For those of us old enough to remember the fun days of Margaret Thatcher, this week has had the invigorating element of déjà vu. The Prime Minister’s speech about renationalising utilities, taking homes off neglectful landlords, establishing a National Care Service, tackling the triple lock, electoral reform and, possibly, reversing Brexit felt like a return to the days when politics were politics, not optics or presentation. Mind you, Andy Burnham is good on the optics. The palpable emotion about his father’s death was human and real. As for the nostalgia vibe, The Sun warned against “a return to the 1970s”… yippee!
These are all big issues. Alas, no one had a kind word to say about Theresa May, who was the last to grasp the nettle of social care — John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s lefty shadow chancellor, claimed he “can’t remember” what he had to say about that. As I recall, it was to bill her proposals a “dementia tax”. Burnham, by contrast, spoke of a National Care Service “free at the point of use” which is a nice way of saying we’d be paying for it upstream.
