Weak and Wobby May Does Massive U-Turn over ‘Dementia Tax’

This also shows how much pressure and desperate the Tories are feeling from a resurgent Labour. In her manifesto four days ago, ‘strong and stable’ May said that she intended taking the value of people’s houses into consideration when assessing the amount they would be charged for their social care. This would lead to people having to take out ‘equity release’, in which their houses would be sold and the money used to pay for their care, while allowing them to remain as tenants.

Florence, one of the great commenters to this blog, has pointed out just how nasty this policy is in a comment she posted to an earlier piece I did about it. She wrote

Equity release is not the same as insurance. Using equity release to pay for care is already available and has many times been shown to be the worse possible use of a house for the elderly. They are essentially unpaid mortgages where the interest accrues along with the original debt, so any capital increase in value is eaten up by interest and charges. The resident can be forced out of the house at any time. Instead of banning these deals the May cabal want to force us to use them.

Insurance will only be available to the young and fit or through workplace schemes. No one will insure a retired person.

Not surprisingly, large sections of the population did not welcome having the government force them to sell the homes they saved for throughout their lives. With the result that May has now made a U-Turn so fast, that she’s left skidmarks in the road, if not in her underwear.

It’s a very quick U-Turn indeed, as only this morning various Tory talking heads were appearing on breakfast TV defending it, saying that the Tories were showing resolve in coming to grips with Britain’s aging population. Now she’s telling everyone she’s going to put a cap on the amount they will be expected to pay. Even though her ministers, like Jeremy Hunt, have been saying all week. She’s also gone on the offensive – and to me, she’s always been very offensive – and accused Labour of scaremongering.

But, as various people on social media have noticed, it’s May herself who appears scared. Or ‘frit’, as the former Leaderene used to say in her native Grantham patois.

Mike’s posted up two videos of her speaking, stating that her own fear is evident from her body language and tone of voice.

One person has posted a picture of a backbone, with a note beside it saying ‘Wanted for Theresa May’. Marcus Chown also posted a photograph of a jelly, to show how weak and wobbly May is. Chown’s a scientist and science writer, who’s written for New Scientist, and published a book on the Cosmic Background Radiation, The Afterglow of Creation, far back in the 1990s. But you really don’t need the Hubble Space Telescope or Jodrell Bank to see how desperate May and her fellows now are.

She’s now telling everyone that she’s going to keep her new promise to cap charges for social care. And the Daily Mail, like the Tory lapdog it is, has issued an article hailing her as an ‘honest politician’.

No, no she isn’t. Not remotely.

Among the various promises and pledges she’s broken are her support for ‘Remain’, which has now definitely been ditched in favour of Brexit; her promise to raise National Insurance contributions from the self-employed; she claimed she wanted to put workers in the boardroom – that went very quickly; and her stated resolution not to hold a snap election. Along with a pledge to reduce the sugar content in children’s foods.

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/22/dementia-tax-u-turn-theresa-may-is-a-weak-and-wobbly-conservative-in-chaos/

As Mike states in his article, it’s not a complete list.

In fact, May’s party lies frequently and shamelessly. Remember when David Cameron, May’s predecessor, was telling everyone that the Tories would ring-fence NHS spending against cuts? How he, IDS and the rest of the Tory faithful claimed they were trying to protect the NHS for New Labour’s closure of hospitals up and down the country? These policies were ditched almost as soon as Cameron got his foot in No. 10. As was his statement that his would be the ‘greenest’ government of all. That was ditched along with the little windmill outside his house, and replaced with a huge support for fracking and other environmentally destructive policies.

And May’s new pledge about capping the Dementia Tax is, in my opinion, another lie, from a party of liars.

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UKIP’s Leaflets in Cheltenham: Printed in Germany

According to today’s Gloucestershire Echo, the party’s leaflets for their campaign in Cheltenham were printed by a Bavarian company, Onlineprinters, at Neustadt an der Aisch. Which kinda makes a mockery to the party’s slogan of ‘Believe in Britain’.

UKIP’s spokeswoman, a Mrs Simmonds, said that it was a simple business deal, as the Gloucestershire printers couldn’t provide the same quality and price.

The article’s at http://www.gloucestershireecho.co.uk/General-Election-2015-Cheltenham-UKIP-s-Believe/story-26325765-detail/story.html

So much for UKIP’s patriotism, but it does show you their real values. They have absolutely no interest in protecting the country economically. Indeed, they seem to stand four-square behind the Tories’ privatisation of Britain’s assets, which have been sold to companies outside the UK.

What they are really against are mass immigration, and, of course, Britain’s own working class. Hence the demands to remove workers’ rights like maternity leave, sickness pay, paid holiday.

As for criticising the Tories for their ‘broken promises’, this is mendacious coming from the Kippers. They promise to provide another £3 billion in funding for the NHS. As Nigel Farage wants to replace it with an insurance based system, and Paul Nuttall and other senior Kippers have said they want to privatise it, the reality is that probably the NHS won’t see any money from them at all. Except in so far as a temporary boost in investment may make it attractive to the highest bidders.

Vox Political on the Tories Empty Pledge for Extra NHS Funding

On Saturday, the Tories declared that they were going to add an extra £8 billion to the NHS budget by 2020 if they are returned. When pressed by Andrew Marr on his show about where the money would come from, George Osborne repeatedly refused to say, and instead gave evasive non-answers about the state of the economy instead. He also gave assurances that it had all been correctly costed, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Labour have released a video of this section of the interview, which the good Mr Pride has put on his blog. He had accompanied it with a clip from the classic Newsnight interview, when Paxo repeatedly asked Michael Howard a question, which the then head of the Tories refused to answer, and hummed, ha-ed, and bluffed instead.

Mike over at Vox Political has also posted his critique of Osborne’s claims in the post ‘Tory NHS pledge is ‘fantasy funding’’. This begins

The Conservative Party must be getting very desperate indeed.

Faced with the failure of the plan to belittle Ed Miliband, the Tories are making a belated attempt to take some of Labour’s policy ground with a promise to provide £8 billion extra, every year, for the NHS.

From where?

The Conservatives have already told us they will be squeezing the economy by (at least) £30 billion over the next five years – if they remain in office. The National Health Service is ring-fenced from those cuts, we are told, but that hasn’t prevented real-terms funding from falling during most – if not all – of the Parliament that has just ended.

The Tories had no intention of adding funds to the NHS – or at least, they didn’t until today.

Despite claims that the health service in England alone needs another £8 billion in order to cope (the shortfall is £30 billion but NHS boss Simon Stevens reckons “efficiency savings” – cuts – will cover £22 billion of it), the Conservative Party had been hoping to keep it quiet and let the public service quietly starve while private, profit-making firms strip it of its most lucrative sources of funding; the services that attract the most money.

Like the plan to attack Miliband, this was a mistake; Labour has campaigned forthrightly on the needs of the NHS and the public has responded strongly.

So the Tories have wheeled out Jeremy ‘Misprint’ Hunt to announce a funding commitment that they don’t have the ability to honour.

It is exactly the kind of fiscal ineptitude of which they were accusing Labour, before the other party publicised its fully-funded plans for government.

Mike also refutes Hunt’s claim that the Tories have increased funding to the NHS. They haven’t. As the table from the National Statistics Authority shows, it’s actually been below intended funding, not above.

He also shows Hunt’s claim that the Tories have turned the economy around to be equally mendacious. Well, not exactly. Not if you believe the exact opposite of what they’ve said. They claimed that Labour had produced the depression, and that now, thanks to them, the economy is expanding. In fact, the economy was growing thanks to Alistair Darling. The Tories, on the other hand, have managed to shrink the economy.

Mike therefore concludes that What we’re seeing is fantasy funding – building castles – or rather, hospitals – in the air.

Judging the Tories on their record, they certainly won’t be improving health here on the ground.

Mike’s article can be read at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/04/11/tory-nhs-pledge-is-fantasy-funding/

In fact, as I commented on my reblog of Tom Pride’s post about this, there is a way to increased effective funding of the NHS and make massive savings: cut out the waste of money that is the Private Finance Initiative, the internal market and the outsourcing of NHS treatment to private firms. The bureaucracy involved in this waste’s billions, as well as causing massive inefficiency and waste.

On the other hand, it does provide a nice, juicy income to Tory donors, and the private healthcare firms which 92 Tories and Lib Dem MPs either own, or are employed in. Cameron, IDS and Clegg really won’t want to upset them, especially as they might need to find a few more jobs after the election.