pollytoynbee

Solving this neglected crisis requires money. The problem is: so does every public institution starved of funds since 2010

Indignation fatigue makes it hard to keep track of the many public service failures, so social care has fallen from the public eye since Covid – though it goes on getting worse. Its failings block more hospital beds with elderly patients who can’t be released because there’s nowhere for them to go. More people needing care find rising barriers of ever-higher criteria, leaving them with none. Quality is so appalling in some places that councils in England have spent £7.5bn since 2019 paying for care rated as “inadequate” by the regulator. All this is laid out graphically in a report, Support Guaranteed, published today by the Fabian Society.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting and the trade union Unison commissioned the report to lay out a roadmap to a new National Care Service. This is the right time for Labour to explore radical policies, planning how to implement them, as centre-left thinktanks did in the run-up to 1997. It doesn’t commit the party to a policy, but it does the research and the thinking, ensuring it is ready for power. The report shows what good care should look like, the order and priorities for improvement and how to do it – when funding permits.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

While ministers look to the Telegraph for policies and Nadhim Zahawi fights for the status quo, Labour has a bold, serious vision

Governing parties in their death throes thrash about, grasping for life rafts and hunting through old lists to recapture the tried-and-tested vote-winners of yesteryear. The campaign by more than 50 Tory MPs and the Telegraph to abolish inheritance tax is a prime example. Didn’t it work its magic once before, when George Osborne spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in 2007 by promising a £1m threshold? Surely, that means it will work again in the Conservatives’ hour of desperate need?

This time, Labour is not spooked. Far from it. Nothing could be more comic than the multimillionaire Nadhim Zahawi leading this campaign, the man whose only memorable moment in his brief chancellorship was being sacked for failing to declare an ongoing investigation into his personal tax affairs. A party of zillionaires campaigning against a tax that only the likes of them need to pay looks like clueless insouciance. It shows how far their feet have drifted from terra firma. Yet again, their trusty Telegraph has led them madly astray – as it always does.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

His iniquitous austerity programme left the population sick, vulnerable, and unprepared for a pandemic

The bells tolled at 4pm today, the deadline when every shred of evidence would be handed over by law to Heather Hallett, the retired high court judge. The government set up the Covid inquiry, ordained its wide remit, gave its chair legal powers to command whatever evidence she deems necessary, but then balked at obeying it.

Public attention will focus on the contents of those WhatsApps and notebooks. What were ministers and officials saying to each other? Is Dominic Cummings right that Boris Johnson said “let the bodies pile high?” Other forms of callous cynicism may be exposed if we discover that ministers knew “eat out to help out” was a plague spreader and put the economy before safety. More will be revealed about fast-tracked mega-contracts for cronies, and about those who were heroes among the good scientists and doctors. Ministers’ tone will set the context for all they did, as bereaved families watch hawk-eyed every step of the way. This battle over admissible evidence and black-ink redactions is only the first struggle among politicians hoping to preserve their reputations. By the final reckonings, whatever the blame and praise, these actors will have left the political stage.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Public opinion is turning against the super-rich. Will it take a general election for the prime minister to realise?

The prime minister sincerely hopes, as he said last week, that we’ve “moved beyond judging people by what’s in their bank account.” Is that so? Attitudes to wealth and inequality are confusing and often inconsistent. But Sunak’s phenomenal fortune seems deeply unhelpful for his electoral prospects.

Those in his stratosphere have prospered exponentially, especially in the past decade, according to the latest Sunday Times rich list. Their gravity-defying golden era, untouched by the banking crash, Brexit or the pandemic, only this year suffered a blip. Sunak, the first prime minister to feature, and his wife, Akshata Murty, are listed at £529m, down from £730m last year. It’s hard to comprehend such numbers. The pair lost £500,000 a day – a day – for 12 months, yet even that is too little to touch lifestyles in this hyper-realm.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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It wasn’t just luck that steered the Guardian columnist to Oxford and into a media career ... She reflects on the subtle mechanics of class (and an early encounter with a naked future PM)

Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening. Good liberal parents teach their children to check their privilege – useful modern phrase – but it swells up like a bubo on the nose. There’s no hiding it.

I can summon up the childhood shame at class embarrassments. Aged seven like me, Maureen, with her hair pinned sideways in a pink slide, lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower. They were at the other end of Lindsey, more hamlet than village, half a mile down the road from my father’s pink thatched cottage set in the flat prairie lands of Suffolk, where I spent half my time, the other half in London, shuttling between divorced parents. I envied Maureen for what looked to me like a cheerful large family tumbling noisily in and out of their ever-open front door. They never asked me in, so I would hang about the door waiting for Maureen to come out and play.

There’s no shortage of people who want more children. But under the Conservatives, parenthood is punished

Miriam Cates, MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, launched her own culture war at the National Conservative populist rave this week. Her central point, which she called “existential”, was the need to stop the falling birthrate, which she said was threatening British culture. “If you want to be a national conservative, you need a nation to conserve … As conservatives we want to preserve our nation and our heritage.”

On the baby drought, I agree with her, but for very different reasons. I share none of her explanations nor her remedies – though I agree the lack of babies is “a symptom of a serious societal malaise”.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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‘Boring’ Keir Starmer is more radical than you might think, and as the local elections drubbing showed, he’s already bringing home the votes

How rare it is to be able to pinpoint the day you witnessed the winds of change sweeping away the old political landscape. As I wrote just before the local elections, I felt that great doorstep surge in Lightwater, in Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency. Sure enough, those angry Tory voters did desert his party in droves, turning three forever blue seats Lib Dem yellow and giving the Liberal Democrats control of the council.

What’s Gove’s response to his constituents’ rebellion? He ignores it, heading off to the wilder shores of rightwingery that has just been rejected, to speak at the National Conservatism three-day jamboree in Westminster. This low-tax, small-state religio-populism, which has much in common with the Tea Party movement, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, is on another planet from Gove’s voters. With other senior colleagues who also attended – some fresh from another Tory rightist rebel conference at the weekend – they reveal how little they have absorbed of views expressed through the ballot box at the local elections.

Despite Tory promises, 7.3 million people are waiting for an operation. Frantic activity in the government’s last days can’t correct its fatal decisions

The NHS waiting list in England for hospital treatment has just broken its own record, rising to 7.3 million. Just before the data dropped, the Tories issued yet another murmured apology for missing an NHS waiting time target. A promise to treat all those who had been waiting 18 months for an operation by April had not been met – with about 10,000 in that category still in line, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, admitted. Expect many more of these confessions – this one sneaked out under cover of loudly announced plans to try to improve access to GPs.

What chance of any significant cut before the next general election to the gigantic waiting list? Ask health economists and analysts, and the outlook is grim. “Vanishingly small,” says Anita Charlesworth, the director of research and economic analysis at the Health Foundation. “Close to zero,” says Nigel Edwards, head of the Nuffield Trust. “I have no doubt they will miss their targets, with more than 10% of the population waiting for treatment.”

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Other European royals would never have risked a display on this scale. From the much-mocked pledge of allegiance onwards, Charles’s gamble has gone terribly wrong

The king never said: “Who will rid me of this troublesome republican?” Of course he didn’t. No doubt he wrung his hands with woe at the sheer idiocy of the police arresting the head of Republic, Graham Smith, and others as they unloaded harmless “Not My King” placards on the morning of the coronation. What a gift to their cause. A letter from the Met had warned them “tolerance will be low”, but it never said it would be at absolute zero under the new anti-protest laws.

The homemade sign that may have captured the mood of many read simply: “Don’t you think this is a bit silly?” Oh, but this is what we do so well! We invite the world to see us in our lavishly gilded splendour; parading the largest military display for 70 years, as the commentators boasted over and over, so that no visitors would guess our army is a fifth of its size at the last coronation.

Nursery education is in crisis, schools and FE colleges neglected. Only by funding these properly will Labour improve standards

There’s been a lot less hoo-ha about Labour’s retreat on abolishing tuition fees than some expected. Large numbers, even among students themselves, think paying for their own degrees is fair: YouGov yesterday found 50% of them pro-fees with only 30% wanting the public to pay through general taxation.

Turkeys voting for Christmas? One higher education expert suggests to me, “Students tend to be progressive,” and there is nothing very progressive in these hard times about spending billions on those already destined to be higher earners.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

An avalanche is coming. The voters I met are abandoning the Conservatives over lying, cheating and Brexit

“Were you still awake for Raab? Or Hunt? Or Gove?” On the morning after next year’s election we may be asking each other that, remembering the magic early-hours moment in 1997 when Michael Portillo lost his seat in Enfield Southgate, north London, symbolising the earthquake that brought down the Tories after 18 long years. Imagine the shock of Tory A-listers’ seats tumbling in the forever Tory fiefdoms of Surrey.

I had never imagined it, so what I discovered while canvassing with the Liberal Democrats last weekend in Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency was terra incognita to me. Before, there was no point in following the fortunes of forlorn opposition candidates trying to knock down impenetrable home-county blue walls. There is now.

The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless, a worthless vacuum shrouded in ceremony

“Not My King,” say the yellow T-shirts of the anti-monarchists TV cameras may swerve around in the coronation crowds. But he is our king, willy-nilly, like it or not, as he and his family are our dependants. The Guardian’s deep dive into the royal family’s finances shows our monarchy costs a fortune, more than anyone else’s in Europe.

The Borbones of Spain cost a mere £7.4m a year, while we pay our Windsors a very pricey £86m. And that’s before we add in the roughly £40m a year in revenues from their Duchy estates – adding up to £1.2bn over the years. That’s not much really, monarchists may claim. Out of £1tn in annual government spending, the royals’ consumption of taxpayers money is a mere bagatelle, a fleabite.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The PM and his chancellor thought they could hide the greed in plain sight, but focus groups show voters are aware – and angry

“Welcome to the pensions gold rush” and cheers for “The ultimate inheritance tax dodge”. Tory newspapers’ money pages whoop up the “super-charged” pensions tax giveaway to the wealthy: “The bigger your pot, the greater your savings.” Today, Labour forces a vote in the Commons against the chancellor’s surprise gift to the rich that removes any limit on tax-free pension contributions. These huge pension pots can be handed on free of inheritance tax to generation after generation unto the end of time – or until a Labour government abolishes the policy as soon as it gets inside the Treasury.

Pensions advisers are being inundated with calls from wealthy savers “looking for ways to protect their nest eggs from the risk of a Labour government”, says the Daily Telegraph. The rich are shifting other assets into pension pots to save tax now, but the biggest draw is that their pensions have become the best escape from inheritance tax. Why do this? Jeremy Hunt’s excuse was to stop senior doctors retiring once they reached their tax-free pension limit. How many of them? Here’s the shocker: only 105 left the NHS voluntarily for early retirement last year, according to the government’s own figures. How easily he could do as Labour proposes, and make a special NHS pension plan for them, without this great bonanza for all highest earners. His cover is blown.

From longer waiting lists to discouraging nursing applicants, the costs are huge – for patients and the service itself

When the mighty Royal College of Nursing walked out on its first ever national strike, there was never a doubt that the government would fold and offer a pay increase to NHS staff. Nurses could never be conveniently branded as “militants”, though at first, pathetically, the Tories tried it; nor did that epithet stick to the ambulance staff, physiotherapists and the rest who went on strike. Why did ministers waste all this time, with all those lost appointments and operations, inflicting extra suffering on patients while lengthening the politically damaging waiting lists?

It was blindingly obvious that NHS staff would require a better offer for this year when inflation topped 11%, as well as for next year. After the Covid clapping, after the nightly scenes on television news of staff struggling heroically in dangerously hard-pressed A&E corridors and understaffed wards, their case was undeniable.

Jeremy Hunt has announced reforms to childcare, pensions and disability benefits. What do they mean for the economy?

“Are you and your family better off than you were 13 years ago?” Ask yourself this, Labour says, echoing Ronald Reagan. Of course not. Living standards will fall and every public service will continue to decay. The government can expect few thanks for preventing another monster rise in energy bills, when people are still paying twice as much as a year ago. Headlines on falling inflation will impress few when voters find prices don’t fall, but keep climbing. “You could have been even worse off” is not much of a slogan.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Rational reforms of our wildly unjust tax system could harvest huge sums. But don’t expect Jeremy Hunt to listen to the experts

Was it that Mayfair launch of bottles of Bollinger at £350 a pop? Was it flicking through glossy newspaper supplements with their pages of hideous watches costing hundreds of thousands? No, surely last week’s top shocker was watching both Shell and BP CEOs’ pay double to about £10m each, profiting from the slaughter in Ukraine.

These budget-week reflections, amid a wave of overdue strikes, echo a recent report by the FT’s astute data-cruncher John Burn-Murdoch, that “Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people.” The tyranny of averages hides the way we live now, though any reader of this paper, or indeed the FT, will have a weary sense of deja vu about our grotesque and economically dysfunctional inequality: earnings for the top 1% have accelerated since the start of the pandemic. UK plutocrats rank proudly fifth in the world for mega-wealth, but our poor have 20% less than the poor of Slovenia.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

I’ve visited Pen Green nursery many times, and now it faces huge cuts. Its plight shows why Labour needs the life-changing radicalism of the Sure Start years

An award-winning children’s centre in Corby, Northamptonshire is about to be hit with an estimated 70% funding cut from its local council, demolishing all that it’s famous for. It is the culmination of the 13-year destruction of Labour’s Sure Start programme. I have been visiting Pen Green over many years; it is considered a beacon and model for children’s centres, training thousands of early-years teachers and childcare specialists, and visited by people from all the world who want to copy its success.

This wilful destruction hits one of the most deprived parts of Corby, a Labour town now swallowed up by Tory North Northamptonshire. The council is taking the money to spread among three nurseries in less deprived zones, a depressing reminder of how much more damage the Conservatives can still do in their swan-song remaining months. Under threat before, Pen Green was rescued by a former Tory minister but the children’s minister, Claire Coutinho, has told Pen Green she won’t save it.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

A newly restored drinking fountain commemorates my ancestor. We need more to tackle the horror of so many discarded bottles

Enough contemplation of this government’s misdeeds: today I thought I’d take a break from rogue prime ministers and cabinets, a breather from their damage to the public realm. Instead, to enjoy a miniature item of good news, I attended the re-opening of a beautiful Victorian gothic water fountain in Wimbledon, south-west London, that has just been restored. Its ribbon was cut by local children involved in its current purpose: to urge people not to buy plastic water bottles but to refill their own bottles here.

I was there because the fountain was erected in 1868 in memory of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Toynbee, otologist and ear-syringer to Queen Victoria: he died young in his laboratory experimenting on himself with chloroform for tinnitus. He was a radical local campaigner who fought to save Wimbledon Common from the rapacious Earl Spencer’s attempt to privatise and enclose it. He set up the Wimbledon Village Club, a working men’s institute for edification, entertainment, refreshments and a library, in much community use now. Family history records that his rigorous selflessness included dragging his nine children across Wimbledon Common on Christmas Day to make them donate their Christmas dinner to a Travellers’ encampment. The plaque on the fountain says that working men of Wimbledon and those “interested in the public good” paid for this memorial.

The prime minister is boosting MPs’ morale with a pub quiz. Bonus question: name three things the government has improved since 2010

Awaydays are a special kind of employee hell, but imagine the awfulness of Conservative MPs compelled to be together in Windsor for two whole days to contemplate one another and their future.

Team-building would test the skills of any awayday service offering trust-creating rope climbs or collaborative raft-making: try pulling together this rabble of sworn enemies and cabals with myriad acronyms, while anxious northern red wallers engage in a tug of war with the southern discomfited. Paintballing might suit them and break-out sessions will come naturally.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The calamity of an EU-UK trade war, primed by Boris Johnson, might now be avoided. But Britain remains as damaged as ever

Dither, dawdle and delay: the deal has been waiting there “on the cusp”, but at last the patient European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, arrived to sign. What caused the hold-up? In Brussels they feared that every passing day allowed Brexit fantasists to further rally their troops. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak prevaricated in fear of his headbangers and the Democratic Unionist party held him to ransom by paralysing the government at Stormont.

But before everyone plunges deep into Northern Irish politics, the details of the protocol and this deal’s diplomatically subtle wording, remember this: all the deal does is prevent Brexit turning into the trade war that Boris Johnson built into his hand-grenade protocol bill. Slight easements on the Irish sea border and better relations with our neighbours still leave Britain and its great Brexit calamity much where it was, but at least no worse off.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist