PM Burnham’s Offering: In An Ageing Britain, Universal ‘Care’

“How often did Narcissus return to the pool

Did he fall for himself year after year?

Was he then just an ageing fool?

What message do we get from the mirror?”

— From Hey Bhagwan, What About Trumpistan by Bachchoo

This week the UK’s Labour Party holds its first annual conference since Andy Burnham assumed the leadership of the Party, ushering PM Keir Starmer out of the role and consequently being crowned Prime Minister, or as the satirist says, ‘King of the North’.

Right-wing rumblers on social media harp on about his prime ministership not being legitimate as it didn’t come about through a general election.

Britain doesn’t have a written constitution and it is accepted that the leader of the ruling party occupies 10 Downing Street — unless of course, like Andy Burnham, ex-mayor of Manchester, he passionately believes in his mission to devolve power to the North of Britain and to the regions away from ‘controlling’ London. He symbolically says he won’t use 10 Downing Street as his central home.

As a consequence of the “constitutionally doubtful” perception about the legitimacy of his position, Andy has been repeatedly asked if he plans to hold a snap election before the designated date in 2029. He very firmly says there will be no such early election. He will set out what he intends to do in the years towards it, and then his Party’s manifesto for that election.

The one policy Burnham has announced. and seems determined to implement, has committed him to a massive advance in the British state’s responsibility — as big a step as the introduction of compulsory education for all children, or the establishment of the Nation Health Service. Burnham has, perhaps strategically — though it might be cynical to see it that way — tied his announcement of this intention — a new state-paid, free-to-all ‘care’ service to the recent death of his aged father. Outlining his plan for this proposed service, and mentioning his father, tears came to his eyes.

So what’s the new, historically-game-changing policy of universal ‘care’?

Gentle reader, I hadn’t heard this particular ‘C’ word in this context till I arrived in Britain. In India it was assumed that the infirm and the old would be looked after by their families. There were no institutions to which the old and/or dependently disabled would be sent, or to which they could voluntarily go.

In the household where I lived during school term time as a child and teenager, under the care of my mother’s two maiden sisters, my ‘maasis’ (because my army-officer father was posted to places families were not allowed — such as the frontier of Kashmir?) My grandfather, my maasi’s dad, lived with us, and my late grandmother’s much older, infirm sister had also been brought from her isolation in Bombay to live with us and be looked after.

That was the norm in every family I knew of.

In Britain, I became aware of three categories of ‘care’. The severely infirm senior citizens could be assigned a care worker to live with him or her and see to the cared-for’s needs. The second care format involves visiting carers who turn up to do what an old person or a disabled one can’t do for him or herself.

The third is the recourse to the thousands of institutions, some run by outsourced capitalist companies, called ‘care homes’. These are for the elderly, and in a macabre way are accepted as places where you wait for the end. Or, as one friend says, you are “on the runway”.

These care homes, and the other care services, very often entail hefty expenses, which mean the ones who go into care homes have to divest themselves of savings, assets and even their homes. Andy Buirnham wants to face this problem by instituting a national, state-paid care service, free for the steadily increasing proportion of aged people in Britain’s population.

It will cost billions. How will Labour pay for it? By changing the regulations that today govern the state pension paid to old age pensioners — yes gentle reader, including Dinosaur Dhondy.

Today, and for decades past, the pension paid by the state to senior citizens has been subject to the “triple-lock”. No, it’s not a very secure formula for incarceration, it’s a way of determining what the pension should be. The triple lock specifies that this pension keep pace with inflation, with a 2.5% annual increase or stay in line with increases in the average wage — whichever is the greatest. Burham says he will reduce this to a double lock: keep the inflation and 2,5% criteria, but not the staying-in-line with the average wage, which under Labour is probably set to increase year on year.

Of course, the right-wing press is desperate to make electoral capital out of this change by harping on about ‘attacking’ pensioners.

The proposal is designed to save billions, and the very small increments that millions of us oldies will be deprived of are absolutely fair targets for the massive ‘care service’ that Burnham plans.

At the conference this week Andy also says he will contemplate rejoining the European Union as a full member. He will also nationalise water and energy services…

But the promise of a national care service remains the most significant historical change in line with the ageing demographic!