When Michael Gove sought to shore up support for the Government’s polices on lockdown, he invoked the most sacred idol in the land by daring his party sceptics to defy the deity they must all worship. “We had to act,” he wrote at the weekend. “Because if we did not our health service would have been overwhelmed.” The bespectacled cabinet office minister, who once acted in a film as a priest, went on to deliver a chilling sermon about a broken health service filled with overflowing wards, struggling staff, cancelled operations and dying patients if his blasphemous critics did not bow down in faithful obedience to his pious demands.
Gove’s hellfire and brimstone warning was overheated guff. Yet his ploy was clear: few things strike more terror into a Tory politician than being seen as unsympathetic to doctors and nurses. Perhaps he deserves some credit for at least setting out clearly the Government’s stance, something that seems beyond his boss. Yet note how once again this Conservative administration demands complicity from citizens in its efforts to control Covid-19 on the grounds of protecting the National Health Service, just as when the pandemic’s first wave hit the country. The legacy of this obsession was the relegation of social care to secondary importance, which led to thousands of needless deaths in a sector already shattered going into this crisis.
The Government seems to have learned nothing from the carnage in care homes. Gove’s intervention followed a spending review that saw another £6bn bunged to the NHS while social care — starved of cash over the past decade despite surging demand — was swept aside. One Tory bigwig boasted on Twitter how real term spending on the NHS would have risen next year by an astonishing £56.4bn since his party took office in 2010.
He failed to mention, of course, that chancellor Rishi Sunak handed social care a pitiful £300m, plus access to a further £700m through local tax rises that will be soaked up in rising wages. This may, however, finally nudge spending on adult care over the £22.4bn high water mark seen in the year David Cameron became prime minister.
If councils cannot support old folks with dementia and other citizens with complex needs, extra pressure lands on health services, showing the hollow hypocrisy of those ceaseless chants of devotion to the NHS. That fall in social care spending occurred during a decade of rising demand in a growing and ageing population, with additional need coming especially from disabled adults who account now for almost half the spending. “It is hard to believe this level of underfunding could have been tolerated yet it was — at least in part because social care is used by far fewer people than the NHS and does not enjoy the same degree of public recognition,” said Simon Bottery, a Senior Fellow at the King’s Fund think tank.
Spot on. Yet there is no sign still of the chimeric plan to salvage social care that Boris Johnson promised he had in his pocket when he entered Downing Street last year. Part of the problem is under-funding, which leaves desperate people abandoned in their time of immense need and overburdened staff paid insulting sums. And Brexit has made the staffing shortages more acute.
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