A few weeks ago Dave Middleton wrote a well researched blog on the crisis in social care, made all the more powerful by the personal story of the difficulties in securing adequate care for a parent with dementia. Read his blog. I will try not to repeat the excellent points he makes.

Today the iPaper has a report on the “perfect storm” facing social care in the absence of any coherent plan from the government. It makes for grim reading. Social care is underfunded, staff are underpaid and many are moving into jobs in hospitality and retail where pay and conditions are better. There are over a 100,000 vacancies. EU staff who went home are unlikely to return and the government’s post Brexit immigration policy means they would probably not be allowed in anyway.

Thanks to Covid, morale has never been lower. Denied adequate PPE, care workers are traumatised after 40,000 residents and several hundred care workers were killed when the government discharged sick and untested people from hospital back into the community as the first wave threatened to overwhelm the NHS. Despite the success of the NHS vaccination programme many fear the worst when another wave of Covid and the flu virus return this winter.

And it is not just about care homes for the elderly. Nearly half of the adult care sector is for working age adults with disabilities, especially the learning disabled. One third of expenditure is for domiciliary care. People like my wife who spent many years as a home carer, visiting people in their homes on zero hours contracts and with no pay for travelling time between clients.

The situation is made worse because, although local authorities are responsible for delivering social care they are caught in a double whammy. They depend on government grants to fund much of their expenditure and this has been drastically cut during the years of austerity. At the same time the privatisation of much of the care sector means that they have to buy into care places provided by private companies that are milking the sector for all it is worth. Ian Birrell, who has skin in the game as the parent of a disabled child, is a journalist who has investigated the businesses who are happy to pay executives two hundred times the going rate for front line carers and export millions in profits to foreign tax havens.

The answer is obvious. If the welfare state introduced by the post war Labour government is ever going to deliver on its promise to provide care from the cradle to the grave we need a National Care Service modelled on the NHS that provides social care that is free at the point of use. I thought this was Labour policy. Starmer backed the motion at Labour Party conference in 2019, based upon proposals by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA).that called for a new National Independent Living Support Service (NILSS) for England that would provide a universal right to independent living that was “enshrined in law”. He reiterated his support for free social care in the Labour Party leadership campaign in 2020.

But this week Labour frontbencher Thangam Debbonaire ruled out this policy on the grounds that it would “just give the Tories a stick to beat us with.” According to Disability News Service she claimed that such a policy would cost over £100 billion a year and exceed the NHS budget. Well, for a start the direct cost of all adult care in the UK is only £24 billion and the annual NHS budget is £130 billion. So we are floating fact free here. I am not holding my breath waiting for Starmer to sack her though. She obviously represents current Labour thinking.

And this is what sounds the alarm bells for me. How does Labour ever expect to win power if it is so afraid of doing anything that might give the Tories a stick to beat us with? The Tories say and do things we disagree with and we fight back and try and win the argument. It’s called politics. We will not win by trying to avoid any controversy in case the Tories and their media chums use it against us. They will always find sticks to beat us with. We win if we have bigger and better sticks than them. Sticks like Care Home Crisis, 150,000 Covid deaths, corruption and cronyism around contracts for PPE, billions wasted on track and trace etc.

The left should never be afraid to show that we care. One of the reasons for disillusion and demoralisation amongst voters is the belief that Labour does not care; that politicians are all the same; that they are only in it for themselves. Socialists do care. On current evidence the Labour leadership does not care and, instead of going after the Tories, is running scared.