Imagine your house is on fire, and when you dial 999 the call handler suggests you try putting the blaze out yourself. Resources are tight, you see, and demand high, and the service increasingly relies on volunteers. Or perhaps your child’s maths teacher is off sick. The headteacher texts and asks if you can leave work to explain algebra to the class. It’s your family, after all, so shouldn’t you be the one to help?
The idea is ludicrous of course. And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the almost 6 million people in the UK who are unpaid carers for sick, disabled and older relatives. While we rightly wince at headlines of DIY dentistry and patients on NHS waiting lists crowdfunding for surgery, it has long been normalised for family to fill the gaping holes in the social care system.
Or a horrific one, obviously.
Is the state there to fill in the gaps between society’s activities? Or should the state do everything and society fill in the State’s cracks?
“Unpaid”
Well familial and fillial duties spring to mind.
However, many carers are paid and those that are not can be, if they know what form to fill in. It is called Attendance Allowance and is designed to prevent cared and carers falling into penury ( buying soup or soap ). The patient receives the money and uses it to buy their own care or recomensate the volunteer carer.
Certainly most medical consumables can be provided free of charge through prescriptions.
We’ve just been through the whole process with my old Mum.
Yeah the “unpaid” thing is interesting. Lefties are obsessed with money, mostly other people’s, but also in general. Imagine thinking of charging your own family for things.
…like housework.
We found very quickly that this whole experience was turning out very expensive.
The burden largely fell on my sister who had to go part time on her job and take a cut in pay, which left her in considerable difficulty.
The nice lady from Age Concern filled out the AA forms and told my mother that this was a classic example of what the allowance was for, because it would not be sufficient to cover ‘proper’ cleaners and carers, rather to help family members cope.
Guardian columnists want the state to wipe their arses for them, they are so infantilised.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been employed by the state and never wished to be…
Funny she’s using that particular example… Used to happen more often than she realises..
Not *really* often in highschools, but there were call lists of peeps who went on to get an edumacation in [subject] and could and would fill in.
Used to be *very* common in the polytechs, where the Old and Experienced either did Boss-Approved courses ( and some light recruiting…) or moved from the Daily Grind to Grinding Thick Young Skulls as a late-career move.
That was, of course, in the days where education and experience actually mattered, and they hadn’t Introduced the Must-Have Mandatory Socialist Brainwashing Course to “qualify” as a Teacher yet…
They’ll be trying to charge for housework next. Oh, wait…
There’s a pattern here….Campaigns for wages for housework, state-funded care of the elderly and disabled, abortion on demand, decriminalisation of late abortion, state-funded childcare, free contraception and assisted suicide all seem to be designed to help wimmins escape their biology and the apparent constraints of the patriarchal family. So the social cancer of feminism leads inexorably to socialism…
The whole thing just shows their entire mindset.
They want everyone to do everything for them.
Teach your kids algebra? Any halfway intelligent person should be doing that anyway. Same for making sure your house doesn’t burn down. And if it starts, put it out yourself, before it gets to the point where you can’t. The fire people are there for when things go awry beyond reasonable control.
Self-reliance is the definition of adulthood.
Caring for family? It’s a given. What else is the point of family other than to care for each other?
Long rider says it well. They’re just infantilised.
And the problem is, they think everyone is like them and needs coddling. Or worse, they look at those of us who are more independently minded and are jealous or scared or both, and want our freedoms taken away.
“Do it yourself!” And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the millions of people who raise their own children.
… so far. They’re working on it.
Fair enough. I’ll look after me and mine if the state (and its various statelets) stops stealing every 19s 6d of every quid. That includes pauper councils and at the fuel pump.
Thought not…
I would be happy with the state nicking 50p out of every pound if only they spent it more wisely.
10% is good enough for God, why should the State get more than that? Of course they think they are better than God.
Actually God doesn’t take any of it (unless you volunteer). The law on tithing is that you should consume one-tenth of your harvest “rejoicing before the Lord” (but one year in three you should give that tenth to the Levites/church and the poor). Tithing is all about reminding you to be grateful, not about taxes.
We’re currently meandering down the west side of France and parked up overnight next to some excellent playground facilities. My wife commented about the facilities the French (and Germans) have in most small towns and villages.
i pointed out that they pay a lot of tax, and then thought so do we.
(For the military historians were in the small town of Rom, it was the intention but while here I paid my respects to these guys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bulbasket)
If you’re heading down that way, try the beach at La Porge. Miles of soft white sand, big Atlantic rollers & hardly any people. And a very good campsite near the beach You can get the ferry over to the peninsular from Royan. Also on the Gironde, the campsite within the castle at Blaye. When I was living in Bordeaux I used to like going to Arcachon, weekends. It’s where Sharpe’s Siege is set. Although I don’t think his fortress existed.
Thanks, bis, I’ll suggest it to the wife but she’s not really in to beaches. Might make a nice break though.
… and the service increasingly relies on volunteers.
Me: What percentage of American firefighters are volunteers.
Grok: While volunteers make up about 65% of individual firefighters, they staff the vast majority of fire departments. Roughly 82–85% of U.S. fire departments are all-volunteer or mostly volunteer (often in smaller/rural communities protecting about one-third of the population). In contrast, career firefighters are concentrated in larger urban areas and protect about two-thirds of the population
Huh. So one of Timmy’s “the state there to fill in the gaps between society’s activities”, then. Seems to work for them. At least, I don’t see swathes of American in flames (apart from Los Angeles last year – one of those, you know, ‘career firefighters’ places).
Maybe not the killer point the author thought it was…
Much the same in the UK – though volunteer firemen are diminishing, many rural areas have always been covered by volunteer units.
So the rest are staffed by conscripts?
It’s no different to expecting the state to pay for care homes so that kids can inherit their house.
Having seen many state employees there are not many cracks I’m inclined to fill in.
Ah. Once referred to by the drummer in a band I played with as “grouting”.
Drummers, always trying to squeeze in a fill.
Talking of drummers, why can’t we have a PM with some character like this?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cre12n72nwno
Quite.
What financial support do we owe the millions of people propping up the care system?
£0.00. Nothing. Zero.
I’m not unsympathetic, but it’s NOMFUP, and she lost me as soon as she claimed “we” (she means you) “owe” something to other people for existing.
Like many Blokes, I get paid £0.00 for being a father, husband and a provider and £0.00 in benefits in exchange for paying a sickening amount of income tax every year. Clearly, nobody owes me or my family a living. In turn, we owe absolutely nothing to strangers taking care of their own relatives. So Frances can fuck off with the language of obligations and debts.
The thing I don’t trust is the spending in the “care system”.
Like so much else that government gets its hands on, the cost just goes through the roof. A mountain of bullshit regulation happens, all managed by well-paid middle aged women. Rather than grandad moving in with his loving children who considered all the things he needed.
And it’s all really about the Servant Problem. Women want to do pointless fannying around jobs making sure a care home has ticked the right boxes on Form 11B, pretending to be special. So instead of cooking, cleaning, looking after Grandad, men get taxed up the arse. The money goes on their wife’s stupid job, and she doesn’t have time for Grandad. And that leaves a gap, so let’s fill the country with cheap unskilled workers from Asia to do the care work. Cheap as in now. Not cheap as in, when they start getting sick and want pensions.
Fuck knows when this is all going to blow up, but paying for those cheap immigrants is going to require even more cheap immigrants, Ponzi-style.
Isn’t that pretty much what the police do?
Actually the police are worse; they’ll tell you they can’t come out, but it’s illegal for you to try to fight the fire yourself.
It’s not true that coppers are all fat, useless, piss-stained cowards tho.
Some of them are on Ozempic.
A fire broke out at the boundary between my inlaws house and the police house next door, (this was a long time ago).
The mother in law called the fire brigade and though they arrived promptly we had it out shortly before they arrived. They squirted the side of the shed for good measure and I suspect for fun.
Then along came the copper from next door asking if it was caused by one of our family group celebrating there having discarded a cigarette. As none of us smoked this was a non starter so he ambled off. The fire chief had a quick look round and quickly noticed the evidence that the coppers kids had been making a camp deep in the hedge. “I’ll have a quiet word with him” he said.
What? They should tell you help is on the way, even if it is 4 hours out?
Imagine you call 999 to say someone’s heart has stopped, and the call handler suggests you go grab a coffee until the ambulance arrives because members of the public are completely incapable of wiping their own arses without help from the state.