The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Yes, But Is The Scrap Heap Cheap Enough?

Even today, some unlucky souls are sheltered enough to be shocked when it transpires that New New Labour have been cutting social care services for the elderly. Well before the Chancellor needed money to throw at the banks, but contemporaneously with the swingeing rises in food and heating costs, local authorities made a cut of just over one and a half per cent in spending on care for "vulnerable pensioners". I do not know whether vulnerable in this context is Standard English or New New Labour jargon; if the latter, it presumably designates those pensioners too frail to take advantage of the Ivan Lewis Work for Food and Stop Neighbourhood Murder scheme. The cut coincides with a four per cent increase in the number of people aged over eighty-five, whom research has shown display considerable obduracy when it comes to retraining and flexible working: almost as bad as Cabinet ministers. The chairman of the Local Government Association's "community wellbeing board", a title I can only wish I had made up, contrived to miss the point entirely by noting that "it is increasingly urgent that we address the issue of how the country will pay for the care of our ageing population". Our ageing population is increasingly numerous, but also physically vulnerable and not a major donor to either member of the governing coalition; the only urgency surrounding the issue is how to get away with bigger and better cuts.

The Glorious Successor's spokesbeing for social neglect, Phil Hope - in the circumstances, a name nearly as unfortunate as "community wellbeing board" - responded by pulling a number from his magical ministerial rectum and reiterating all the promises New Labour has been breaking for the past dozen years or so.

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