WITH home care for the elderly in a huge crisis as private companies go broke and councils declare that they cannot afford to meet the bill for elderly care, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Community Health and Care, David Mowat, has come up with the Tory solution – drive care for the elderly back 100 years or so.
He says that adults have just as much a duty to look after their elderly parents as they do to look after their children. Mowat continues that society must play a greater role in caring for older people. ‘We need to start thinking as a society about how we deal with care of our own parents,’ he told the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee.
He made his suggestion at the same time as the teaching trade unions are reporting that family living standards have fallen so low that teachers now have to bring food to school to feed hungry children, as well as bringing clothing and shoes to kit out pupils in need.
Teachers add that more and more families now depend on food banks, and that children are coming to school so hungry that they cannot concentrate on their lessons and their education is suffering badly. Mowat is blind to all of this.
He told the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee: ‘One of the things that has struck me as I’ve been doing this role, is that nobody ever questions the fact that we look after our children – that’s just obvious. Nobody ever says it is a caring responsibility – it’s just what you do.
‘I think some of that logic and some of the way we think about that, in terms of the sort of volume of numbers that we are seeing coming down the track, will have to impinge on the way we start thinking about how we look after our parents.’
Mowat is attempting to drive back society many decades, where the elderly poor die out of sight, while the rich pay for their care and their comforts. His solution to the Tory-created crisis in elderly care comes as local authorities say that they are fighting a losing battle to care for the elderly, after huge cuts in the finances available.
Many councils are planning to raise council tax, and Surrey County Council is holding a referendum proposing that bills rise by 15% to plug the funding gap. This is the path back to rich areas being able to care for the elderly, while the elderly poor die well away from the public gaze, in attics.
Meanwhile, the NHS has issued many calls for a big increase in funding for adult social care after ‘bed blocking’ in hospitals by the elderly who have nowhere to go, rose by more than 40% in a year.
As well, the MPs’ House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has pointed out that asylum seekers arriving in the UK are being dealt with in the same way by the British government, and are being housed in filthy, rat-infested accommodation. In evidence heard by the committee, one woman complained that her kitchen was ‘full of mice’, saying ‘they even ran across the dining table while we were eating’.
Since 2012 accommodation for asylum seekers has been privatised in six regions and is delivered by three providers – Serco, G4S and Clearsprings Ready Homes. Labour MP Yvette Cooper, the committee’s chair, said: ‘We have come across too many examples of vulnerable people in unsafe accommodation, for example children living with infestations of mice, rats or bedbugs, lack of healthcare for pregnant women, or inadequate support for victims of rape and torture.’
Britain is being driven back to the dark ages by a Tory government that is seeking actively to force the poor and the needy back to the 19th century. This is going hand-in-hand with the Tory drive to privatise the NHS and to destroy the gains of the 1945 Labour government, which was supported by millions workers as they sought to lay the basis for socialism.
On February 11, the All Trades Unions Alliance is organising its national conference to defend the NHS and social care by organising a general strike to bring down the Tories and to bring in a workers government and socialism. Make sure you are there and that you bring a delegation!
