So the General Election campaign continues apace, largely ignored by me and by most of the general public. Most people don't make up their minds during the campaign. But every now and again something emerges which makes one perforce sit up.
Such is the Tory plan for social care. Broadly speaking this involves a charge being placed on your house, and the post-death proceeds being used to pay for your care until there's only £100,000 left. The care system is undoubtedly in crisis, but this isn't the answer and won't, I think, stand. For what it's worth, it's already done immense damage to Tory prospects of a sizeable majority (and given Labour's recent surge, may even stop them winning altogether).
What's wrong with it? It's not fair. Firstly, if you get cancer, the state will pay for your treatment. But not if you get Alzheimers (and not if you don't get either). The welfare state was set up to take some of the consequences of ill-fortune away from the individual. The Tory plan breaches that principle.
Secondly, it makes no allowance for how many children you have. An only child? You get the whole £100,000. Four siblings? That's £25,000 each. Unfair.
It's also a form of sequestration. You may not pay it until after death, but the charge is placed on your property while you're still alive. Your asset is effectively confiscated by the state. This is demeaning to the individual and a retrospective tax on assets acquired many years, perhaps even decades, previously. Moreover this is the confiscation of an asset that you worked hard to secure, with money on which you'd already paid tax.
My own parents lived modest and rather frugal lives, but if they hadn't built up an asset, or if their house had been heavily mortgaged, they would escape the Dementia Tax altogether, unlike someone who'd lived large. To be clear, I'm not short of cash and my future plans don't depend on my inheriting all their property. But I saw them last week, and their distress at the prospect of not being able to pass the bulk of their carefully acquired assets to their sons was palpable. Leaving an inheritance is our final creative human act.
Although there was a lot I didn't like about the Tory manifesto, it did, as you would expect, make some attempt to address head on the many difficult problems Britain faces. Unlike Jeremy Corbyn's pie-in-the-sky fantasies it showed distinct signs of being the work of realists. But if social care is a massive problem, this is not the answer.
Instead, make everyone pay a kind of social insurance against the event that they will need care. You could think of a short, snappy name for it. "Tax", perhaps.
PS Within half an hour of my posting this the Tories had done a U turn on the manifesto policy. "This isn't the answer and won't, I think, stand". I'm often wrong, but in the context these words have a certain ring to them. There would additionally be a cap, unspecified, on how much an individual will have to pay. This doesn't look terribly competent, although to be fair to Mrs May the manifesto did speak of a green paper (a consultation in other words, rather than a policy set in stone) and the contrast with the Labour party is telling - their crap policies remain, unchanged.
