Time we woke up over care of the elderly

Everyone in the Westminster bubble solemnly contemplated its implications as Andrew Dilnot, the report’s author did the media rounds telling anyone who would listen that his proposal was a ‘fair’ and equitable solution’ to an intractable and dogged problem.

As someone who has had to sell everything our mother owned to keep her in care, I have to say, that it isn’t is it?

The report’s proposals are at best ‘less-bad’ than we currently have – but compared to other countries in this alleged ‘union of equals’ it is yet another case of the English cash cow being milked, fleeced, rogered and sacrificed upon the altar of political connivance.

Compare and contrast how the Scottish Government look after their elderly – and how the Westminster collective use smoke, mirrors and the mushroom principle to ensure that our elderly in England are used as little more than money donors to the union cause.

In Scotland all elderly care is paid for by the Scottish Government. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Duke of Atholl’s dad, Sean Connery’s aunty or Jimmy Krankie’s ailing guardian, none of them will be required to sell their home, ancestral castle or Cote d’Azur, Cap Ferrat condo.

They’ll not be forced to empty their bank accounts or flog off the family silver to pay for their care because it’s all free, gratis, and for nowt, courtesy of their more-than-generous block grant from Westminster.

And in England? No such state-sponsored generosity. No, in England it’s all about squeezing till the pips squeak. It’s extortion from men in stripey suits carrying violin cases and threatening to leave a horse’s head in your 100 quid a day social care-home bed.

As of now, if you have assets of over £23,250 and you need to go into a social care programme then they’ll have it off you – the lot. It’s best illustrated by a radio piece broadcast on July 5.

A BBC reporter interviewed a somewhat weary middle-aged, middle-income, middle-England woman whose 93-year-old mother was in care. The lady was asked how the Dilnot proposals might affect her mother’s outlook – and her bank balance.

The woman said that Dilnot was not a panacea – it was still going to hurt a hell of a lot of people. And a ceiling of £35,000 was still an awful lot of money to find – and anyway, she thought the government would drag their feet sufficiently as to make any difference to her mum’s circumstances completely irrelevant.

She then told her story, in many ways it is typical of the routine filching of the English by a Westminster elite – and of the way we just seem to roll over and take it.

When asked how much it had (to date) cost to finance her mum’s care, the lady said “So far they’ve taken over £170,000 from my mum’s assets. It costs her over £100 a day, every single day”.

That’s nearly a grand a week, not far off 50k a year – and counting…. Just consider the magnitude of that cost. £170,000 paid by an ailing dementia-suffering nonagenarian; while just up the road in the means-test-free zone that is Scotland it’s the gratis gravy-train for billionaires, millionaires, homeless tramps and everyone in between.

I was waiting for an expression of outrage from the BBC man – but predictably none came. The reporter didn’t say a word. No surprise or indignation from him – to be honest, it hardly registered as he patched us back to the studio.

It was almost as if it was expected, the assumed white flagged position of humiliation, surrender, subjugation and exploitation – the natural state of things in England.

Once again, the English are getting comprehensively tax-shafted to provide enough money for others in the union to enjoy benefits that are apparently off limits for us.

The media reports were like a rerun of the announcement that tuition fees would treble to £9,000 – as with tuition fees, a myriad of experts, commentators and politicians were rolled out to tell the English public why it was impossible to finance our old age elderly care without extra taxation, insurance cover and one-off payments of around 35 grand.

Lectures abounded from gravitas-laden government flunkeys about how the new scheme would cost £1.7 billion, and how it may only be afforded via an extra dollop of pensioner taxation.

But how can this be? We all contribute to an economy which is common to all four nations of the UK.

We’re told that this UK is apparently a ‘union of equals’ where both the pleasure and the pain is supposed to be a shared experience for all. In this co-operative, during the good times every UK citizen is supposed to shared the dividends, similarly, in the bad times the more who share the pain, the less it hurts – and as a confirmer, David Cameron likes to proclaim that “We are all in this together”. But that’s the PR Cameron double-speaking.

Quite clearly we are not in anything together.. Some citizens within the UK are living off the backs of others – and routinely enjoying services and benefits that are totally off-limits to us in England.

It’s like a colossal pyramid selling scam with no prospect of Ester Rantzen exposing the obscenity of ripped-off England by the gangsters of Westminster. It’s about time the English public woke up to that fact.

David Miller, Rotherham Road, Maltby.