MINISTER: BRITAIN’S TOO SELFISH TO CARE FOR ITS ELDERLY

Families ‘don’t look after their parents’

BRITAIN is a ‘selfish’ society where families shirk their duty by ‘outsourcing’ the care of their elderly relatives, a Government minister has warned. phillip Lee, a Gp, said families needed to face up to ‘uncomfortable’ truths about the demands of looking after elderly parents or grandparents, rather than expecting the state to care for them.

He said society had become too ‘selfish’, with help delivered only by workers who were ‘paid to care’. He said the UK was becoming an ‘ atomised’ country that failed its most vulnerable – and it could learn from how the Muslim and Hindu communities look after their elders.

The justice minister also said mobile phones should be regulated in a similar way to other addictive activities.

Speaking about Britain’s failure to get to grips with the effects of

social media and cyber-bullying, he said: ‘Our society is quite sick and no one really wants to talk about it.’ Dr Lee’s hardhitting remarks come amid pressure on ministers to spend billions more to solve England’s social care crisis.

It emerged this week that the vast majority of councils were facing dramatic shortages in the number of care home places by 2022; while home helps said they were still providing only 15-minute care visits due to cuts.

Dr Lee said it was up to families to shoulder more of the burden, and people should not simply expect the state to assume all responsibility for their elderly relatives.

His words could boost calls for family carers to be given tax breaks, or for new laws to enable people to take time off work to look after elderly relatives.

At a fringe event on loneliness at this week’s Tory conference, organised by Age UK, Dr Lee said Western liberal society was to blame for the way the elderly were treated.

He bemoaned the decline of the church for loosening the bonds of society, adding: ‘When I used to do [GP] visits, I would go into residential nursing homes and I would rarely meet a Jew, a Muslim or a Hindu. It’s uncomfortable for me. But in those communities it’s a responsibility that they look after their own; that they care for each other at different stages of our lives.

‘And we don’t do that. We are outsourcing the care of our parents. Why have we gone down that path – is it because we have become a bit selfish?’

Dr Lee, 47, lamented the fact that too many families expected councils to take on duties they should be performing themselves.

‘I want to be cared for and looked after by people who know me and I know them,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see a stranger knocking on the door with a meal. I want to see somebody that I know – a friend, somebody in my family.

‘I think care is much better delivered by people who truly care, not people who are paid to care.’

And he said he feared Brexit could worsen the social care crisis.

‘We’ve chosen to live lives that are fundamentally ludicrous,’ he said. ‘We are putting our families all over the place and we are expecting people – invariably from abroad – to look after our elderly.

‘We are relying on migration – the irony is that the old voted for Brexit.

‘Who is going to look after you when you are old? It isn’t anyone from your local neighbourhood.’

He said that unless families stepped up, elderly people would have no option to rely on 15-minute care visits with home helps with poor English skills.

‘This is not going to be solved by taxing and spending more,’ he said. ‘That is not where you get a solution. You get a solution from people saying, “I had better go and see Auntie Elsie”.

‘As Conservatives there is a huge scope for us to step forward and say, actually it’s not about spending more and higher taxation, it’s actually about saying to people it’s your responsibility to spend half an hour a week with that lonely old lady down the road.

‘It’s your responsibility to knock on that door and say “is everything all right?”.’

He said society had become ‘ increasingly atomised’, with young people obsessed with social media.

‘We haven’t really thought through the impact of social media on society,’ he said. ‘Why is it that we ban cocaine but not mobile phones? We need to take the problem seriously.

‘In the past if you were bullied at school you got a hug from mum or dad. Now it follows you home on social media. Clearly there is an issue here and I think we need to deal with it.

‘ Because our society is quite sick and no one really wants to talk about it.’

‘I don’t want to see a stranger at the door’

WHILE all eyes at this week’s Tory conference were focused on the farcical events surrounding the Prime Minister’s speech, some of the more interesting thinking appears to have been happening outside the main auditorium.

Justice Minister and GP Phillip Lee used a fringe event to claim that Britain is becoming a ‘selfish society’ where families outsource the care of elderly relatives, rather than looking after them at home.

The rhetoric may be strong, but it’s true. The way Britain treats the elderly says something worrying about our values as a country.

Of course, some old people suffer such severe conditions that only the State can provide their care. But other countries and cultures seem less willing to consign their elderly to nursing homes, knowing the most humane welfare system is the family.

If ministers are looking for bold policy ideas – which after the worrying absence of any at the Tory conference, they should be – isn’t it time to offer a tax break to those who care for their own elderly relatives, rather than placing them in soulless homes to be looked after by strangers?

IN a new low for British politics, millionaire Tory minister Alan Duncan claimed this week that the Brexit vote was no more than a ‘tantrum’ by the working class. Should a man with such flagrant contempt for ordinary people really have a place in Her Majesty’s Government?

AND talking of lows, Nick Clegg’s call for people to join Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, with its la-la-land economic policies, in order to thwart Brexit betrays both his party and his oft-proclaimed belief in sound economics. But then the treachery of the man dubbed by the Mail the Madame Fifi of British politics never ceases to amaze.