‘In Response to My Critics’: The Care Debate

Chase Olivarius-McAllister

Yesterday, we received some extremely interesting responses to my post, “Should We Be Looking to the East for Elderly Care Models?”  You can read the whole thing here, but, in short, I argue that because the UK’s population is rapidly aging, Minister Paul Burstow should adopt policies like South Korea’s “War on Dementia,” not measures like Japan’s Hureai Kippu.

One critic, Helen Parsons, writes that “Mr Olivarius-McAllister’s hostility toward Minister Paul Burstow’s proposal is typical of Old Labour thinking: he rejects market-based solutions to social problems like elderly care, even those that are proven successful, because he thinks the elderly should be entitled to equally sub-standard care.”

To clarify, the idea of the “welfare state” first took shape in the minds of Victorian activists and intellectuals.  Institutions like the Fabian Society, trade unions, and the Labour Party agitated for the adoption of a national minimum wage and a pensions system in the nineteenth century.  Though Liberal legislation enacted between 1906 and 1914 lay the foundations, Britain’s welfare system came of age in the aftermath of the Second World War.  Wartime necessities like rationing and detailed economic planning had gotten people used to the idea that government intervention could be beneficial; memories of the human wastage caused by the Depression also remained powerful.  After so much sacrifice, the country did not want to leave people to the caprices of the market in times of unemployment, ill-health, and old age.

I don’t think that “the elderly should be entitled to equally sub-standard care.”  I think that offering Britons anything less than both care and equality in old age is substandard.  And I don’t think this way of thinking is Old Labour; I think it’s old fashioned.

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A second commentator, Elaine Gibbons, rejected my conclusions (and also identified my gender incorrectly.  No offence taken):

‘Going forward, how will we care for our elderly?’ Mr. Olivarius-McAllister provides the most modern of answers to this rather old question: look to ‘the East,’ i.e. Asia, because we ‘the West,’ i.e. Britain and the rest of Old Europe, are in decline.

But the problem isn’t that the UK’s population is aging: the problem is that its birth rate is declining. If British women had more babies, our fortunes and those of the elderly would be reversed.