Various undercover documentaries have revealed the brutality of life in some of Britain’s social care homes, so it cannot be ruled out that somewhere in the country, a particularly sadistic nurse arrives in the TV room at noon each Wednesday and ritualistically turns over to Prime Minister’s Questions.
Every week they cry out in agony for a return to Homes Under The Hammer, even Loose Women. Every week they are ignored. None will have put the frighteners up them quite like this week’s instalment. At the end of a year in which you wouldn’t trust the nation’s political leaders to feed your goldfish while you went away for the weekend, this was not the time to lay bare the terrifying reality these really are the people in charge of looking after us when we can no longer do it ourselves.
It followed in the wake of revelations that local councils will be permitted to raise council tax specifically to pay for social care. “Is the Prime Minister aware,“ Jeremy Corbyn asked, “that raising council tax in Windsor or Maidenhead is going to raise a lot more, than by raising council tax in Newcastle or Liverpool? Is she saying elderly people are less valuable in some parts of the country?”
He should have stopped there, a question to which Theresa May’s answer could only be some clumsy variant on “yes, because they don’t vote Tory” (at least not yet) but unfortunately this rolled directly in to a policy proposal of his own: “Would the Prime Minister cancel cuts to corporation tax and spend it on social care instead?” This is as magnificent a microcosm of the Corbweltanschauung as you are ever likely to get. Stop making money. Start spending it.
Yesterday, as the Commons spent two hours debating the horrors in Aleppo, it was hard not to imagine the carnage unfolding on the streets in real time as they did so. No, no one is coming to help, but don’t worry, we over here will not rest until the blame for that is properly apportioned.
It was the same old story again. Corbyn screamed at Theresa May that this government had “cut £4.6bn from social care”. Ms May screamed back: “Let’s look at the record of thirteen years of Labour government,” before rattling off the same list of consultations, commissions, green papers, white papers, red pills and blue pills as she did four weeks ago – the last time Corbyn raised the very same question.
It’s fitting enough. You simply can’t look upon Westminster at the moment, and certainly not at Prime Minister’s Questions, without feeling like you’re getting politics free at the point of delivery. That this can’t be the best we’ve got. That, sod it, maybe it’s worth just paying to go private.
Trouble is, you can’t. This really is it.
