It’s only the middle of the week and I’m already furious. More than my usual baseline (see my blog on being fuelled by rage here.)
I’m furious about a statement a moronic minister has made at a recent political conference. He suggested that people in the UK should have more children so that they can care for the rising ageing population. I read the article, which made me even more mad, he is also considering cutting the number of care visas because they’re not considered ‘high skilled’ enough.
To recap, he wants us to have more kids we can’t afford, cut down the number of care workers even more, and expect us to care for our elders for free. I’m not sure who this message appeals to, but even for a populist statement, this one makes no sense.
He wants to reduce the number of care visas, mainly because they’re ‘foreigners’ that we apparently ‘can’t look after’ despite the fact they’re coming to the UK to work, so will pay taxes and will probably be looking after all your elderly relatives so you don’t have to. I looked it up, to qualify for a Health and Care Worker visa, you must be a qualified doctor, nurse, health professional or adult social care professional. Hardly ‘low skilled’.
We also need them, there are approximately 165,000 vacancies in the social care sector. And this guy wants to cut visas. This is why the caring agency I hire to provide two and half hours of paid help a week struggles to fit that into their weekly rota and charge me a fortune for it.
Among the many flaws in this idiotic idea, is the fact that by 2040, about 1 in 6 of the UK population will already have to balance their job at some point in their lives to provide care to their loved one. They will probably have to give up their job or reduce their hours, losing their pension contributions during that time. If they have to give up their job they will have to claim benefits, and in the unlikely event they the whopping £76 a week of Carer’s Allowance, will be labelled ‘scroungers’ and ‘unwilling to work’ for doing so by the very politicians calling for these cuts. Cutting care visas and encouraging people to have more children will only increase the chances of that happening.
These types of stories are indicative of the total contempt the government has for unpaid carers and the real work they do. We prop up the system and now the government expects even more people to provide the care we’re unqualified to give and that we pay for in our taxes. The only solution is to fix the social care system and the NHS- but that is really hard, unpopular, and will require actual experts to tackle – not power hungry ministers that haven’t got a clue.
These policies will only help to create a nation of poor unpaid carers, which nobody wants. This is not about which political party to support, I don’t care who fixes it. But it needs to be addressed seriously and with a willingness to understand the issues, not make populist claims that appeal to their base. I don’t even care if they use AI to find a way to fix social care – it might also be able to help the government figure out how to get trains from London to Manchester while they’re at it.
Rant over- thanks for reading if you made it this far. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
References :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66998692
https://www.aon.com/unitedkingdom/media-room/articles/caregiving-responsibility-set-to-increase.jsp
Number Eighteen, in the corner 
2 responses to “Go north and multiply?”
The downside of democracy. The peop
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Completely agree with you, this is moronic and shows contempt for carers, for those in need of care, for foreigners, and for childfree people.
Also what a horrible and cynical reason to have children !
This is what happens when you put populist party lines (no social spending, no immigration) above empathy and reason.
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