Labour has abandoned any pretence at trying to break the Mexican stand-off on social care

The Daily Telegraph reports this morning of ‘fury’ after Dame Louise Casey, the woman in charge of the Government’s review into social care reform, abandoned plans for cross-party talks:

“Instead, she has written to opposition political parties and asked them to meet her one-on-one rather than together to discuss the challenges in social care”, the paper says.

Why the fury? It’s fair enough on one level, I guess: Labour first said it was going to do one thing, and is now doing another. But it all feels a bit Potempkin; the Casey Review is – through no fault of Dame Louise – an absurdity.

No, the problem is that putting social care on a sustainable footing would require finding lots more money for it, and the Treasury isn’t prepared to face up to that. As a result, we discovered last month that she has been “has been warned not to ask for more money”, and that HMT has imposed an absurdly long timetable on any changes.

To date, central government has managed to keep social care off its books by making it a statutory responsibility of local councils and sucking the life out of them instead. With that approach now rapidly running out of road, the alternatives are either a) find a lot more central taxpayer cash or b) ask people to contribute towards the costs of their own social care.

Option B is the only one which might actually work, given the general condition of the public finances. But Labour, alas, weaponised the whole idea of paying for one’s own social care very effectively at the 2017 with the election, and thus took it off the table.

Ministers thus have no way out. Objectively, punting the question of social care reform a decade or more into the future is madness; barring some as-yet-unforeseen economic or state-reform miracle, all that will be different ten years’ hence will be that Britain will be ten years’ deeper into its demographic crisis, meaning that social care will be an even more expensive problem than at present and the state will have even fewer resources with which to tackle it.

But lacking the imagination or the courage to actually try and meet the demands of her political moment, Rachel Reeves has once again followed in the footsteps of Jeremy Hunt and retreated into what I previously described as the bad version of long-term thinking, in which the ‘long-term’ is:

“…an indeterminate but comfortably distant point in the future, at which we will get around to taking those difficult decisions once the urgent demands of our present moment – which must, of course, be our immediate priority – have abated.”

So why the outrage from Ed Argar? The Casey Review isn’t real, or at least isn’t serious. In fact, it’s being forced to report so slowly that even the Conservatives’ own laggardly policy review ought to be finished long before Dame Louise’s initial recommendations ever cross the Health Secretary’s desk…

…and that’s the problem, isn’t it.

Social care, like British politics in general at this point, is essentially a prisoner’s dilemma crossed with a Mexican standoff. Nobody can be the first to defect from the fiction that it can all be paid for without finding more money from somewhere, because if they do the other parties won’t be able to resist the short-term ‘Dementia Tax!’ instinct to shoot them in the head.

If Argar and his colleagues came up with a policy on their own, it would be either nonsense or political suicide. When he talks about “the cross-party progress this issue needs”, he means that all the players need to have dipped their hands in the blood for any workable reform to be viable.

Casey holding talks with each party individually, by contrast, must just look, to an understandably suspicious mind, a bit too much like a trap. If any one of them went to Dame Louise with serious proposals (i.e. proposals with losers), they run the risk of that getting out and damaging them.

As such, none of the participants will have much motivation to say anything more useful than the Department of Health’s vacuous promotional jargon that the Review “will start a national conversation, build cross-party consensus and provide recommendations for a social care system that is fair and affordable for all.”

This development is, then, yet further evidence that the Government is giving up on any initial hopes it might have harboured to make progress on actually tackling social care. Having kicked the part where it might have to spend any money to after the next election, it is now getting down to the usual serious business of setting traps for the opposition.

Conservatives can take comfort from one thing, at least: Labour is paying a deep and truly karmic price for its conduct during the 2017 election. It’s only a shame the entire country has to pay it too.