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A South London GP friend told me a disturbing story last week. I paraphrase, but this is roughly it. A woman in her fifties called up the surgery. Her elderly and confused father had soiled himself and she wanted to know if the surgery could send someone round to clean him up. “Did you have children?” my friend asked her. She did. He went on: “When they were babies did you ever contact the state to see if it would come round to change their nappies?” She went quiet. Ouch, what a question.
Last week the Evening Standard – now, of course, a propaganda rag for George Osborne’s Remain-inspired end-of-the-world fearmongering – led with the following front-page headline: “Who’ll look after our elderly post Brexit, ask care chiefs”.
I’m still spitting blood at the arrogance and callousness of that question. It summed up all that I have against the Osborne neoliberal (yes, that’s what it is) world-view. And why I am longing for a full-on Brexit – No Deal, please – to come along and smash the living daylights out of the assumptions behind that question.
First, let me answer the question. Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. It is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom. This sort of thing is not something to subcontract.
Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t. The Evening Standard’s headline was the complaint of those who realise that their ‘help’, the Polish or Spanish care worker, might not be available to look after Mum and Dad. OMG, they might just have to do it themselves!
Writing in the Independent last year, Luciana Berger – MP for Liverpool Wavertree and recent Labour defector, and also a member of the Health and Social Care Committee – spoke out against the effect of Brexit on the social care sector. “A massive increase in demand for elderly care is predicted in the coming years. More than 1.2 million older people will need some form of care by 2040, according to the Department of Health and Social Care. That’s double the number of people compared to 2015,” she wrote.
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