Home Sweet Home

Not posted in a while.  Been lots happening both personally and in the news of course.  But despite starting two or three posts, I just wasn't feeling it.

However, today I went for a short drive around the area where I used to live.  So I thought I would briefly muse on that.  I have very rarely gone back since I left home completely.  It is not a particularly nice town and I had little attachment to any friends who had not also left.  Maybe one or two but that was it.  My parents divorced a short time after I left and that was that.  House gone, no need to visit the place.

There were a couple of things which really struck me today, in the suburbs where I was brought up.  The first was the complete de-greening of the place.  Nearly every lawn where we had played has been turned into a double driveway.  Many trees and hedges have vanished.  And a lot of grass verges have been co-opted into people's properties - and therefore their driveways.  It wasn't a posh neighbourhood but I remember it as leafy and pleasant.  It was rather odd to be confronted with such mass environmental change and it worries me to think how many other places are now the same. 

The other very clear situation was house building on a large scale.  Developers have finally managed to get access behind some of the classic 'ribbon development' roads on the outskirts and are taking full advantage.  But none of it looked to be 'affordable housing'.  And I could not see how the infrastructure is going to manage.  New schools and roads will be desperately needed from what I could see.  And the huge swathes of fields which have gone was quite shocking when you had not been there for such a long time.

It all appeared to be a microcosm of the sorts of issues facing many towns in the UK.  Not enough housing for those on lower incomes, lack of investment in everything needed to sustain modern life apart from these houses, the one hospital is on the other side of the town.  And the car is king.  It is already king in the existing estates and will have to be king on the new ones because you will not be able to get anywhere without one. The only public transport is buses.  Similar issues are happening where I live now.  

Once again on this blog, I must go back to 'this is not a poor country'.  We have money.  It is just not being spent properly.  Theresa May leapt to the defence of the NHS when Trump attacked it.  Brilliant.  Now spend some money on it.  Ministers pondering on the housing crisis - sink estates, hundreds of people in B&Bs, the issues following the Grenfell tragedy, etc?  Cancel Trident and spend the money on houses - council houses.  As for the environmental changes I saw, I don't see how, at present, we can escape from the car trap.  Homes are built further and further away from facilities but there is no other transport.  Many houses accommodate at least two working adults.  Unfortunately, it is the green in our lives which is having to give way.

Actually, I lived in that place for so long that I remember there being fields in places which are now thirty to forty year old estates.  Change has to happen.  Of course.  But I don't think nearly enough thought is being given to the planning situation now and that is something which should worry us all.

The Services Demographic

So I had planned to whitter on about the 'dementia tax' in this post.  And now this morning there has been a U-turn apparently.  

I am not surprised the U-turn as come on the care side.  At university in the early Nineties, I earned my beer money working on political surveys to analyse the membership demographics of the Conservative and Labour. parties  It was a slog of a job because there was no technology for looking at the answers.  So big thick surveys were posted out and then we all worked to code the answers by hand, reading each and every returned book.  Various work came out of the projects but the main one about the Tories was a book called True Blues by Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson.  My memory of the work is largely composed of continual amazement at the great age of most of the Tory members.  Crabbed handwriting became our speciality.

And I don't think their demographic has really changed all that much.  I don't propose to analyse the reasons for that - it is far too complicated for this little blog post.  But I was amazed at the arrogance of the announcements last week.  It really felt like the Tories were so over-confident of winning the election, they were prepared to finally say what they really though about social care, school dinners, etc.  No tiptoeing required anymore.  And no numbers to back anything up.  Just 'this is how it is'.

For a key part of their core support though, care for the elderly is a huge issue - be it for themselves or for relatives who are already struggling to provide care.  Free school dinners are also one of the few benefits which are not means tested.  No matter how much tax you do or don't pay, your children are entitled to the meals. 

Whilst I entirely agree with the arguments by Jamie Oliver and others about the future saving to the NHS from keeping our children healthy, I don't believe there will be a U-turn on school dinners.  They don't want the NHS to be saved.  They want it to creak slowly to its knees so they can say it is no longer fit for purpose.  Neither will there be a change on university tuition fees.  Because the Tories see no electoral benefit to themselves.  They let the Liberals fall on that sword.

What needs to happen in these last weeks of campaigning, aside from encouraging people to actually use their votes?  Well, I think we need to be talking about how policies will actually affect people.  You may be safe for now from a 'dementia tax'.  But you are only safe while the Prime Minister has taken it off the table in order to get your vote.  Clearly, policy work has been done on this issue and a large Conservative majority will mean they could bring all sorts of things out of the cupboard in the next five years.  

Voted Conservative all your life?  Well, during most of this electorate's lifetime, there has been an NHS, social care, public funded education.  Think about your life without those things.  Your grandchildren losing free meals, your own future care uncertain, the NHS unavailable as you age.  Your children working until they are seventy.  Your grandchildren stressing about having to get into grammar school.  Starts to look a bit different doesn't it?  The last massive Tory majority privatised anything they could get their hands on.  Now they want to get their hands on the last bastions of the post war consensus.

This is not about True Blue or True Red.   This election is about the future of our services.  It is not too late to make that decision.