“If someone’s going to make my breakfast, I want a full English, geddit!” In the community centre cafe, Charlie’s contribution to discussions about the impact of the latest immigration policy on care workers was not the only voice with a hint of xenophobia. Like Cecil for instance: “They’re all foreigners, don’t understand our ways.”
Spot on, though not in the way he meant. The care staff who make our breakfasts and wipe our bottoms don’t understand our ways, because many of them come from cultures that view the dislocation of elderly people from their families, the outsourcing of their care to paid strangers as barbaric. “Who’s going to replace them, that’s what scares me.” Elizabeth is known for her honesty. With half the “economically inactive” already undertaking care and many of the others retired themselves and on the cusp of being cared for, there’s not exactly a queue for care jobs.
“I’m more scared of this virus thing, corona whatsit, and if there’s fewer carers, well…” Joyce this time. Cecil scoffs, pointing out that there’s a flu epidemic every winter. Charlie adds that it’s nature’s way of culling, which chimes with the comments I’ve received from neighbours in the almshouses, not quite “que sera, sera”, but a sanguine recognition that all of us crumblies are headed for the exit, one way or another. The reason why older people are more concerned about the deficit in care than about catching the virus is simple; we are less afraid of being dead than we are of the process of dying. The care worker is the only human buffer between us and the indignity of the final process. Hardly attractive work, I suggest. “So?” Charlie ripostes “It’s a job, get on with it. We’re all human after all.”
But are we? Human, I mean. We uber-old are a novelty, a new breed, almost a new species. Only two generations back, the octogenarian was the exception. The majority of us departed on time. Longevity has generated dysfunctions and ineptitudes that require of those who care for us a portfolio of skills for which there is no accredited prior learning.
That, for me, is the real issue of the government’s immigration policies, not the xenophobic undertone. To describe care work as “low-skilled” reveals a serious misconception: there is no issue about which the inhabitants of the palace of Westminster are more illiterate than social care, perhaps because frontbenches have ever been occupied by men, primarily, with a history of nanny, matron, bedders and scouts. To understand the skills required for the delivery of care, you need to understand how it feels to be old and on the receiving end. We are afraid of tomorrow’s indignities. We feel guilty for today’s privileges. We resent the erosion of yesterday’s independence. Above all we feel humiliated by our redundancy. It is a degrading process that makes us querulous, perverse, implacable and that’s why delivering the most intimate services to us demands an emotional literacy which is off the scale.
Politicians do not appreciate any of this, nor that care goes beyond bodily hygiene: it is essential to wellbeing and involves mental and physical health, especially during the present coronavirus crisis, when carers can serve as frontline diagnosticians of infection.
Not content with devaluing their skills and paying them below the subsistence rate, the commercial care industry drives a work regime that gives no time to establish and maintain the crucial emotional connection that tells us that we matter, and can tell how we are feeling.
The alarm and confusion provoked by Westminster’s indifference to care has been reinforced by the tabloid scaremongering from Whitehall, with its contradictory messages about an illness with common cold symptoms requiring morgues in public parks. Together they create fear and it is fear that is masked by Charlie and Cecil as they grumble and gripe.
Like them, I am graduating from slippered pantaloon into zimmered malcontent. Caring for me will require a much higher level of patience and humanity than that required to stack shelves in supermarkets. By equating them, the political establishment reveals an alarming illiteracy about civic values.
Faced with the prospect of a decade of undignified deterioration in a “care-less” society run by emotional illiterates, if I am honest, I do not find the possibility of an early Covid-19-induced departure quite so daunting.
• Stewart Dakers is an 81-year-old community worker
