I suppose a society that puts its old folk in care homes,it’s babies in nurseries from a few months onwards so as to allow the individual to express him/herself to fullest degree possible ( pure selfishness?) reaps what it sows God forbid we will all be old one day!
TM
uztazo
4 years ago
Another globalist reporter making a case for immigration. It seems to never end.
The problem with social care in Britain is down to two words – a) familism b) care. A is thinning out at an exponential rate and B is paid with lip service. No surprise Eastern Europeans are coming in by the thousands filling up these roles. A is in their DNA and B is a function of A. The choice for Britain is rather straightforward, we either carry on importing people or we teach these values at home. Furthermore, we should underpin it by encouraging and incentivising our youth to take up studies and careers in these roles. Gender and sexuality studies will not cut it.
As for the NHS. What a tragedy it has become. A service which sucks up over a £120 billion a year and is it still deemed to be ‘underfunded’. There are many things wrong with the NHS, wastage and duplicity of roles amongst them, but the chief problem in my opinion is the shortage of carers. The UK boasts of over 100 universities, 84 of these teach social care. Where are the graduates? What is the NHS doing to fast track these graduates?
We are a country of 67 million, if we continue to easily import carers, our ability to cultivate social care professionals will wane.
Yes. Ian Barrell makes many good points within a sobering article, even though we have known most of this for some time. However, more immigration is most emphatically not the answer.
GM
Gary Miles
4 years ago
Damn fine piece. If only the journalists would read it!
WL
Walter Lantz
4 years ago
The article raises good points about a situation that exists in most western democracies – not just the UK. IMO the main issue is the on-going battle between Globalism and Nationalism and the whole “politics makes strange bedfellows” thing. Many decry the Bad Globalism of corporate tax-avoidance while promoting the Good Globalism of open borders. Those folks also favour “sell here, pay tax here” Good Nationalism while protesting the racism of “citizens first” Bad Nationalism.
Meanwhile the large anonymous Middle has to pay for it all. They have to make hard choices and usually can’t afford to play politics. So rather than moaning about corporate kleptocracies or rampant nativist xenophobia why don’t we find out what the Middle needs – besides more taxes? Why is “Buy local” Good Nationalism an un-affordable virtue exercise for many? What system can afford to import labour while at the same time support locals that don’t work? Immigrants can survive on low wages but not locals? When did governments decide it was somehow more humanitarian to dismiss the wisdom of “charity begins at home” and ship vast loads of cash to the fiscal black holes of the world?
Absolutely our most vulnerable have suffered more than others and there needs to be changes but by focusing on trashing Amazon and promoting more immigration we would be simply pandering to trending twitter politics. The issues are much deeper and require much more thought than that.
TD
tdoymeysey
4 years ago
We currently (pre Nightingale) have 115,000 NHS beds in UK, and 450,000 care home/nursing home beds. Both roughly operating at 90% of capacity. The NHS and the social/nursing/home care sector each employ more than 1M staff. Both have more than 100,000 vacancies. The NHS is entirely taxpayer funded, though not with a predicated tax. The social/nursing/home care sector is largely privately owned, and funded through inadequate local authority money and expensive self funded family assets. Nationally, we have decided to place the NHS on a pedestal and clap for its heroes once a week. We prefer to pretend that the private care sector doesn’t exist. Sadly, the body count from the care sector from Covid-19 is now becoming visible and may yet outnumber the Hospital deaths. Will it cause us to rethink, relook, reconsider how we take care of an ageing population? I doubt it.
JJ
John Jones
4 years ago
Good piece, but I think you have missed a major point. Although it’s true that few predicted that covid could be a pandemic very early, many people have been saying for many years that we are not prepared for a major epidemic. Obama set up two committees to investigate the needs for the States during a pandemic. Trump shut them both down in 2018. He should be held accountable for that lapse of judgment, which arguably is why America is now the hardest-hit of all western countries.
So no, no one predicted this particular problem in detail, but the general threat has been known for years. If we had listened to the scientists 30 years ago, we would have been more ready for this particular calamity, just as planes carry lifevests for water landings, even though the chances of any particular flight going down over water are minimal.
What a stupid comment. Trump disbanded the committees because the states did not act on any of the recommendations they delivered.
i.e. NY state was recommended to stockpile 16,000 ventilators but chose to come up with a strategy to stretch the 2000 in stockpile instead and spend the Federal grant on “Green Initiatives”, like batteries and light bulbs.
But what Trumpd did to for the incompetent Cuomo Governor of NY was save his arse by building hospitals, providing every NY citizen who needed a ventilator a ventilator and sending a hospital ship.
America is the hardest hit because the DNC told everyone Trump was a racist when he cancelled flights from every place that was riddled with COVID 19. (FYI as deaths/million they are not in the top 10)
I think you have been eating too many scoops of cold ice cream from Nancy Pelosi’s freezer.
CE
chris4
4 years ago
Tom, interesting article, thank you. Bill Gates predicted a ‘flu like virus’ capable of killing 10 million people in 2015. He also said we were not prepared for it. Perhaps we should all learn, journalists and politicians included to:- #takenoteofthesmartpeople. Too many of us are spending this time trying to blame, politicise, create panic, ignore scientific reasoning. It’s time for change. I would like to see journalists from scientific publications at the No 10 briefings. Yes they can challenge and probe, but their ultimate aim should be not to catch people out but to improve outcomes.
DF
David Fitzsimons
4 years ago
Well said mr Birrell.
Can someone explain why this is true please?
Indeed, the increase in demand for care services rose more than twice as fast for working-age adults as for elderly people over the past five years, even in a rapidly ageing society.
LG
Lindsay Gatward
4 years ago
Nice to think this has just been several dozen Sundays and when we are let out on Monday all will resume as normal – Trouble is who will have the courage to let us out to get infected now that the Lockdown to slow the rate of infection so the deadly cases could be dealt with in an orderly and politically acceptable way has morphed into the idea of defeating the virus – Surely we will all be exposed to infection eventually as with all flu and those that react to it in a deadly way will do so as with all flu – Meanwhile the longer the Lockdown the greater the unintended consequencies one of which is an economic depression and history shows us they insidiously kill a lot of people and lead to dangerous politics……… – So many permutations of how this greatest ever experiment in social isolation and economic suspension eventually ends – And how will the deadly results compare to regular flu epedimcs where we did not experiment.
I am very concerned how the “test” for whether a politician is allowed to give a sensible answer on how we get out of this lockdown, rather than just repeating the same old message, has changed from the original “there must not be a second peak that overloads the NHS” – something I agree with, especially now we have a load of virtually empty Nightingale hospitals and actually permanent hospitals are running at about 50% capacity in most places to “there must be no risk of a second peak – R must not rise above 1”. Given that Germany has not had a peak, just a very slow growth in daily confirmed deaths with the odd kink (R just above 1) in the trend and countries that have peaked are seeing the downward slope plateauing (R close to 1) at quite high levels, I can’t see what scope there really is to do anything meaningful to even ease the measures that would not see deaths start rising again about 3 weeks after the relaxation (without any other reliable and consistently measured data it is only when the daily death trend turns (peaks or troughs) that you can be sure where R was in relation to 1 about 3 weeks earlier). Whereas under the original test, a partial relaxation (eg at least got schools and most shops open again) which led to a slow rise and a peak below NHS capacity when herd immunity was achieved, would have been possible.
Even if vaccine trials are successful, we are still about a year away from having it available for all. The current measures are not sustainable for that length of time and I feel by changing the test we are painting ourselves into a very bad corner where we finally come out of lock down just in time for seasonal flu to hit alongside a resurgence in CV 19 plus the effects of all the cancelled operations and a depression which will see crime soar and that really will overload NHS even if Nightingales are still open.
CE
Colin Elliott
4 years ago
An interesting article, more thoughtful than I’ve become used to recently. While reading it, I thought of two similar situations. First, we all insure our houses against fire. calculating as you say that there may well be only a vanishingly small chance of it catching fire, but it’s finite, and would be financially catastrophic if it were to do so. The other situation is perhaps closer to the current situation; the chances of war might be low, but extremely serious were one to occur without preparation. This is what happened between 1919 and, say, 1934. It is interesting to look at what has happened to defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP over the last few decades. I like the theory that a politician arguing for expenditure which turns out remain to be unused or become obsolete may not expect to be politically successful.
MB
Michael Baldwin
4 years ago
The problem is the kind of politicians we have now, who are not of the same kind as Clement Attlee who introduced the welfare state, and thus made caring the legal duty of the state in a way it really wasn’t ever before.
But as time went by since Clement Attlee was gone, even the allegedly socialist politicians, of which the Labour party was supposed to consist, talked less and less about caring, and more and more about the economy, which meant basically, anything that didn’t make money was no longer “viable.”
“We can’t afford this”, “we can’t afford that”, became the new political “mantra” of all parties of government (I mean, they would promise anything until they got into government, and then the mantra would be the same regardless of the party, once elected).
So of course old people, disabled people, are from the economic point of view just a burden on the system, non-productive people (if very seriously disabled), and the “practical government” is interested in the people known as “wealth creators”, the multimillionaires and billionaires who “boost the economy.”
Of course not everybody thinks that way, but we have allowed our government to be filled with such people, whose main concern is the economy and little else.
They have a nation of consumers, all screaming for more money and lower taxes, and so for decades now every political party has been pretending we can have good public services without paying for them, as the party promises once elected to carry out “efficiency savings” so it can then afford tax cuts.
This of course got even worse with the “era of austerity.”
No party seeking election has been honest enough to say “if you want good public services you have to pay for them”, because they think that statement of reality is not what the public want to hear, they want to hear about tax cuts so they can buy more stuff they don’t need.
So the politicians prioritise money, the economy, because they want the votes of a society of people who want to have lots of lovely things – all the best clothes, jewellery, cars, holidays abroad, electronic gadgets, etc, etc. – so the politicians think if they say they are going to spend money on people who need care, it is not going to get them elected.
It’s a bit like two parents trying to get “the love” of a child, and so they both try to spoil the child with treats, to prove one “loves” the child more than the other.
Perhaps there’s a different way they can get a child’s love, perhaps by being more caring.
Maybe the government might try that too.
But it won’t, while we have an electoral system that doesn’t really allow anybody who isn’t selfish, pushy and aggressive to get anyway near power.
We need electoral reform to do that, getting control over electoral candidate lists, and full PR, so everybody’s vote can count.
Change.org has a petition with over 300,000 signatures on it in support of proportional representation, so I am far from alone in this thinking.
JS
Joe Smith
4 years ago
“The current carnage sweeping through care homes was sadly predictable since they are filled with people who are old or may have underlying health conditions.”
The government policy of kicking CV infected elderly people out of hospital, some of whom go into care homes, has ensured there was carnage.
AS
Adrian Smith
4 years ago
My prediction is that we will not really learn the right lessons from this experience and when the next potential pandemic comes along (we have had several in my recent memory Bird Flu, Swine Flu, SARS, MERS) the response will be just as heavily criticised for either being an under or over reaction. 95% confident.
The reasons why I am so confident is we never seem to get these things right, despite having plenty of similar past experiences to go on and the same pundits who can’t forecast but are great at criticising will be full of what the “right” lessons really are, all of which will serve other agendas eg response to global warming and whether or not we should continue with BREXIT or just simply to blame the government and group think will then embed those pseudo lessons.
I will be totally honest and declare that I don’t know what the right lessons are and probably still won’t at the end and it is actually the bit about the next one that is falsifiable to some extent.
SA
Scott Allan
4 years ago
One of the very best pieces of journalism, which we know to be as rare as hens teeth these days. Added you to my favorites.
I agree, an excellent essay. However yet again, you manage to demean yourself with your vulgarity to John Jones. You have a valid point, but must exercise self control, if you wish to be taken seriously. The Pelosi remark was particularly crass. Do you not agree?
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I suppose a society that puts its old folk in care homes,it’s babies in nurseries from a few months onwards so as to allow the individual to express him/herself to fullest degree possible ( pure selfishness?) reaps what it sows
God forbid we will all be old one day!
Another globalist reporter making a case for immigration. It seems to never end.
The problem with social care in Britain is down to two words – a) familism b) care. A is thinning out at an exponential rate and B is paid with lip service. No surprise Eastern Europeans are coming in by the thousands filling up these roles. A is in their DNA and B is a function of A.
The choice for Britain is rather straightforward, we either carry on importing people or we teach these values at home. Furthermore, we should underpin it by encouraging and incentivising our youth to take up studies and careers in these roles. Gender and sexuality studies will not cut it.
As for the NHS. What a tragedy it has become. A service which sucks up over a £120 billion a year and is it still deemed to be ‘underfunded’. There are many things wrong with the NHS, wastage and duplicity of roles amongst them, but the chief problem in my opinion is the shortage of carers. The UK boasts of over 100 universities, 84 of these teach social care. Where are the graduates? What is the NHS doing to fast track these graduates?
We are a country of 67 million, if we continue to easily import carers, our ability to cultivate social care professionals will wane.
Yes. Ian Barrell makes many good points within a sobering article, even though we have known most of this for some time. However, more immigration is most emphatically not the answer.
Damn fine piece. If only the journalists would read it!
The article raises good points about a situation that exists in most western democracies – not just the UK.
IMO the main issue is the on-going battle between Globalism and Nationalism and the whole “politics makes strange bedfellows” thing.
Many decry the Bad Globalism of corporate tax-avoidance while promoting the Good Globalism of open borders.
Those folks also favour “sell here, pay tax here” Good Nationalism while protesting the racism of “citizens first” Bad Nationalism.
Meanwhile the large anonymous Middle has to pay for it all.
They have to make hard choices and usually can’t afford to play politics.
So rather than moaning about corporate kleptocracies or rampant nativist xenophobia why don’t we find out what the Middle needs – besides more taxes?
Why is “Buy local” Good Nationalism an un-affordable virtue exercise for many?
What system can afford to import labour while at the same time support locals that don’t work?
Immigrants can survive on low wages but not locals?
When did governments decide it was somehow more humanitarian to dismiss the wisdom of “charity begins at home” and ship vast loads of cash to the fiscal black holes of the world?
Absolutely our most vulnerable have suffered more than others and there needs to be changes but by focusing on trashing Amazon and promoting more immigration we would be simply pandering to trending twitter politics.
The issues are much deeper and require much more thought than that.
We currently (pre Nightingale) have 115,000 NHS beds in UK, and 450,000 care home/nursing home beds. Both roughly operating at 90% of capacity. The NHS and the social/nursing/home care sector each employ more than 1M staff. Both have more than 100,000 vacancies. The NHS is entirely taxpayer funded, though not with a predicated tax. The social/nursing/home care sector is largely privately owned, and funded through inadequate local authority money and expensive self funded family assets.
Nationally, we have decided to place the NHS on a pedestal and clap for its heroes once a week. We prefer to pretend that the private care sector doesn’t exist.
Sadly, the body count from the care sector from Covid-19 is now becoming visible and may yet outnumber the Hospital deaths. Will it cause us to rethink, relook, reconsider how we take care of an ageing population? I doubt it.
Good piece, but I think you have missed a major point. Although it’s true that few predicted that covid could be a pandemic very early, many people have been saying for many years that we are not prepared for a major epidemic. Obama set up two committees to investigate the needs for the States during a pandemic. Trump shut them both down in 2018. He should be held accountable for that lapse of judgment, which arguably is why America is now the hardest-hit of all western countries.
So no, no one predicted this particular problem in detail, but the general threat has been known for years. If we had listened to the scientists 30 years ago, we would have been more ready for this particular calamity, just as planes carry lifevests for water landings, even though the chances of any particular flight going down over water are minimal.
What a stupid comment. Trump disbanded the committees because the states did not act on any of the recommendations they delivered.
i.e. NY state was recommended to stockpile 16,000 ventilators but chose to come up with a strategy to stretch the 2000 in stockpile instead and spend the Federal grant on “Green Initiatives”, like batteries and light bulbs.
But what Trumpd did to for the incompetent Cuomo Governor of NY was save his arse by building hospitals, providing every NY citizen who needed a ventilator a ventilator and sending a hospital ship.
America is the hardest hit because the DNC told everyone Trump was a racist when he cancelled flights from every place that was riddled with COVID 19. (FYI as deaths/million they are not in the top 10)
I think you have been eating too many scoops of cold ice cream from Nancy Pelosi’s freezer.
Tom, interesting article, thank you. Bill Gates predicted a ‘flu like virus’ capable of killing 10 million people in 2015. He also said we were not prepared for it. Perhaps we should all learn, journalists and politicians included to:- #takenoteofthesmartpeople.
Too many of us are spending this time trying to blame, politicise, create panic, ignore scientific reasoning.
It’s time for change. I would like to see journalists from scientific publications at the No 10 briefings. Yes they can challenge and probe, but their ultimate aim should be not to catch people out but to improve outcomes.
Well said mr Birrell.
Can someone explain why this is true please?
Nice to think this has just been several dozen Sundays and when we are let out on Monday all will resume as normal – Trouble is who will have the courage to let us out to get infected now that the Lockdown to slow the rate of infection so the deadly cases could be dealt with in an orderly and politically acceptable way has morphed into the idea of defeating the virus – Surely we will all be exposed to infection eventually as with all flu and those that react to it in a deadly way will do so as with all flu – Meanwhile the longer the Lockdown the greater the unintended consequencies one of which is an economic depression and history shows us they insidiously kill a lot of people and lead to dangerous politics……… – So many permutations of how this greatest ever experiment in social isolation and economic suspension eventually ends – And how will the deadly results compare to regular flu epedimcs where we did not experiment.
I am very concerned how the “test” for whether a politician is allowed to give a sensible answer on how we get out of this lockdown, rather than just repeating the same old message, has changed from the original “there must not be a second peak that overloads the NHS” – something I agree with, especially now we have a load of virtually empty Nightingale hospitals and actually permanent hospitals are running at about 50% capacity in most places to “there must be no risk of a second peak – R must not rise above 1”. Given that Germany has not had a peak, just a very slow growth in daily confirmed deaths with the odd kink (R just above 1) in the trend and countries that have peaked are seeing the downward slope plateauing (R close to 1) at quite high levels, I can’t see what scope there really is to do anything meaningful to even ease the measures that would not see deaths start rising again about 3 weeks after the relaxation (without any other reliable and consistently measured data it is only when the daily death trend turns (peaks or troughs) that you can be sure where R was in relation to 1 about 3 weeks earlier). Whereas under the original test, a partial relaxation (eg at least got schools and most shops open again) which led to a slow rise and a peak below NHS capacity when herd immunity was achieved, would have been possible.
Even if vaccine trials are successful, we are still about a year away from having it available for all. The current measures are not sustainable for that length of time and I feel by changing the test we are painting ourselves into a very bad corner where we finally come out of lock down just in time for seasonal flu to hit alongside a resurgence in CV 19 plus the effects of all the cancelled operations and a depression which will see crime soar and that really will overload NHS even if Nightingales are still open.
An interesting article, more thoughtful than I’ve become used to recently. While reading it, I thought of two similar situations. First, we all insure our houses against fire. calculating as you say that there may well be only a vanishingly small chance of it catching fire, but it’s finite, and would be financially catastrophic if it were to do so. The other situation is perhaps closer to the current situation; the chances of war might be low, but extremely serious were one to occur without preparation. This is what happened between 1919 and, say, 1934. It is interesting to look at what has happened to defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP over the last few decades.
I like the theory that a politician arguing for expenditure which turns out remain to be unused or become obsolete may not expect to be politically successful.
The problem is the kind of politicians we have now, who are not of the same kind as Clement Attlee who introduced the welfare state, and thus made caring the legal duty of the state in a way it really wasn’t ever before.
But as time went by since Clement Attlee was gone, even the allegedly socialist politicians, of which the Labour party was supposed to consist, talked less and less about caring, and more and more about the economy, which meant basically, anything that didn’t make money was no longer “viable.”
“We can’t afford this”, “we can’t afford that”, became the new political “mantra” of all parties of government (I mean, they would promise anything until they got into government, and then the mantra would be the same regardless of the party, once elected).
So of course old people, disabled people, are from the economic point of view just a burden on the system, non-productive people (if very seriously disabled), and the “practical government” is interested in the people known as “wealth creators”, the multimillionaires and billionaires who “boost the economy.”
Of course not everybody thinks that way, but we have allowed our government to be filled with such people, whose main concern is the economy and little else.
They have a nation of consumers, all screaming for more money and lower taxes, and so for decades now every political party has been pretending we can have good public services without paying for them, as the party promises once elected to carry out “efficiency savings” so it can then afford tax cuts.
This of course got even worse with the “era of austerity.”
No party seeking election has been honest enough to say “if you want good public services you have to pay for them”, because they think that statement of reality is not what the public want to hear, they want to hear about tax cuts so they can buy more stuff they don’t need.
So the politicians prioritise money, the economy, because they want the votes of a society of people who want to have lots of lovely things – all the best clothes, jewellery, cars, holidays abroad, electronic gadgets, etc, etc. – so the politicians think if they say they are going to spend money on people who need care, it is not going to get them elected.
It’s a bit like two parents trying to get “the love” of a child, and so they both try to spoil the child with treats, to prove one “loves” the child more than the other.
Perhaps there’s a different way they can get a child’s love, perhaps by being more caring.
Maybe the government might try that too.
But it won’t, while we have an electoral system that doesn’t really allow anybody who isn’t selfish, pushy and aggressive to get anyway near power.
We need electoral reform to do that, getting control over electoral candidate lists, and full PR, so everybody’s vote can count.
Change.org has a petition with over 300,000 signatures on it in support of proportional representation, so I am far from alone in this thinking.
“The current carnage sweeping through care homes was sadly predictable since they are filled with people who are old or may have underlying health conditions.”
The government policy of kicking CV infected elderly people out of hospital, some of whom go into care homes, has ensured there was carnage.
My prediction is that we will not really learn the right lessons from this experience and when the next potential pandemic comes along (we have had several in my recent memory Bird Flu, Swine Flu, SARS, MERS) the response will be just as heavily criticised for either being an under or over reaction. 95% confident.
The reasons why I am so confident is we never seem to get these things right, despite having plenty of similar past experiences to go on and the same pundits who can’t forecast but are great at criticising will be full of what the “right” lessons really are, all of which will serve other agendas eg response to global warming and whether or not we should continue with BREXIT or just simply to blame the government and group think will then embed those pseudo lessons.
I will be totally honest and declare that I don’t know what the right lessons are and probably still won’t at the end and it is actually the bit about the next one that is falsifiable to some extent.
One of the very best pieces of journalism, which we know to be as rare as hens teeth these days. Added you to my favorites.
I agree, an excellent essay. However yet again, you manage to demean yourself
with your vulgarity to John Jones.
You have a valid point, but must exercise self control, if you wish to be taken seriously. The Pelosi remark was particularly crass. Do you not agree?