An exodus of social care staff to better-paid jobs in supermarkets, retail and hospitality is fuelling the worst NHS crisis since records began. The Times has more.
Leading doctors told the Times that the “frightening” situation in A&Es was now worse than during the Covid peak but said the solution was to “give money to social care – not us”.
Social care is due to receive only £5.4 billion of the government’s new £36 billion package for healthcare reform, funded through a rise in national insurance that was introduced this month.
NHS chiefs warned that the “bottleneck” in hospitals would deteriorate further unless social care capacity was increased so that patients could be safely discharged from wards.
Medical organisations said it was vital that carers receive a pay rise so they earn more than they would “stacking shelves in Tesco”.
Some 410,000 staff quit social care last year. Vacancies in the sector have almost doubled in the past year, with one in ten posts now empty – a shortage of about 160,000 staff.
Widespread labour shortages and the cost-of-living crisis means staff are being lured to jobs in supermarkets with higher wages, while companies such as Amazon are offering “golden handshakes” of up to £3,000.
This has reduced capacity in care homes, with four in ten refusing to take on new admissions – meaning elderly and vulnerable patients end up stranded on hospital wards.
NHS England figures show a record 13,000 patients a day are taking up beds because they cannot be discharged, creating a logjam in hospitals and ambulance services that is “costing lives”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Many people have claimed that this crisis has been caused by the Government’s insistence that care home workers had to be jabbed from November 11th 2021 as a condition of remaining employed. That may well be a contributory factor, but it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th.
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Social care was hammered because of the mass sacking because of the vaccination mandate. It has always been a bottle neck, but it has deteriorated.
During covid all the care homes near me closed and are now being converted to……. LUXURY APARTMENTS. Where have all the residents gone? I know Matt handcock killed a fair amount but surely not that many
How do we find out how many?
I think that Will Jones managed to find this.
Some are just luxury care homes. One where I worked on an ‘add-on’ building project a few years ago got stalled (after I left my engineering consultancy firm) when the establishment in question was hauled over the coals by the regulator for many (bad) failings.
Apparently then the owners sold the old building (nice but not really suited Manor House) and built a smaller new, VERY upmarket car home about 50m away.
I bet that won’t be housing ordinary old folk.
As an aside – notice how all the cheapie (‘savers’ etc) foods in supermarkets are the ones with all the ‘shortages’ at the moment? None of the expensive brands are affected. Rather like the parts shortages and cars.
Funny how crises (including manufactured ones) never affect the rich and powerful.
We need to remember though, that many/most/all luxury care homes are willingly occupied by people with decent pension provision, paid for by themselves (with employer contributions of course).
It represents a good use of their pension as most residents are past spending their money on clubbing and exotic holidays. Many are also funded from the proceeds of them selling their properties and enjoying their final years with no responsibilities.
It reduces the burden on the state and in my experience, the one my mother in law was in, was well appointed and well run.
We also have to remember that we boomers were amongst the first to routinely contribute to pensions as part of a working contract so the reliance on the state is not as onerous as it might have been.
I also discovered recently that the means by which to convince your children to save for a pension is to write your Will and include them in the process.
In one glaring moment of reality they are compelled to deal with the prospect of your death, however many years away it is, and their own future. It was a real, and emotional, wake up moment for our grown children, and us.
Nor do I mean the £60 bargain bucket Will writers, I mean a proper will, written with the aid of a reputable lawyer. Expensive(?), but having been through the cheap version in the past, I now understand some of the complexities of my family’s life and the need to address a variety of subjects so our death doesn’t become the burden my surviving parent’s deaths was to me.
You might think your estate automatically goes to your children, but it doesn’t. Like everything else in life, our government has it’s tentacles in everything. A Will is a means by which you can, at least, largely exclude government plunder.
And a word of advice. Never, Ever, appoint lawyers as the sole executors of your Will. My father did that his estate was financially rinsed by his lawyers, and we had no legal right to challenge them whatsoever. In fact, when I did, they threatened to sue me.
Trust your children to manage your affairs. If they screw it up beyond what you express in your Will, they only have themselves to blame.
Also if one of you goes into care (assuming a permanent relationship) before the other without them writing a Will, that’s when our ‘benevolent’ government swoops to seize assets (houses, investments, pensions etc.) of the surviving partner to pay for the care of the other. A Will can legally ensure that needn’t be ruinous.
My local Aldi has been out of the cheap tinned tomatoes for ages. The more expensive branded ones are available though.
And I thought Aldi only sold cheap tinned tomatoes!
You’ve never been into an Aldi then, have you? A Waitrose fan, perhaps?
I seem to remember a story that supermarkets sometimes sell cheaper products (eg milk) at below cost price to tempt shoppers in who will then buy the more expensive products as well where the supermarkets make up their money. Would that explain it?
Most cheaper foods are imported from a subsidised EU. I have noticed that our farm shop has also got empty shelves. Food grown and prepared locally seems to be readily available still. It’s not the poorer classes they want to get rid of first. It’s the elderly (useless eaters who know and understand history) and the middle classes who can save money and own beautiful houses. These people take up too much room and are in the way of the NWO where no one owns anything.
Matt Hancock killed far more than we realise. Two very concerned funeral directors spoke up at the time. One ended up in hospital and was offered a cocktail of experimental drugs which he refused and has now gone very quiet presumably to protect his family. The other had his licence taken away. John O’looney was rescued from hospital by an American doctor who he had been in contact with. A close shave ……
Life long Carers were arbitrarily sacked by overbearing and demanding Mangers – even when fully jabbed – I know one personally .
It seemed any excuse would do.
Our societies are broken travesties.
Across the world, children are subjected to experimental injections and woefully inadequate educations, designed primarily to inculcate passivity and obedience.
Old and vulnerable people are treated as refuse, to be stored somewhere until they die; placed in the “care” of those who services are rated as being less valuable than stacking shelves in a supermarket.
Our governments waste billions of our money on demeaning and harmful products and processes; and show no interest in providing genuine peace and safety, let alone the capacity to do so.
While all this is going on, time and energy is wasted in absurd, punitive examinations of other people for their degrees of virtue: a term which has now come to mean conformity to whatever those currently dominant declare to be right and proper.
The temptation is to give up, and make as happy a life for oneself as possible, in spite of it all.
But that means accepting a blinkered life, determinedly not looking at future prospects, or at the present outside our own doors. That works for some, at least in the short term; but not for others.
I don’t believe that defeatism is an option.
If anybody has any idea of what can or might be done to create lands fit for humans let alone heroes, please share it.
Thank you AE for such an eloquent, considered and inspiring reply.
All the best.
No doubt that’s why there are now calls for letting more migrants into the country to ‘pick up the slack’.
I think we need some migrant MP’s.
Unless, of course, they pay them more as prison warders. More of those may soon be needed.
The social care worker problem predates CoVid, but is the outcome of other Government policy. Minimum wage increase.
Care home workers are at the bottom of the pay scale. Put mandatory minimum wages up, employers respond by decreasing the head count to reduce the payroll expense.
Businesses have to make enough, or the capital goes elsewhere. But it is not just private care, NHS budgets are affected by minimum wage increases too.
We live in a joined up economy. Politicians being economically illiterate don’t understand that.
Wouldn’t ‘bottlenecks deteriorating’ be a good thing? We’d hardly want them to flourish.
‘Nothing to do with covid’ – lots to do with covid, well the ludicrous actions of the Government in reaction to it. Being a Registered Care Manager who has abandoned the industry because of vaccine mandates, having to wear PPE that has no evidenced based application but is hideously horrible to wear. Try it for eight plus hours. Did it once, never again. Could not even consider stopping family seeing their loved ones and being complicit in sacking staff for refusing to be vaccinated. All the Government’s doing and not as if they were not warned. It’ll will get much, much worse I fear. All hopelessly broken – well done Johnson, Handcock. Javid and all.
Almost nothing to do with Johnson, Handcock. Javid and all. They were told what to do by the activist medical ‘experts’.
I would like to see some of them taking the blame…
Social care is hideously broken and the reasons are diverse and way beyond ‘activist medical experts’. The ongoing crisis in social care is historical and predates covid and I would need to write a mega comment to even begin to deconstruct the issues here and what I have witnessed over many years. Yes, so called ‘experts’, the bureaucrats that afflict health and social care, have a considerable burden of blame. Ultimately the buck stops with the decision makers and if they are puppets to their advisors etc. they are no less culpable.
The ‘decision makers’ don’t care. If THEIR loved ones are in hospital, no-one is going to prevent THEM from visiting. No-one’s going to make THEM queue for vital surgery. No-one will stop THEM from accessing a GP.
And so on.
Hmm, but the buck stops here… they may have had crazy advisors (certainly out of control) but they still listened. On here, we all knew the truth – why not Johnson et al? Weak leadership and I’m amazed Johnson hasn’t resigned. He was given a shitty stick but he should have resigned on principal.
Principles? Johnson? If he has any at all, they’ll be to do with self preservation and spreading his genetic material far and wide.
True, I have zero faith in him doing the right thing.
Is it not possible that Johnson & Co hired these experts because they were willing to tell them what the WEF and WHO told them the public had to hear?
They made the decision and other equally if not better qualified scientists told them not to so the blame and shame lies with them as well as the official advisors
Nuremberg 2.0
Nuremberg 2 – arranged and conducted by whom, though?
And even those ”medical experts” are puppets – self-serving, greedy, amoral, arrogant people. Dishonourable and easily bought.
My sister in law is a qualified nurse and was working in a care home until last June. She left as her employer introduced vaccine mandates several months before the government deadline. The employer has recently offered her the old job back, without her being vaxxed. She turned the offer down flat and is now working in a warehouse where she is happy. The warehouse, she says, is packed with all sorts of well qualified people who have left employment where they were being pressured to take poison by needle.
A very efficient warehouse, for sure.
I know a dyslexic pimp who opened a warehouse.
Your sister in law is wonderfully sane; her government insane. Her employer has been treated appropriately.
Any journalist worthy of the name would be fascinated by this, and follow it up – if only in search of a prize-winning story. But where are they?
Every man/other has his/their price.
And of course this kind of movement of workers will result in a levelling down – which I suppose is what’s wanted by the puppet-masters.
Sad is it not, yet hardly surprising. So very many able people have done the same and continue to do so. Alas the underlying reality is there’s so much unmet need as a consequence. Becomes a moral dichotomy, which I struggle with. I have run out of adjectives to express my loathing for those that have brought about this abomination.
If like me, and you always suspected covid is renamed flu/cold, the actions of the government appear nothing short of demonic.
I’d be intrigued to know if you have any insight into the administration of Midazolam…
I do and have serious concerns about its use. That’s yet another can of worms. It can be very effective, but context of use is critical. You are obviously aware that it can have serious outcomes if not properly used.
Johnson and pals have got away with it, and are still getting away with it. A £50 fine and it’s chortle, chortle, chortle. How nice to have friends in high places. Not to mention all that luvvly jubbly money from the Russians.
The crisis has without any doubt been created by the Government’s ‘Emergency’ Covid policy .How can anyone even dispute that?
The question is simply whether by accident, incompetence or by design.
When you look at the plans for the Health Service ‘by design’ certainly has some traction – a suggestion that would have seemed inconceivable and outrageous just two short years ago.
It seems they are in the process of arbitrarily withdrawing the NHS service as we have known it and have merely bi-passed the political system and the Commons.
There are serious issues for democracy in MPs allowing Johnson to carry on running the country under ‘Emergency’ Legislation .
For example, when is Ofcom’s media censorship of openly discussing vaccines , their efficacy and vaccine injuries going to be overturned ?
(Comment today from a female friend ( ex Royal Navy) visiting a Hospital A &E Dept- she could not even understand what staff were saying as so few of them spoke adequate English).
My GP is the same. Pakistani, thick accent. I’m not sure he understands what I’m telling him either.
How did it come to this?
Ashkenazis.
Seriously.
I believe the polite term is rootless cosmopolitans
I bet half the staff nick the toilet paper from the NHS hospitals and take it for their own homes, to supplement their meagre wages.
Interesting. When I was in hospital recently all spoke decent English, and my doctors (if I can get hold of them) speak perfect English. Guess it varies by area?
The demise of the NHS is yet another example of regulatory capture by ‘commercial interests’ over several decades.
The NHS budget of what, 120billion? is up for grabs as the bluest of blue chip investments. The COVID Scamdemic and the actions of Governments, Banking, Big Pharma, Big Tech MSM and the rest, tell you how this is going to play out.
Crocodile tears about old people don’t signify, when they’re prepared to jab your children for profit.
When Bliar pinched Brown’s thunder over increased NHS funding, they’d already bribed GPs into giving up their monopoly some years earlier. They believed GPs, or the services they provided, could be done equally well by trained nurses, pharmacists, physician’s assistants and the like.
In many cases this was true and in some cases done even better, because protocol driven care in chronic disease means you’re more likely to get important messages across, and for example, my Diabetic Nurse would always know a damn sight more than me and I would ask her advice and be thankful for it.
But if you’re seeing 40-odd patients a day, many for the first time, and for 10 minutes only, you need more than a computer algorithm (although using the web for information for patients was invaluable) and for me it boiled down to Neighbour’s Dictum. Don’t just say something, sit there!!! Because it’s always in the history, if your doctor can shut up long enough to listen to it.
if you can get to speak to one, that is. Let alone see one.
And Savage Jabber’s 10 year cancer plan? Another one?
Clown.
Dido Harding and her hubby have been trying to sell the NHS off for years – not a secret.
“she could not even understand what staff were saying as so few of them spoke adequate English” – haven’t you heard that ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ is what gives the country its strength?
Won’t be long ’til the NHS signs are replaced with ‘Lidl Medical Services’ or somesuch.
I’d have more confidence if Lidl or Aldi were running the NHS compared to the ex bankers and current failed management – indeed even the 2 Rons could manage the NHS better
I think it is a little disingenuous of Toby to claim in the headline that it is nothing to do with Covid, when a large number of care staff left or were sacked for not being vaccinated “against” Covid.
I think the exclamation gives it away …. sarcasm!
I am a bit slow on the uptake, however Toby’s Stop Press rather suggests it wasn’t. I’m confused.
I think we agree to be unsure until and when Toby clarifies ….. Toby????
“Widespread labour shortages and the cost-of-living crisis means staff are being lured to jobs in supermarkets with higher wages, while companies such as Amazon are offering “golden handshakes” of up to £3,000.”
Absolute crap, Savage Jabbit could help solve this overnight with reinstatement with backpay of all those sacked because of the jab mandate. Of course he won’t because he’s a pos.
pos? Pakistani Of Standing?
Permanently Overzealous Shitface.
So we open the door to India to get a trade deal…..
Another one of Thatcher’s chickens coming home to roost. We used to have convalescence homes where patients discharged from hospital were able to recuperate and benefit from physiotherapy and occupational therapy before returning to their homes. They were closed by Thatcher and that’s why we’re seeing bed blocking today.
I don’t know why you’ve been down voted for that, it sounds (sounded) like a very good idea. The trouble with this government is they are more than happy to splash the cash, or rather, waste money, on things like unused PPE, Nightingale hospitals and the like, for which we will never see a return, yet something useful like a convalescent home would cause massive teeth suckling about the cost.Think how much the government is spending housing illegal immigrants by taking over whole hotels – for healthy young men who are mostly economic migrants. How about taking over a hotel for the recovering British sick who have paid into the system all their lives and to whom the government really owes a duty of care – charity begins at home and all that. I have a friend who has been stuck in hospital since January – they don’t know what to do with him and seem to have no will to find him a care home as he can no longer care for himself. The system is totally broken.
Margaret Thatcher ceased to be PM in 1990, 32 years ago. What stopped Major, Blair, Brown Cameron and May from reversing her policy?
Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Blair!
They were closed because they were little more than death camps. We also used to lock the mentally ill up in asylums. I can’t count the number of escapees I scraped off the railway lines around Woodilee Hospital.
As Beowulf points out, Thatcher’s successors, ‘caring’ socialist governments did nothing to improve matters. Indeed, they largely made them worse.
They didn’t bloody QUIT, they were bloody SACKED for claiming sovereignty over their own bodies.
Exactly. Passed with barely a murmur.
Is there any proof that care home workers were ‘sacked’?
Yes.
Heart Inflammation More Prevalent Among Vaccinated Than Unvaccinated: Study
https://www.theepochtimes.com/heart-inflammation-higher-among-vaccinated-than-unvaccinated-study_4420652.html
By Zachary Stieber
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Option one –
You are old and you are falling apart, pharma pumps you full of meds you don’t really benefit from so that you are semi sedated, you are a bit demented so you may or may not recognise your family members on any given day. You are going to be put in a ‘care home’ because you can’t even wipe your own arse any more, you may be locked down at any moment, heldin solitry confiemment and injected with poison by government medics at any point.
You can live (exist) like this for two or three years but doing so will more than absorb any wealth you acrued during life.
Option two
You get to decide when to call it a day before the horror of option one kicks in and you can decide to be ‘put to sleep’ much like you would a beloved family pet that you love too much to allow to suffer any further.
Why is option one the only legal option?
Option three, midazolam i.e. option 2 decided by someone else.
Why do you only give two options?
Both of which are bollox. Had anyone gone near my dementia suffering mother in law with a needle that was not discussed with us, they would have had the same jammed up their backside.
Nor were we alone in that contention. MrTea assumes we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the care of the people who cared for us into adulthood just because they go into a home.
The only case of an ‘overdose’ of drugs I actually know of was when my mother was dying of cancer and a succession of courageous Nurses turned up her pain relieving morphine pump over a few weeks until she finally passed away peacefully, free of excruciating pain.
I’m an ex cop and was frequently called on to witness the final moments of someone’s life when a doctor couldn’t be contacted. I also watched doctors in tears at the loss of patients who were more than just patients. Many had known and cared for them for decades. They lost friends.
I recently spoke to a carer who had moved from a home into the hospital. She told me she earnt 50p above minimum wage as a “supervisor” (senior carer) in the home she worked in. She didn’t get paid anything extra to work a night shift or a bank holiday or a weekend. It’s absolutely scandalous. Who would take a backbreaking job, lifting patients for 12 hours at a time, day and night, for minimum wage?
GP practices are also going to find themselves struggling with recruitment if there is a continued push towards evenings and weekends. GPs get away with slightly underpaying by having attractive hours compared to hospitals…
You can’t flood the country with millions of third worlders and expect it not to depress wages. We can add that to the list of things verboten to discuss. The government admits to 4.5m over the last ten years. It will be twice that. These are the very jobs affected by this kind of activity.
“Diversity is our Strength”
Is it really, when the ‘doctors’ in hospitals can’t even speak English? Where have they studied? Are they really qualified?
When have you ever met a doctor practising in the NHS who can’t speak English?
What a lot of shite.
Be explicit. Are these legal or illegal immigrants you are talking about.
I don’t suppose there are many doctors sailing across the English channel in RIBS.
US insurance companies were reporting a 40% increase in death claims amongst the working age population for 2021, the year of the jab.
This is simiar to four or five Vietnam war death tolls in just one year.
The insurance companies have never before experieced anything like this, if the death rates are up 40% what are the injury rates up by.
Now what warp speed product was pushed on the working age public in 2021, I’m sure there was something novel they were really keen to shift.
Was it veganism?
Insurance companies don’t have their own agenda of course.
Funny how insurance companies, universally condemned as parasites, are rolled out as ‘evidence’ of medical malpractice when it suits a narrative.
Social care is always the “poor relation” Private sector care staff – vaccine mandate: NHS staff vaccine mandate dropped. Extra money (at any time) NHS gets lots, private sector care services get buttons. Clap for NHS staff, crap for private sector care staff.
It has been like this for more than 10 years. Maybe it takes more “under pressure” whining from the NHS for someone to actually realise the basic problem resulting from under-funding private sector care homes and home care services (often because some prejudiced decision maker thinks it just feeds profits).
The “vaccine” mandate may have recently been revoked but it’s important to realise that staff have been treated appallingly.
In “normal times” the employer would have been dragged over hot coals for the threats and bullying they applied to coerce their staff -many having worked in the industry for decades- into being jabbed with the black gunk.
Who would stick with an employer that treated them so bad? Especially if elsewhere pays better.
I deliver shopping for one of the big supers. I go to a few different care homes where I have seen, on the doors, notices that all visitors – workmen, hairdressers, tradesmen etc must have proof of being fully jabbed. It would seem many care homes are making up their own rules anyway. BTW – still pure, myself!
The Stop Press is a hopeless non sequitur. Those hounded out in November, or many of them, probably think that such treatment, followed by the usual government post-damage volte-face isn’t an incentive to rejoin. That’s assuming the social providers aren’t working their own restrictions, prompted in part by insurance cover problems.
What comes out of the NHS is the usual bleating and handwashing, tempered by the ever so generous redeployment of funds on other than Taylors times X, diversity managers and the rest.
We have to have a serious debate about the state of the NHS removing all emotion from the discussion otherwise we’re going to be in a horrible, horrible place sooner rather than later. It’s not a discussion primarily about money either.
Several million people on waiting lists of indeterminate length for cancer appointments and who can’t afford to be treated privately are in that horrible, horrible place already. And yes the hospitals monitor waiting lists carefully so they know know fairly accurately p how long the wait will be but won’t say in the interests of expectation management, or arse covering just plain bureaucratic bloody mindednesses.
Primarily government intervention. The medical community were instructed to conform. Wrong, but that’s another discussion.
They cold have objected, voiced their opposition, resigned or otherwise rebelled. Did they?
No as the environment doesn’t encourage questioning. Quite the opposite as we’ve read about those health care professionals who have been treated as heretics for suggesting the pandemic response was a bit off.
Political meddling and using the NHS as a political weapon is a key part of the problem. My neighbour is German and her recollection is that the government aren’t allowed to meddle in their health care system. Not sure how true that is.
It was Labour that started the trend of bashing the opposition using the NHS.
So yes, stopping government meddling would be a good start but the NHS itself has to admit that it’s mainly the problem with massive inefficiency. We’ve all seen this first hand. Mum, who sadly passed away during pandemic (don’t get me started on being PREVENTED from seeing her) left behind two massive boxes full of unopened bandages. My gf, a nurse, reckoned there was about £500 of bandages in there. Ended up giving them to a local company who runs first aid training courses.
In her last few years mum visited hospital far more often than we’d all wish but seeing the creaking systems just highlights how bad it’s got. I was about to scream if one more person asked me for the (long) list of medications mum was taking.
We would inevitably reach the conclusion that the NHS isn’t fit for purpose as no other country has adopted the model.
It’s laughable that the NHS is held up as a paragon of socialist ‘caring and sharing’ intervention when, with the possible exception of nurses and some doctors, anything you care to point at at is privately produced.
The land, the buildings, the drugs, the equipment, the energy, cleaning, catering etc.
First problem to overcome is the resistance to change both from the NHS itself (they ARE blockers) and the love affair some members of the public have with the organisation. Fortunately (!) the degradation in service is helping with the later.
A different model is clearly needed before we end up with a two-tier system (arguably we’re there already) of those who can afford to pay and those who can’t. The gulf between the two is frankly embarrassing.
“Some 410,000 staff quit social care last year. Vacancies in the sector have almost doubled in the past year, with one in ten posts now empty – a shortage of about 160,000 staff.”
I bet the bosses at P&O know where to get plenty of cheap labour. Why doesn’t Javid give them a ring?
“That may well be a contributory factor”. Is that you Saj?
“it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th.” A bit late for those who’d already been forced out and decided never to go back.
I was about to say the same. And are care homes and providers willing to take on the unvaccinated now? I know my singing group, who visit care homes to sing with the residents, can’t have me back as i am unvaccinated and homes won’t allow me in.
What is it about politicians that they are incapable of listening? It’s not as if the results on Social Care employment of their idiotic vaccine mandate weren’t shouted from the rooftops. Let alone the result of low pay. Yes the mandate finished 3 weeks ago. But the horse was half way to Kyiv by early January!!
I’m one of the first to condemn governments as being useless and wasteful however, most people don’t recognise, even now, the purpose of Maggie Thatcher’s quite radical reformation of a hopeless, post WW2 country which had not progressed in any way beyond that war.
Yes she made mistakes, yes she seemed brutal, and yes to all the claims of her right wing ‘excesses’ but, all our industries that were basically nationalised for the war effort were never de nationalised after the war. They fell into being unprofitable burdens on the economy run by unions (and I support unions as a necessary voice of the working man) who were at least as corrupt as any government.
Britain was a wounded industrial nation facing the threat of the industrialising Europe and, more importantly, the far east, principally Japan, but south Korea, Taiwan etc. at the time but by the 1970’s, China as well.
Shipyards, steel production and car manufacturing here could only be competitive if we paid coolie (oriental term for navvy) wages.
We simply couldn’t do it. We are far to small a country to assemble the numbers of cheap, often forced labour to compete.
So Maggie figured, correctly in my opinion, that we should seize control of the means of their production. Money and professional services. The UK had one of the best financial centres in the world and it also pretty well invented modern commercial, international law. Both control everything on the planet.
My point being, we need to consider the long term implications of any major political manoeuvre. Frankly, however, I really haven’t seen any evidence of long term, strategic thinking in a UK government since Thatcher as the EU has been running this country for 40 years and our politicians are no better than local councillors.
Excellent observation. However, I must confess that it is actually all my fault. I lived in the UK from 1958 to 1985 – thereby presiding over its fundamental collapse. Since then, I’ve lived in the USA where I seem to have had exactly the same effect.
Is there a country you despise that you’d like me to move to next?
LOL. I claim that right of societal collapse as I moved to the UK in 1966 when it all began. Had I been here as a one year old in 1957 I would have done something about it of course.
Thank you for bringing the World Cup with you when you moved
“but it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th.”
…the big bully finally stopped threatening me but is still in charge of me. The point is that now I know I work for a bully who has all the power. It’s not a healthy relationship. It’s very very bad for my mental health. Should I just say “oh it’s all okay now, it was just a mistake”… Some people don’t stay in abusive relationships.
It may be that the no jab policy was revoked on March 15, but those care workers aren’t getting their jobs back.
I suspect this has far more to do with forcing care staff to take jabs, than it is payrises. Social care, special needs etc etc have notoriously been poorly paid because these people often fill a vocational need. Before the creep of bureaucratic and unionised healthcare most social needs were provided more than adequately families in the community. This created close communities who looked out for each other.
yet another overreach by a useless Government to control our lives.
We need to get rid of the useless Government
“We need to get rid of the useless Government”
Who is this ‘we’? The people spraying the handles of their shopping trolleys? People who can’t find tins of cheap tomatoes in Aldi? The people who claim they are going to boycott Tesco’s but continue shopping there? The people who snitched on their neighbours to the Police for ‘breaking the lockdown rules’?
‘Stop Press’ – Toby – yes, the mandate has been rescinded, but those who returned home to Central Europe remain ‘returned home’, those who left, remain ‘left’. It’s like selling a car and wondering why you have to walk everywhere….. Things change slowly for the better, and rapidly for the worse.
Is cheap labour from central/eastern Europe really the answer? Surely people working in care homes should have decent wages and decent working conditions?
This is exactly the problem and where we are right now – everybody wanted cheap, cheap, cheap, and bought a load of poor quality items Made in China because… they were cheap.
Buy cheap, get cheap.
When millions of foreigners are imported, and they say to your boss they’ll do your job for less money, don’t be surprised when you find yourself out on your ear and the incomer is sitting happily in your chair. Good for them, good for your boss. But, hey, you wanted the ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ so suck it up, buttercup, whilst you stand in line at the dole office.
“Stop Press: Many people have claimed that this crisis has been caused by the Government’s insistence that care home workers had to be jabbed from November 11th 2021 as a condition of remaining employed. That may well be a contributory factor, but it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th.”
Yes but a lot had left by then. Certainly a couple in my SITP group left because they refused to take the experimental gene therapy treatment. One of them now works for Centre Parcs earning a lot more and doesn’t, as far as I know, have to wipe old people’s bottoms.
People who work in care homes are on the minimum wage and often on zero hours contracts. They have found other jobs that may not pay better but don’t involve wearing a mask for the whole shift, cleaning up other people’s excrement or being beaten round the head by a ‘service user’,as my niece was recently, and ending up in hospital with concussion.
Care homes mostly relied on Eastern European labour. Much of that disappeared after Brexit. The only answer for care homes is for them to be taken over by local authorities and for the staff to be on decent wages and proper contracts. There should also be an acceptance that some people (the person who beat up my niece was an autistic adult male) need to be looked after by strong men, not underpaid young women.
I have a young friend who needs 24 hour support at home and recently it’s been a huge problem finding enough staff there too. I’ve been wondering how many ‘caring types’ have been employed in vaccine and testing centres and in many other COVID-fear capacities (eg sitting all day outside a public toilet to make sure only one person at a time went in). I’m betting they were all paid above minimum wage.
“care home workers had to be jabbed from November 11th 2021 as a condition of remaining employed. That may well be a contributory factor, but it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th.”
Many left the sector because of the bullying and coercion to get jabbed – I know of three in one small local care home – never to return.
And it may have been revoked but care homes are still insisting on vaccination.
Um, I am not sure I understand the point of the Stop Press comment. Is that tongue in cheek? A joke?
“Many people have claimed that this crisis has been caused by the Government’s insistence that care home workers had to be jabbed from November 11th 2021 as a condition of remaining employed. That may well be a contributory factor, but it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th”.
Yesterday, I sent this to a Labour leaning friend who said the bed blocking was there before the Care Home injection of staff mandates….
“Sure, Anna and I get that, but come on, my Mother in Law’s care home which has capacity for only about 30 residents had to let 10 long term, loyal full time staff go.
Ten!!!
All because they were rightly (as it turned out) v worried about this MRNA gene therapy experimental injection.
If we weren’t still under emergency measures with censorship, (please ask yourself why we ever were and still are!), then maybe a decent, honest journalist would expose this more and work out exactly what proportion were sacked or coerced to leave.
Rough figures I have seen think it is about 25 per cent. It is hard to get exact figures as so many Care Staff are agency workers.
So I suggest you throw off this “its all the Tories and New Labour or capitalisms fault”.
Sure, that may have something to do with it, but a much higher proportion of Tories voted against sacking NHS workers when that was voted on than Labour MPs did.
In fact, just eight Labour MPs did.
From clapping to sacking in 18 months, a gross betrayal of working people by the zoom class type clowns of MPs now in Labour who are supposed to stand for working people!
And now we are all supposed to look away and follow the latest “current thing” out east in the steppes.
And so, sadly most people in the UK or in the world do not even realise or care that this assault on people’s rights and freedom of bodily autonomy ever even happened”.
What on the world is going on?
They may have removed the enforced medical experiment in November, but that was after tens of thousands left the Care Sector. And who, unjabbed, would want to take a chance on it now, knowing full well that the Government is doing its best to make it mandatory through the back door.
Arrogant Ministers didn’t understand that it takes a strong character to work in Social Care. They thought they could bully a low-paid workforce into taking the monkey juice …. and found that they had miscalculated.
Well said, back of the net!
Oh so predictable, as was the huge damage done to kids. But the woke don’t care about anyone but themselves.
Continually wearing a mask that you know doesn’t work and is detrimental to your health, having to load your personal medical details onto a central system, having your time monitored continuously, knowing that you are working for people who supported contravening the Nuremburg code without challenging the data.
People who care about others and choose to look after them do not deserve to be treated like that.
The only people who are left are the ones who haven’t yet found alternative jobs at salaries they can accept.
So not enough healthcare or care workers, combined with the potential tsunami of health issues arising from having injected 45 million people with a biological weapon that suppresses the innate immune system and reduces the bodies ability to fight cancer. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35436552/ ( I do not accept that the current rise in cases is due mainly to backlog, it is far more likely to be as a result of adverse impact of the covid injections but due to the diverse range of symptoms is not being linked to it (nor would the government or MHRA want it to be).
I am frightened for what the future holds for younger people.
“it’s worth pointing out that that policy was revoked on March 15th”
What sort of apologetic idiotic thinking is that? The policy has not been revoked in other countries. The trust has been lost. When you consider your career and know there are crazy people in charge of the sector, you don’t pay attention to what policy has been temporarily revoked, you pay attention to what may happen to you in the future. Which is precisely what those workers are doing.
‘NHS chiefs warned that the “bottleneck” in hospitals would deteriorate further unless social care capacity was increased so that patients could be safely discharged from wards.’
This is NOT new. In years gone by Winter ‘flu took care of it.
”….that policy was revoked on March 15th.”
So ”revoking” the policy should have immediately resulted in a surge of carers returning?
I should think that a great number of these employees decided they wouldn’t touch the job again with a barge pole if they could find some other work.