that we cannot possibly afford the rising cost of care. Many of us have even come to believe it ourselves.

I don’t remember any debates about whether we could afford it when the warmongers amongst us decided to bomb Iraq into submission or when the financial apologists decided to bail out the reckless gamblers who nearly wrecked our banking system.

It is the biggest and most dangerous omission from the debate about care of all. It means we have to put up with invasions of our privacy, the possibility of legal action to take our homes and even future imprisonment in some kind of residential establishment.

But it is even more dangerous than that because it devalues our lives and points down the road to terminal neglect, accelerated death, do-not-resuscitate policies and assisted suicide. As a disabled person I used to be just scared of the future. Now I’m officially old as well, I’m bloody terrified.