EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

         

 

Dilnot care commission: In place of fear

It was dismaying to hear No 10 meet this powerful report by murmuring that care was 'complex and difficult'

Fear of death is, perhaps, part of the human condition. But it is a bitter irony that our collective success in postponing the inevitable stirs avoidable anxieties. Foremost among them, in England at least, is being ruined by stratospheric care costs. The Dilnot report reaffirmed the terrible nature of the financial risk which the elderly run, and produced a practical plan for banishing the worst of the fears.

Rich in evidence and pithy in prose, it was dismaying to hear No 10 meet this powerful report by murmuring that care was "complex and difficult". Yes, the byzantine current system defies comprehension and common sense, but that is why ministers appointed economist Andrew Dilnot to head the commission which has now reported. The insight he has applied is in fact arrestingly simple: that the core problem here is the reality that we are all uninsured.

Where a quarter of us will need no old age care at all, and half will incur bills that ought to be manageable above the breadline, one in five retirees will go on to clock up total costs of more than £100,000 – sometimes several times that. It is no use hectoring people to save prudently. No one of ordinary means can afford to put aside enough to foot the biggest bills, which is why a minority see out their days by losing everything they ever had. Mr Dilnot points out that life is littered with potential financial catastrophes, from costly-to-treat illnesses to house fires, but that in all other cases the risks are pooled, whether through the state or the insurance market. With care, however, the market balks at the virtually limitless liabilities involved. The state, meanwhile, tries and fails to muddle through, under the auspices of 1940s legislation which was concerned with humanising the Victorian workhouse.

The consequences are dire – and legion. Frail people are effectively forced to sell their houses, even as councils restrict entitlement so savagely that judges rule the retrenchment unlawful. Nobody knows what they will be entitled to should they need help, so all must live in dread. Everyone agrees that it cannot go on, but then everyone has for years – and yet nothing has happened. Money, of course, has always been the problem, and in appointing Mr Dilnot, a former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the coalition no doubt wanted to make sure it would receive recommendations that were properly mindful of the austere public expenditure outlook. And so it has. But if, as some grumbles emanating from the Treasury now suggest, Whitehall had been banking on Mr Dilnot regarding the deficit as a reason to do nothing at all, then it was sorely mistaken.

The proposition is not that taxpayers should foot everything. There is no delusion about some sacred right to bequeath property. The big idea is rather the community insuring individuals from catastrophic costs in return for individuals paying a very sizeable excess of up to £35,000. Often the state will take that excess by claiming a share in the home. That will be controversial, but so be it. The vast profits made from bricks and mortar must play their part in meeting this pressing need. The point is no one should lose everything. Besides the universal £35,000 cap, that same principle leads Mr Dilnot to propose smoothing the cliff-edge of a means test which poorer pensioners are currently shunted over.

This is in many ways a modest agenda. Questions about the fit with the NHS, excess charges for board and lodgings, and the lunacy of running care homes as property investment vehicles are for another day. But a narrow focus on staving off the ruin of an unlucky minority keeps the price down to 0.25% of state spending. That is affordable, particularly if pensioners' blanket exemption from national insurance is qualified. David Cameron is desperate to prove he can be a social reformer as well as a deficit cutter. Mr Dilnot has provided him with an opportunity that will not be bettered.

Thailand elections: military crackdown rejected

Opposition parties vow to respect the voters' decision to elect Thaksin Shinawatra's sister, Yingluck, as prime minister

It is a strange election where the party that wins an overwhelming majority in parliament seeks the next day to bolster that advantage by forming a coalition with four others. Puea Thai, the party loyal to the exiled billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, won 31 more seats in Thailand's general election on Sunday than its disbanded predecessor, the People's Power party, won in 2007, and this in a race whose rules had been changed to favour the losing side.

The result was a major rejection of the military crackdown last year and all the establishment had done since the military coup in 2006. The incumbent prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva resigned on Monday as head of the Democrat party and army generals all dutifully said they would not interfere. So on the face of it, there was no reason for Puea Thai to have increased its majority from 264 to 299 seats, forming a coalition to secure two thirds of the parliament. But this is Thailand, and anyone who thinks the losing side of generals, royalists, and the senior elders of Thai society are going to play a constructive role in opposition has another thing coming. They will bide their time. Barely had the preliminary results been announced than the election commission said it was investigating claims of fraud, which could disqualify candidates and reduce the size of the Puea Thai victory.

Clearly a truce of sorts has been reached between the two camps, which only a year ago reduced the commercial centre of Bangkok to a battle zone and brought the country to the verge of civil war. The military will respect the results of the election which will allow Mr Thaksin's youngest sister, Yingluck, to form the next government, just as long as the man himself, who lives in exile in Dubai, is not allowed to slip back into the country. Members of Puea Thai initially talked of a political amnesty, which could allow Mr Thaksin, who has been found guilty of corruption by a Thai court, to return. But they have backed away from it since, and Mr Thaksin said he had no immediate plans to return.

For those who have grave doubts about Mr Thaksin (both in terms of corruption and the brutal war on drugs he launched when prime minister) but who also abhor what the old elite have done since the coup, the Puea Thai victory represents an opportunity. It is time to recognise the demands of the rural and urban poor. The Democrat party started to do this earlier this year in a nine-point plan that included expanding social security and low-interest loans to taxi and motorcycle drivers. But it was too late for them. Yingluck's solutions may be populist but a reconciliation will only happen if her voters are part of it.

In praise of… Fulneck

There's more to this small Czech town than a Wimbledon champion

The Czech town of Fulnek (population 6,000) has produced a dazzling tennis star in Petra Kvitova, winner of the women's singles at Wimbledon, and that is praiseworthy enough. But there is more. If President Obama pauses to survey the White House, and indeed the Capitol just along the street, Fulnek can claim modest credit there too. The link is the Moravian Brethren, Protestant missionaries who emerged from a century's underground work in the Habsburg empire in the early 18th century as the "hidden seed" of the Hussite movement, brutally persecuted all those years before. Moravians from Fulnek and elsewhere were renowned for seeking out those at the bottom of the heap and standing by them; they also created outposts which thrive today. Two such are Fulneck settlement, birthplace of Len Hutton, and Fulneck school between Leeds and Bradford, which numbers HH Asquith and Diana Rigg as former pupils, and which also holds the Washington link. Schooled in Moravian virtues of hard work, scholarship and enterprise, Benjamin Latrobe, a Fulneck headmaster's son, made a modest reputation as an architect in Britain before emigrating to the United States in 1795 and becoming a great one. He was a key member of the team which built both main symbols of the US government and is credited with the humbler but practical installation of the country's first domestic bathroom. Tennis was not played in his day; but he would undoubtedly have admired both Ms Kvitova and that roof.