Tory austerity policies may have spared pensions but not social care. Labour has shown no sign of ending the use of housing wealth as collateral, with Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves ditching the cap on social care costs. According to the IPPR, 600,000 fewer people received care between 2008/09 and 2018/19.
There are still 152,000 vacancies in the social care sector, driven by a 30,000-person fall in the number of UK domestic workers in 2022/23. This is helping to create a larger pool of unregulated British and non-British workers. 1.5 million disabled working-age adults could also be missing out on social care.
Allyson Pollock, a public health doctor, presciently said in May 2020 that those who died from Covid would be failed by social care, not the NHS.
Matt Hancock’s unlawful guidance that discharged older NHS patients into care homes to free up 25,000 hospital beds should be the defining scandal of the Covid pandemic, not Tory staffers drowning themselves in mediocre wine.
One aide said care home residents were “near the end regardless”. 59% of those who died in the first wave were disabled. Social murder remains.
Callous economies often win out. People go without when social care – and the people it is designed to support – are framed as a burden and crisis rather than underinvestment being the crisis. Even left-leaning commentators only seem willing to consider age and disability as adjuncts or caveats in their politics, so long as it doesn’t raise their taxes.
Disability scholars like Tom Shakespeare have long argued that not only is impairment exacerbated by ageing, but that ableism is often rooted in this very fear of ageing. Though disability is also socially determined by the ability to work, to pathologise impairment and disability is to distance ourselves from mortality as something embarrassing and disgusting.
Disabled feminists have argued similarly about the constant approximation of frailty with femininity and vice versa. But more strident discourse mongers au fait with ableism in terms of affects or representation may not readily see increased poverty from raising the retirement age or the persistent underfunding of social care as ableists.
The UK’s piecemeal social care system is not the most attractive issue for those who assume pensioners are getting enough resources. ‘Self-care’ is a popular invocation, having long lost any radical roots, but repeated as rote in the 2010s among activists resigned to the realities of exhausted, uncaring, unfunded institutions.
This incantation lands somewhere between a cheery call for a bubble bath and “There’s no such thing as society” Thatcherism. It errs more towards individualised self-pity than Lynne Segal’s vision for ‘mutual care’, or Nancy Fraser’s vision of the ‘universal caregiver’.
Impoverishing pensioners now creates the conditions for future immiseration, as the American philosopher Fraser has argued, inoculating a profoundly uncaring economy which does not properly care for its resources or people and continues to extract the wealth from those on the bottom rung.
Both left and right fetishise non-European countries and people when it comes to social care. The right cites East Asian people caring for their elderly relatives in multigenerational homes. Many on the left say unpaid domestic labour has been transferred to immigrant women and that social care funding is effectively on their backs.
Both overlook how much unpaid care still takes place in the home. Carers UK estimates that unpaid carers save the government £162bn a year. The unpaid carer is usually a woman, but older people are also carers: 21% of unpaid carers are aged 55-64, and 20% are aged 65 and over.
In his 2007 argument for a $1 per-day Global Pension, Robin Blackburn noted that odes to the dignity and respect afforded to elders in other countries exist aplenty, but these don’t equal resources.
A Global Pension would likely reduce not just poverty but the burden on the wives, mothers, and daughters who usually end up doing the caring. Jay Ginn and Liam Foster have argued similarly for the universal pension as a feminist necessity in the UK.
Women, on average, earn a third less than men over a lifetime and have less than half the savings of men while making up two-thirds of pensioners in poverty; unpaid care is a primary cause of this gap. Investing in older people is the best means of nourishing respect for older people.
Political parties present austerity as the only reform to address ageing populations.
What if we saw increased life expectancy (which has stagnated in the UK post-Covid, particularly for working-class people) as something to be embraced rather than a crisis? As something requiring increased productivity and technological gains, and redistribution of resources from guns to butter because social needs have changed?
This would include increased investment in residential care, healthcare, and resources that allow older people to live and work longer. It might also include extending the WFP to disabled people and other groups, as a promise to enable longer lives.
The expectation that ageing Millennials and Gen Z voters will save us quickly becomes base, a faddish cult-of-youth politics. At its worst, generational analysis views any data concerning working-class pensioners with derision or contempt.
If younger people want progress, older people are necessarily reactionaries with time-honoured assets and views to protect. Underlining it is a miserable tendency that roots politics in sympathy rather than solidarity, able to recognise a plight but not a shared humanity.
Jane McAlevey, the late union organiser, was keen to remind people that solidarity will come about through action rather than agreement. Bridging the gap between old and young is not a task for only the most prolific columnists.
The lack of sustained support for anti-austerity movements from older voters in the 2010s was a political and strategic problem rather than a moral one, just as disproportionate youth support for European far-right parties is now.
Posting ‘OK Boomer’ (perhaps OK Zoomer in these countries with strong youth support for the far right) memes doesn’t solve the ongoing social care crisis or burst the housing bubble.
A left that cannot see the commonalities between the young trans person and the pensioner languishing on NHS waiting lists, or the South Yorkshire ex-miner and young black London renter who have both experienced police abuse, is sorely lacking in imagination or rigour.
In her 2013 book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing, Lynne Segal described older women who keep pictures of their younger selves on display, as if the latter are their authentic selves and their older form a mere costume—an imposter. We imagine ourselves with our younger desires as our most authentic form and the potential of old age as a temporary embarrassment.
Millennials like me post sardonic memes about acquiring lower back pain before property. We are not thinking about ourselves as older, who is not with us, or that we might not even be here to receive the universal and means-tested support older people currently receive.
We all grow old apart from early death. If we get there, propertied or not, we would do better to think of old age as a gift than of ourselves as a demographic crisis or burden.
For those who currently do not get to live without pain or ill health, whose ableness will be on a gradient with age, what an incredible thing longer and more meaningful lives would be instead of being condemned to isolation.
We would hopefully find ourselves part of alliances with the new generations rather than discarded, or doing the discarding.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
