A week of surprises

Sometimes life can be full of surprises, good and bad. Last week was like that. It was no surprise to me to find that a gin and tonic at the Coldplay concert in Manchester last Sunday cost nearly £8! The concert was great, but food and drink prices outrageous. We stayed over in a Premier Inn. No surprise that we had a good night’s sleep, their beds are simply the most comfortable to be had. Later, on Monday, after what felt like a long day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only were Northern trains running, but they were doing so on time!

Tuesday brought with it the lovely surprise of winning £200 in this month’s Premium Bonds’ draw – usually I get £25, if anything at all! I was also surprised to find that I’m now eligible for a pneumonia vaccination. It’s an age thing. What was even more surprising was that when I rang my GP surgery to make an appointment, the phone was answered straight away and they booked me in to have it done on Friday. Primary care at its best, and of course prevention is always better than cure.

And last week I even surprised myself in agreeing with something that the Taliban have been doing. Quite rightly, they are not the most popular of regimes. Their suppression of women and children’s rights is appalling, horrific and unjustified, and makes it more difficult for other countries to provide much needed aid to the Afghan people. So what had I read that made me agree with something the Taliban were doing? Well, it was reading about their war against opium growers that caught my eye.

Over the past year the regime has been systematically destroying the opium poppy crops and ensuring that the farmers concerned grow wheat instead. They are succeeding too.  Across Afghanistan, the 2023 opium crop has been reduced to less than 20% of what it was in 2022. That is staggering. It is important too. Over 4 million people in Afghanistan have a serious drug problem. Heroin manufactured from Afghan opium makes up 95% of the market in Europe.

It will come as no surprise to readers that growing wheat is not as lucrative as growing opium. Poor people are getting poorer since the ban was introduced in 2022. The Taliban’s main spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid acknowledges that people are poor and suffering hardship and hunger, because of this ban, but also reminds us that the harm opium causes far outweighs the economic benefits. He wants the international community to provide more help. And therein lies the rub. As long as humanitarian responses continue to be linked to political ideologies, such aid is unlikely to materialise. I’m not surprised however, by the logic of Mujahid’s assertion that stopping the opium trade benefits the whole world, so perhaps the whole world should provide more help in return.

Closer to home, and thinking about providing help to others, I was impressed by a report published by the Fabian Society last week. It was a piece of work commissioned by the Labour Party and Unison. I have no political points to make in mentioning it here, it is simply a well written and thought provoking reflection on how to address the social care issues facing the UK. You can read it here. I wasn’t surprised to see the Health Foundation’s response to the report, however.

They seldom pull their punches, and so it was here; ‘the social care system in England is broken and the next government needs to fix it’. The good folk at the Health Foundation estimate that it will cost an additional £6 billion a year by 2030 just to keep social care at its current state. That is, no improvement will be gained in addressing the poor state of social care provision despite having to find this additional funding. And the demand for social care continues to grow.

I know from current first-hand family experience (albeit in Wales) that whilst the demand for social care continues to grow, the availability of residential care places, and social care professionals able to provide appropriate levels of care in people’s own homes continues to reduce. The Fabian Society’s report offers some solutions in addressing this, particularly around aligning social care salaries with NHS salary bands, but again this will need additional funding to be found. Of course, options for reforming social care provision are well known, what appears to be lacking is the political will to actually implement any of them. No surprise there then. Now I’m just a humble blogger and not an economist, but it seems to me that we have to find a very different approach to funding and providing our public services. Just think about the frequent periods of industrial unrest we have seen over the past few months. Whether you agree with the demands being made or not, the sad fact is that such unrest has its origins in our public sector services being very much neglected over the past decade. Such neglect can be seen across all areas of the public sector, not just in health and social care.

There is, perhaps, something important to reflect upon here. The lack of good quality social care tends to be thought about as something that involves older people, the vulnerable and the frail. Or those folk who have complex needs. At one level this is how it should be. I can’t help thinking however, that we also need to consider those who require care at the other end of the age spectrum, our children. Their voice can often be as silent as many of our older members of society. We need to invest in them as well. And you won’t be surprised to hear me say, we need to do this because they are our future. As we look for ways to invest in improving social care, we should equally invest in all our futures too.