Britain’s army of unpaid support has been excluded from the political conversation. I didn’t expect to find hope in a book by a party leader
The word “care” sits in a strange place in UK politics, somehow combining an increasing sense of urgency with a maddening and very British vagueness. Most of us know that there is a worsening care crisis. The reasons, we are told, are to do with demographics – more old people, put bluntly – and the seemingly eternal lack of money, or governments willing to spend enough on the kind of care most politicians fixate on: the sort that revolves around either residential settings or home visits, done by the anonymous mass of people we call “care workers”. This category of human being is now in the news as never before: a lot of them tend to come from abroad, something that Westminster has now decided is intolerable.
What a mess this issue is, and how many other matters the debate about it omits – not least the care needs of hundreds of thousands of adults who are learning disabled. But by far the biggest gap in our understanding centres on about 7 million unpaid carers, whose lives are explored in a new book. Strangely, it has been written by a frontline British politician; stranger still, the best bits are among the most compelling, moving pieces of political prose I have read in a very long time.
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