‘I haven’t had the time…..’ An excuse that tends to be seen as a lie, even if a white lie. There are 168 hours in a week, full-time work is supposed to take 40 hours or so, sleep maybe 45. Mmm, 83 hours left.

I haven’t had the time to work on ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’ recently, which probably doesn’t matter to anyone who happens to read this, but it feels a failure to me. Well perhaps I should have had the time. Yesterday I went riding for an hour, today we had lunch in the pub. The issue may not be raw time, but uninterrupted time. I do not have uninterrupted time, except when asleep, and the 3am nightly visit of my father’s domiciliary carers interrupts that, not that I mind because he needs their attention.

Life as a main carer for my parents, both in their 90s, is no doubt similar to that of nearly six million people in the UK, 1.2 million of whom care for an elderly, ill or disabled person for more than 50 hours a week. One in five of the 45-64 age group is, like me, a carer (figures from Key Facts at www.carers.org). Millions of frail and incapacitated people need care, showing that rising longevity is not the same as a longer healthy life. I think the consequences of the rising need for care need to be considered in greater depth.

Public spending has to be slashed because of the UK’s debt mountain. There will be less money to care for the elderly and infirm, and this will increase the need for friends and family to devote time to caring. The alternative is for vulnerable people to go without care, to be forgotten, and to suffer. Strangely enough, as I write this, ‘Election Uncovered’ on Channel 4 is considering this very issue: less public money for care is indisputably possible.

Family and friends who care will have to cut out one or several aspects of their lives. First, discretionary time: fewer hours for holidays, meals out, sports, hobbies, leisure.

Next, caring time cannot also be used for paid work, so carers’ incomes decline. This means lower tax revenues, further damaging public finances. Welfare benefits for non-working carers and for the people they look after could be reduced, giving further force to the downward spiral. For those like me who can work at home a lot, the frequent interruptions mean that each task takes longer and longer to complete. Phone calls and visits from health professionals, the chiropodist, the mobile hairdresser, prescriptions to collect, medical supplies to order, pills to give, meals, drinks, entertainment, company, a care rota and back-up rota to organise, to ensure that a carer is present 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is not a complaint, just an observation that people who are carers have to cut their other activities.

Why not rely on residential institutions? Standards of care are already woefully low in too many homes (remember the Gerry Robinson TV programmes on deficient dementia care?). Slashed public finances will mean worse care homes, except for the very few individuals who can afford to pay for private, personalised care. The decision whether to send an infirm person into an institution, or to support them at home, may exact a high price – from those admitted into institutional care, if standards are low, or from their carers if they have to stop work, stop pension contributions, and neglect their friends and other members of their family.

People who are recently retired have, for decades, been invaluable as volunteers in community organisations, also as elected councillors and as selected representatives on QUANGOs (definitions vary, but ‘quasi autonomous non governmental organisation’ is a popular one). A bonfire of QUANGOs might not have a detrimental impact on government, but community volunteers and councillors are extremely important to our nation. As more and more of the fit retired, as well as people under retirement age, need to care for ailing family members and friends, the pool of potential volunteers and representatives will shrink.

It may sound bigoted to the guardians of political correctness, but might it be a mistake to protect the NHS from cuts and to prune harder elsewhere to compensate? This policy could prolong the lives of people like me, but if we need long-term care as a result, who would benefit? Should the artificial extension of life be unquestioned as a top priority? It doesn’t appear to be a question that is asked in government, but I reckon that it needs to be both asked and seriously debated.

The UK’s National Health Service has a £102.3bn budget for 2010-11. Doesn’t look much? £102,300,000,000? The problem with zeros is just that, they convey nothing. Yet £102.3bn is £1,644 for every one of the 62.222m people in the UK in 2010.

No one, apparently, likes to contemplate cuts in the NHS, which as a concept has become a Great Unquestionable, like ‘Democracy’ in the world’s wealthiest nations, or ‘Capitalism’ as a force for good.  In my mind it is long past the time when we should have begun to interrogate these and other ‘Common Sense’ notions that permeate our lives. I am very interested in ‘Common Sense’. If anyone has an hour or two to spare in Didsbury, Manchester, there is quite a bit about Common Sense in my (little read) PhD thesis, to be found in the library at Manchester Metropolitan University, and titled: ‘Lay Inspectors, Educational Values and Policy Change: the significance of emergent outcomes’.

The ‘Common Sense’ that the NHS is too essential to subject to deep scrutiny means that counter arguments will be unpopular. The journey of any belief from startling novelty to general acceptance is paved with persuasion, as summarised by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who noted “pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary” (‘Power: a new social analysis’ by Bertrand Russell, George Allen & Unwin  1938, 1960 reprint by Unwin Paperbacks, p.93).

Given the nasty situation of government debt which could easily exceed the UK’s GDP, if bank bailout money is not recouped, juxtaposed with rising costs of energy and raw materials, and the expense of protecting the nation against the extreme weather events that appear to be a manifestation of climate change, and the NHS’s annual budget of £102.3bn begins to seem one sacred cow too many.

An important issue for me is whether we have a National Health Service or a National Medical Technology Service. A health service would surely focus on preventative medicine, and a vital part of that is the availability of nutritious fresh (and that means local) food.  In reality, though, the NHS has become the source of technological interventions which often keep people alive but not in a healthy condition. I am not anti-technology, but it is a matter of balance. With any technology, we have to ask “just because we can do this, should we do it?” The technology-led approach has turned ‘health’ into ‘illness’, and has closed local community services because of the funding needs of huge medical technology centres a.k.a general hospitals,  which need vast car parks for staff and patients, and which require the consumption of large quantities of oil and gas — as fuel and power — to function.

The NHS, it appears to me, has turned us into a nation of ill people dependent on machines and drugs to try and restore ‘health’, and I think we need to re-examine the purpose, scope and costs of the service.

The same tendency to technology-led gigantism applies to schools, too, but I’ll return to that another time.

Bankers’ ‘talent’ is a burden for taxpayers

Taxpayers control Royal Bank of Scotland.
The liabilities heaped upon British taxpayers, just for the bank bailouts of 2008, are in £ billions, while the expenses of Members of Parliament, which have caused so much anger, are just in £ millions. £1 billion is one thousand times more than £1 million. So surely we should be a thousand time angrier over the financial collapse than over MPs’ expenses? Not a bit of it, maybe because we can grasp the concept of a million, but not of a billion. But grasp the concept we must because we will have to pay back the debts taken out in the name of ‘taxpayers’.
Meanwhile, the rampant greed in the City continues unabated. Big bonuses are back, allegedly to recruit and retain ‘talent’.
It’s precisely this ‘talent’ that got us into our present financial mess, by creating deals with no better purpose than to earn commission for their arrangers.
UK Financial Investments, which is supposed to look after taxpayers’ ‘investments’ in failed banks, approved a pay deal worth up to £9.6m for Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, if the bank’s share price reaches 70p.
This arrangement assumes that if the share price crosses the 70p threshold, it will be due entirely to Stephen Hester’s talent. This is not a valid assumption. Chance events might well propel the share price up, and then drive it down again. Why is it that bankers take the credit (and the money) when share prices rise, but demand to be rescued by taxpayers when the stock falls disastrously? Why is individual effort supposed to cause stock appreciation, but individual stupidity is rarely blamed for failure?
Answers please.

Pay Gap, Debt Cliff

Bankers and their suitcases stuffed with cash! HBOS – the bank that resulted from the merger between Halifax and Bank of Scotland – had 15 directors in 2007, and they sure took a lot of profits as ‘remuneration’. The directors shared a pot of £17.690 million, which if it had been distributed evenly, would have worked out at £1,179,333 each. The bank’s employees received an average of £31,584. Not a bad income, well over the national average – but each director got, on average, 37.3 times more. That is quite a gap.

We know now that HBOS was floundering. Government ‘rescued’ it by engineering a merger with Lloyds TSB to form Lloyds Banking Group, which opened its doors in January 2009. The government – us taxpayers, in the end – had to chip in a few billions of £s here and there to keep the whole show on the road.

Barclays’ directors raked in even more than their HBOS counterparts, a total of £29.273 million in 2007, a mean of £1,721,941. Barclays wasn’t treating the 17 directors at all meanly! Lots of the workers did quite well too, as their mean income was £54,251, but the directors were taking home 31.7 times more.

One of the more abstemious banks in 2007 was Northern Rock. Well, there was a run on it during the year and it was nationalised in February 2008, so it had to show a little restraint. The 13 directors received £3.376 million between them, an average of £259,692. The bank’s staff were not nearly so well paid as their fellows in Barclays, or HSBC, or even HBOS. Their average income was just £20,145 (well, it’s a northern bank, and everyone knows that northerners can live quite happily on scraps thrown from the London table). Northern Rock was verging on the egalitarian, though, as the gap between directors’ and workers’ income was only 12.9 times!

The UK government almost controls Lloyds Banking Group. It does control Royal Bank of Scotland Group, and it owns Northern Rock and the mortgage business of Bradford & Bingley. These banks were deemed too big to be allowed to fail. Their executives (OK, a few have moved on) remain very well paid.

Banks, and bankers, were allowed to get out of hand because government saw its job, its only real job, as helping the economy to get bigger and bigger. Society became the servant of the economy. Who was it who said that ‘Divitiae bona ancilla, pessima domina’ (Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress)? Oh yes, it was the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626, who died owing £22,000.

We owe rather a lot more than that now, as taxpayers. The UK’s national debt was £513 billion in June 2007. In just 18 months to January 2009 the national debt has quite possibly trebled to over £1,500 billion, or £1.5 trillion. We can’t put a definite figure on it because we don’t know exactly how much the bank bailouts and other economic ‘stimulae’ are going to cost us. In round figures, though, £1.5 trillion is £25,000 for every man, women and child in the UK.

Mission impossible?