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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Polly Toynbee

The blistering speech that tells me Britain’s social care deadlock can finally be broken

A carer with an elderly female patient
‘A decent care service needs to pay care staff NHS rates with NHS-style careers: many home care workers still earn below the minimum wage after paying their costs.’ Photograph: imageBROKER/Alamy

No government in my lifetime has been dealt a worse hand than Keir Starmer’s. Austerity-broken public services, an empty Treasury, a jittery bond market freaked out by Liz Truss and then stricken by the arrival of Trump 2.0 with his bully-tariffs. Now Britain’s ally is setting the Middle East on fire in a murderous war, exploding oil and gas prices. This needs repeating regularly, lest anyone forgets the obstacles blocking this government’s best intentions for change.

One of those good intentions in the Labour manifesto was the creation of a national care service. Louise Casey, respected troubleshooter, was given a commission to review adult social care and solve its impossible dilemmas. She showed her thinking in a blistering speech last week.

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