A somewhat boring post title for a subject that will become increasingly important. The centre is under pressure; after having hoarded power for a century, jealously guarding it and snapping-up any developing shoots of Localism, the central State and its bureaucrats cannot now hold it. The dam about to burst, not just in the UK but across Europe, is social care.
When IDS, the architect of the UC scheme, unveiled his proposals, I wrote that he was creating an unworkable behemoth. Far better to devolve welfare down to as local a level as possible, almost back to the principles of the first Elizabethan poor laws if necessary, to anchor both the costs (tax) and spend right down to the communities in which help is needed. This is anathema to a central State whose reason for being is to act as a substitute parent to citizens from whom it has taken our intermediate institutions. You've all read my excerpts from Robert Nisbet's writings on the subject and in 2020 I'll bring them back, along with de Tocqueville and others.
The first stage reaction of central States to the pressures has been to devolve just the rationing decision - saying in effect "Here's the cake. There's no more. Now you ration it out". The roles of local government and the NHS are being merged, children's social work is now merged with education. The government is carefully hypothecating increased NHS spend into hospitals and nurses knowing health service managers will still use whatever opportunities they have to divert clinical care money into social care services - care homes, home helps and home nursing of the elderly. The Telegraph carries a story this morning that is surely the tip of the iceberg, of NHS managers charging relatives £300 a day to 'assist' their care applications. The Express carries another - this time the EU devolving the rationing decision on food bank support.
IDS is a fine chap with the highest ideals and best intentions, but he was not the Dominic Cummings that welfare reform needs. With UC he has given us an unintentional monster that needs an unacceptable level of central State tax take to function adequately. It is unsustainable.
I believe it will only work when local communities are given the power to make 'time or tax' decisions themselves - whether to resource the needs of the elderly, sick and disabled in those communities by sharing the care duties or paying tax to employ others to do it, and to decide the balance, for there will always be one, between time and tax. That needs a Localism big bang the pressure for which will continue building during the roaring twenties. Hold on to your hats.
13 comments:
Our experience here in Portugal backs up your thesis Radders. My understanding is that care of the elderly here is the legal responsibility of their family, but then social care is not as eye-wateringly expensive as it is in the UK; typically costing the family €1,000 per month per parent (most of which would be covered by his or her pension). How? Well, the concept of familial duty is much stronger here, but the care system is run by a Catholic charity, rather than the state, and is administered locally. The same charity provides (again much cheaper than the UK) a pre-school nursery and physiotherapy among other services, and I imagine much of its income will also come from donations and legacies.
My parents are long gone, but I know this because my next door neighbour had to go into the local home because she could no longer manage the steep steps leading to her house. The facilities were excellent, although that didn't stop her moaning about them, and on a par with anything I've seen in the UK. Even I benefit from such a system, because my council tax is only a third of what it would be in the UK.
I've often thought that the centralisation of 'power' was as much to do with an OCD-like obsession with neatness and control.
Devolving something and have the level of services in Big-end-shire be different from the level of services in Little-end-shire would be excruciatingly uncomfortable for the bureaucrats. One size *must* fit all whether it is practical or not. Could explain a lot of the desire to Remain too.
Brexit is about localism, it is about the electorate understanding the reality that the human being is not such a highly evolved monkey after all. We still need mummies and daddies, we still need to be babies, nothing has changed since Lucy and her mates wandered about.
We are tribal and traditionally organise into fairly small tribes at that, so it is all very well trying to organise trade on a global basis, as long as we do not try to govern real human people on the same basis, and since the market is a human invention, you can't have one without the other.
The evidence shows that we have tolerated a construct that is around the size of the UK, but fail to respond to the idea of 60+% of Europe merging into one. That is a tribe too far.
For a long time I have wittered on about Citizen triggered binding direct democracy, one feature of which is of course the ability to vote on issues at all regional levels, down to the block/street in which one lives. Such a method for organising ourselves is self regulating and will shrink the size of administration departments. We can leave the two party system as it is, abolish the Lords and make the Commons the scrutinising chamber, where the two tendencies argue the toss with each other over what we have told them to do through the ballot box.
Are you local? This is a local shop for local people there's nothing for you here.
One word - corruption.
From the simple abuse by claimants to layers of intermediate paper-pushing hangers-on right up to corporate manipulation of drug costs etc the amount of 'criminal' corruption is simply staggering and far too 'valuable' to allow simplification to interfere with such a lucrative profiteering scheme.
Much might be made of potential changes but none will happen. People need to understand that, to get what they want, they have to deliver it themselves. To place faith in .gov or anyone with a profit motive is simply naivety beyond belief.
Divvy the pot to the individual. This should apply to all tax-and-spending requirements such that those that need the services get to chose how they spend the money - with checks of course.
Why I pay ever-increasing local taxes for ever-decreasing services pisses me off endlessly. If I had access to the pot I hand over I could get the various services I need far, far cheaper and, probably, create a good many local jobs to go with them instead of paying for pen-pushing, over-paid, multi-layered, career-minded, useless fuckwits sat behind council office desks cocking it up on a weekly basis.
And that's before the 'intermediaries' that siphon off the money.
TPH - "This is a local shop, pub, ATM and post office owned and run by local people ... please spend your money with us" is actually starting to become a realityand we should probably encourage it.
DJ - Yep. 'Postcode lottery' is used to tag failure rather than the success of economic and efficient services designed and delivered locally and tailored to specific local needs with maximum economic efficiency. The lexicon of the media is biased towards central planning, inefficiency, the Big State and a depressing mediocity of dull, unimaginitive State-planned homogenous services.
As we saw with Sheffield etc. under Thatcher, localism had to be crushed. The problem was, people could see democratic sociality actually in operation at their level, and they Saw That It Was Good - unthinkable.
How ironic then, that the most draconian centralisers of all, the Tory Right, were those who squealed the loudest about the minimal, limited, pooling of sovereignty from this country and from our friends to our European Union's administrative centre in Brussels.
JPM - Yes, Margaret Thatcher was a great centraliser and with the enthusiastic support of the civil service took much power from local government. It had a sting in the tail, though - the Conservative Party lost ONE MILLION members between 1979 and 1997, including me. Many were disillusioned local councillors and local Conservative Association members who felt they'd just been castrated.
We've since learned with both Scotland and Wales that the answer is to give tax and spend powers and make the incumbent parties directly accountable. The Welsh Labour Party completely mismanaged health and has just been cricified' the SNP are facing decimation in 2021 for the same reasons, which is why nasty Nicola is doing what she's doing.
And of course supranationalism is entirely and wholly the opposite of Localism. Good Localists are also good Leavers ;)
But we have to have international, ideally global standards for all manner of things, from aviation safety to ozone-destroying CFC bans.
The question is one of balance.
The European Union has not done badly, considering.
There is probably an optimum size for nearly everything, where needs and efficiencies are finely balanced.
But we have to have international, ideally global standards for all manner of things, from aviation safety to ozone-destroying CFC bans.
Those intentions don't necessarily mean a centrally run .gov organisation - the EU - that uses such centralised intentions to impose extra rules/regs on a larger majority of manufacturers that aren't even required (or need to) comply.
All those things can be achieved by simple agreement/standardisation. If you don't comply you don't get a piece of the market. The UK, for example, bans the import of lead-paint-coated toys - it didn't need the EU to make that decision for them and the manufacturers, if they wanted to keep selling to us, changed their ways.
But much of the demands for 'standards' are made/set by the manufacturers themselves (CFLs being a prime example) to tilt the markets in their favour.
Corruption - again.
Please remember that the snats are incredibly centralising on their terms. One of the reasons for their phenomenal mismanagement of everything they touch is that the former regional/county responsibilities are all run from edinburgh, which can be hundreds of miles from where the decision takes effect. As long as it has "scotland" in its title it doesn't matter how crap the service is, their core vote will cheer it on, see scottish NHS for further details.
The answer is devolving matters to Swiss canton levels and the default answer must always be to remove the gatekeeper.
True Localism requires Sustainability.
I heartily recommend the Strong Towns Initiative which is a movement that began in North America, but whose insights also apply to the UK and the rest of the world.
One of its founders has just published a book, (Amazon link: Strong Towns) and this has just inspired me to write the following (Amazon) review:
The author writes clearly in a chatty and informal but informative style. He incrementally builds his arguments in a very persuasive manner that has obviously being polished by having been presented many times.
He explains how we have strayed from the historic good practises that created our current towns and cities and what we need to do to correct this.
His primary objective is the creation of sustainable communities that work for their inhabitants.
I can't help but think of Professor Tainter's classic "The Collapse of Complex Societies". Tainter described the retrenchment of the Byzantine Empire as the only example of which he was aware, of successfully staving off a collapse.
This "Strong Towns" book is likewise calling for a sustainable retrenchment before it is too late and I highly commend it.
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