Is this how the Conservatives dump their grannies?
|
Version 0 of 1. When politicians deploy the language of responsibility you can be sure they’re going to try to shirk theirs. So it was when the government minister David Mowat, speaking on Monday to the House of Commons local government select committee, hit on an idea for solving the crisis in the funding of social care, especially for old people. “No one ever questions that we look after our children... no one says that is a caring responsibility.” And that logic, Mowat said, “will have to impinge on the way that we think about caring for our parents.” So what’s wrong with his proposal? First of all, it infantilises old people and perpetuates the stereotype of old age as a second childhood – at a stroke erasing whole lifetimes of experience and skill. Caring for children and old people is comparable only in the most superficial way, in that bodily needs can become more urgent in the early and later stages of life. Otherwise the sensibilities required are completely different (especially in the case of a parent with dementia), as anyone who has done both can testify. The other thing they share is that most of the caring, for young and old, is carried out by women – often at the same time. As the country greys itself (women having children later, parents living longer), this double responsibility can be as stressful as it is rewarding. Mowat didn’t mention gender – perhaps he just assumed it. If you’re asking families to take on more elder care, how are you going to square this with more women entering the labour market, through choice or necessity or both? I can’t help wondering whether lurking beneath Mowat’s solution is an attempt to transfer women’s work from the labour market into the home. More divorce, smaller families, the necessity of two mortgage-paying incomes, the policy to delay retirement – how do these sit alongside taking on more care for the elderly? Crucially, there are now more women without children than ever: are they expected to look after their ageing parents without any prospect of having it reciprocated by their own children? Even policies such as the bedroom tax, the cost of public transport and the reduction in post-Brexit immigration – all, on the face of it, age-neutral – affect our capacity to look after others. In east Asia, where the Confucian idea of filial piety is enshrined not only in the moral code but also the law, China now has an elderly rights law that requires children to visit their ageing parents – although it isn’t clear how this is going to be enforced (presumably it’s not something that they’re doing voluntarily or it wouldn’t have to be enshrined in law). Young Japanese have coined a new phrase: Kaigo-jigoku, the “care-giving hell” of those who look after their relatives. It’s easy to idealise care but in reality it’s a complex thing – a blend of love and duty, responsibility and gratitude. Many people describe the time spent with an ageing parent as one of the most nourishing: an opportunity to speak the hitherto unspoken and make one’s peace. Yet not all family relationships conform to this template, and even if they do the balance between respect and resentment can be a delicate one. In western countries the “burden” discourse has become increasingly inescapable. In her stirring new book, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (to be published this summer), the pioneering US writer Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that the meaning of the word burden has shifted from referring to the demanding work of care-giving (expressing empathy with the carer) on to the recipient of care. No wonder so many older people worry that they’ll become burdensome, and elder abuse is becoming so common. This week saw a novel version of it: the “granny-dumping” of an old man from Los Angeles with dementia, allegedly abandoned in a car park in Hereford. Beneath Mowat’s rhetoric lies the individualising of care and the state’s growing abdication of its responsibility for the health and wellbeing of old people. It seems that we can’t – in the fifth largest economy in the world – afford for people to grow older with their sense of self and basic human rights intact. A staggering 1.2 million older people don’t get the social care they need – a rise of 48% since 2010. It doesn’t have to be like this. All the evidence shows that old people do much better when they’re socially engaged and supported – when cities and towns are made age-friendly and when public resources are made available to maintain them in their own home. In the long term this also saves money, as well as lives. We’re living, though, not in a “big society” but a small one; ours isn’t a shared society either, only a withholding one. |