Squaring the Circle – politicalbetting.com
Squaring the Circle – politicalbetting.com
The facts are stark. In 2021, there were around 11 million people aged 65+ in the UK. By 2040, that’ll hit nearly 15 million. That’s an army of silver-haired citizens, and a growing share will need residential care. The trouble? Care homes are expensive, and someone has to foot the bill. Councils already spend over £20 billion a year on adult social care.
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@YouGov
Latest YouGov Westminster voting intention (17-18 August 2025)
Ref: 28% (no change from 10-11 August)
Lab: 21% (=)
Con: 18% (+1)
Lib Dem: 15% (-1)
Green: 10% (=)
SNP: 3% (=)"
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1957801739828023357
I'd also take issue with your claim the UK has lots of problems. Really it has only one problem - population ageing. All other problems either stem from that or are dwarfed by it.
None of that will be particularly popular, so I doubt you'll see a big bang solution - probably, as with funding the NHS, a system that is permanently about to break down, but politicians always do just about enough to keep it collapsing completely.
It will be the same voters, with the same outcome
They're intellectually unable to take responsibility.
Channel 4 Going Inside 10 Downing Street In Steven Moffat Drama
Sherlock writer Steven Moffat is opening the doors to 10 Downing Street in a drama for Channel 4.
The UK’s most famous residency will be the subject of Number 10, which comes from Moffat’s ITV Studios-owned production house, Hartswood Films.
The show is, in effect, an Upstairs Downstairs-style drama looking to the activities of many people inside the property, which houses the British Prime Minister and their family during their terms. Politics will be put to aside as Moffat focuses on the fictional personalities that make up the home.
Per the synopsis: “10 Downing Street. There’s a Prime Minister in the attic, a coffee bar in the basement, and a wallpapered labyrinth of romance, crisis and heartbreak in-between. Set in the only terrace house in history with mice and a nuclear deterrent, it’s the only knock-through in the world where a hangover can start a war.
“The government will be fictional, but the problems will be real. We’ll never know which party is in power, because once the whole world hits the fan it barely matters. This is a show about the building and everyone inside. Not just the Prime Minister upstairs, but the conspiracy theorist who runs the cafe three floors below, the man who repairs the lift that never works, the madly ambitious ‘advisors’ fighting for office space in cupboards. Oh, and of course, the cat.”
https://deadline.com/2025/08/channel-4-steven-moffat-drama-number-10-1236491676/
Although, on second thoughts...
May I enquire as to why not?
High Court awards temporary injunction to Epping Council to block migrant housing in hotel
Two issues: WRT paying care workers, oddly, unlike with bankers and CEOs of FTSE 100 companies we tend not to be told 'you have to pay the rate for the job (eg £15 million pa for CEOs) to get thr right people'. I wonder why?
Secondly, taper. How is this to be dealt with. Every government all my life has said it is dealing with it. But there is a conceptual fundamental problem, as described here:
The rate for the care worker job is £X per year
Before being a care worker unemployed single parent A received £Y per year in the total value of benefits. Y is less than X but still enough for the family to live on because it has to be.
The extra A gets for working at best is £X-Y, which isn't very much in the great scheme of things.
If they are allowed to keep a good proportion of £Y in addition, this is unfair on single parent care worker B who has always worked and never claimed benefits.
Answers on a postcard to Ian Duncan Smith and Torsten Bell.
America is an unreliable ally even after Trump goes.
Err, that makes the sector very much middle of the road in that regard:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/migrationandthelabourmarketcountryofbirthbasedestimatesenglandandwales
Europe: United Kingdom - 21,959,795 - 79%
Europe: EU countries - 2,345,110 - 8%
Non-EU countries (including British Overseas) - 3,468,760 - 12%
"Council tax bills (already averaging £2,065 a year for Band D) will jump."
Come to Woking:
https://www.woking.gov.uk/council-tax/council-tax-bands-charges
Band D £2,482.03
Remove ILR for any who came in the Boriswave
Leaving that aside, what does it mean to talk about immigration being brought under control? Is it about total numbers? These are falling considerably. If immigration is cut to a quarter of the peak under Boris Johnson, is that "under control"? Or is it about the types of immigration? Is it about asylum seeker numbers (also down) or numbers coming over in small boats (up)?
If immigration comes down, but the cost of care goes up considerably, as per the header, is that what people want?
Personally I think the Dilnot cap got it about right.
The amount paid will come from our home and whatever remains will be shared by our children as their inheritance
How is their economy gearing up to cope?
But rearmament is at last happening ... The wheels were set in motion before Donald Trump returned to office. The pace is not warp speed but it is already changing the Atlantic balance of military power, and that is the larger story behind this week’s slapstick theatrics at the White House.
While Trump still commands the daily news cycle, he no longer commands the West and no longer commands the fate of Ukraine.
Article available here (not paywalled):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/44477f909005f680
Korea will follow next. Then Italy, Germany etc etc.
We all agree it's worthwhile, but the marginal rate ended up as high as it is because Osbourne cut the budget - prompting IDS to resign. If you only change the withdrawal rate it gets to be very expensive with only modest changes.
You can square that circle by cutting how much people receive to start with, plunging them further into poverty, unless you can do that by massively reducing rent levels, perhaps by building x million houses and crashing house prices.
But how do you build x million houses? Governments have had a declared policy of increasing the number of houses built for many years without doing much to meet the shortfall in demand for housing.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/19/high-court-judge-orders-closure-of-essex-asylum-hotel-after-far-right-protests
And TBH 65 is a strange age threshold, albeit the usual statistical one (?) - there are ~1,7 million people 65 or over who are in employment.
They are looking at increasing immigration (from current very low levels). They're keen on robots as a solution to care. Retirement age got increased (to 65). They introduced mandatory long-term care insurance in 2000, 介護保険. There's a focus on community-based solutions.
To quote this paper, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7533196/
The LTCI [long-term care insurance] budget in Japan consists of premiums (50%) and taxes (50%). In this system, every citizen aged 40 years or over pays premiums, whereas the taxes are derived from the national government (25%), prefecture (12.5%), and municipality (12.5%)
It's roughly equivalent to an extra 2p on your income tax when you hit 40.
What is fantastical is to switch policy from being Europe and the world's policeman and not have a proper organised handover transition period.
What is needed immediately is for UK and France, backed by the rest of e-NATO (European NATO needs a name by the way) to make clear that its nuclear deterrent exists for a reason and that this includes the defence of western European interests, just as Russia uses hers to protect her interests. UK and France are not used to this. We are going to have to get used to it.
It works very nicely for the small and pampered home population, and the guest workers are self selecting. It does, however, create a form of apartheid state.
Seems this is likely to cause mayhem but it is a temporary injunction
I guess the downside is that any party proposing such an idea would also be signing its own death warrant.
If the government can go round doing things without a five year court battle, imagine the lawyers who will rapidly be reduced to penury.
When we have a vaccine for Alzheimer's (Shingles + ???) then perhaps things will get better.
Its claim, if successful, could delay and even block deportations of migrants and foreign national criminals, a key plank in Sir Keir Starmer’s policy to deter Channel crossings and reverse the record numbers reaching the UK.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/19/home-office-block-deporting-migrants-data-laws/
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/aug/19/met-chief-rejects-calls-scrap-live-facial-recognition-notting-hill-carnival
Surely everybody will know its there, so if you are wanted for something serious, you just arrive wearing a suitably themed mask.
The burden of care might be cut if the early signs that the shingles vaccine significantly reduces incidence of dementia are confirmed, and meanwhile all us older folk need to be working on our leg strength, which in the longer term is key to keeping us out of residential care.
I guess they'd prefer not to be primary prompted in polling for now so YP doesn't 'stick' eith the public if it ends up changing
Constantly changing your name is for TIGs and Social and Liberal Democrats
What that means in terms of foreign policy isn't as clearcut (Korea, for example, has a very long history of dealing with China), but all of the above have for some time being making moves towards alternatives for arms procurement.
Euro/Pacific cooperation between the democracies is already a thing (Japan's collaboration with Italy and the UK in GCAP; S Korea's various arms deals with Europe etc) ought to be something we actively attempt to increase and formalise.
#self burn 🔥
In the 1990s, the median age of a voter in the UK was 45, so retirement was comfortably in the future for most voters. Now it's 55. So half of voters have either retired or expect to retire in the next 10 years.
#dedicationtoyourward
For those of us to be lucky enough to be on good wages, making a choice between cash and leisure is open to us. On UC, you're likely desperate for every £, even if that is taxed at 70% plus. Sometimes there is an issue with other benefits that are dependent on UC status, particularly in Scotland, and that's why I advocate moving more benefits onto the UC system which is a vast improvement to what came before in terms of incentives.
But if people are turning down work, it's not usually for a lack of a want for cash. What few people want to face is that long-term claimants are often just completely unemployable for multiple complex reasons, and that's going to take a lot more than slightly adjusted tax rates to fix. The rest is to do with various levels of disability, and that's another massive problem to fix.
In any case, the number of people for whom marginal tax rates are a problem is relatively small compared with the vast numbers of people who aren't in work because they are studying, early retired, or caring for relatives etc etc
So you had a 50/50 chance of getting a pension.
If we are more aggressive about prioritising the debts of the elderly over the inheritance they leave we can save ourselves at least £10bn a year now and more going forward. It would not solve our deficit, that is on a truly different and frightening scale, but it would be a significant step in the right direction for once. Carpe diem.
This causes moral hazard, because why save if the state will step in if you have no assets?
So either people will just spend their money to avoid having it taken away to pay for care bills or, they will find a way to give their assets to their children.
Isle of Thanet? Isle of Anglesey? Isle of Grain? Isle of Wight? Isle of Portsea?
Was there not an Isle of Something Independents Party somewhere in the "Thames Estuary" general direction that had some shenanigans a few years ago - Ashfield or Boston Bypass style?
In answer to your second question - suspect you're thinking of the Canvey Island Independents - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvey_Island_Independent_Party
One is our obsession with inheritance- at some point, it flips from human and healthy into something more pathological; a last breath of power from beyond the grave. The other is our general dislike of the idea of paying enough tax to cover the cost of the things we want the state to deliver.
The other difficulty (as I understand it, others may know better) is that the costs of elderly care are very very lumpy. For some, it's not very much at all, whereas for others it would wipe out people wealthier than me. Spreading that risk seems fair enough- whether we do that by individual insurance or just by rolling it into what the state does, paid for by tax.
There is another option where the cost of end of life care is funded by everyone through compulsory insurance or taxes, whether they ultimately need it or not.
Either of these is better than an unmanaged ad-hoc as we have now.
I think few require institutional care before age 75, but the problem remains with the population of over 75s doubling from 2020 to 2040 to 6 million.
I fully intend to be one of them.
I will just say at this stage that things might be worse, financially, than you say in only a few short years as Labour plan to make the care sector their test for reintroduction of sector-based national wage bargaining.
Details are short but the end result is bound to be an increase in the hourly wage and possibly a significant one.
They seem to be piling ahead with this without any indication how on earth the wages are going to be paid for as councils are already either bankrupt or very close. Will central government make up the wage difference? Will social care NI be back?
Who knows.
There is only silence.
(Runs and hides.)
Enjoy your retirement, and spend it on yourself or maybe spend it on things that will help you remain in your own home instead of going into care?
Sorry kids!
Absolutely no chance of it being resurrected now. Wes Streeting, under direct orders from Reeves, killed it stone dead straight after an election in during which he had said he will implement a form of it.
Nothing will change under this one term Labour government except national wage bargaining sometime near the end of the term - with larger costs and no idea how to pay.
The political class has failed again.
The broadcaster’s top brass informed staff about the decision in a memo on Monday evening, telling editorial employees that the show “will not return to the TV and streaming schedule this autumn”.
https://www.cityam.com/exclusive-business-live-dropped-from-sky-news-in-premium-push/
When they don't legally have to run it, Sky News is going to get shut down isn't it.
What about a compulsory 1p on Income Tax for over 50s, to fund it. It could be called National Care Insurance.
If I understand correctly, Putin has conceded that some form (not NATO) of security for Ukraine might be conceded. And while Zelensky has noted that land cessation is constitutionally prohibited, a de facto cessation might not be.
Putin has even agreed to a bilateral with Zelensky, which I don’t think we’ve seen before.
Perhaps there is indeed ground - albeit incredibly narrow - for an agreement.
Without the army of family carers out there the government would have an even bigger problem.
The talk about tax on on death wasn't helpful but some of those opposed to May's solution were doing so on reasoned grounds.
Sabotaging planes and other assets intended for use in Ukraine and other places
They’re a terrorist group. Fuck them.
This moron supports them as it’s a cosy, middle class, obsession.