“What they were trained for is counselling assessment allowing people to live
“What they were trained for is counselling, assessment, allowing people to live with dignity, and getting resources for them.”Even the right-wing Adam Smith Institute is aware that increasing numbers of people see no incentive in saving for their old age. “My own mother says she wishes she’d given all her money away” says the Institute’s director, Dr Eamonn Butler. Along with organisations that act on behalf of the elderly, such as Age Concern and the Alzheimer’s Society, the Institute is grappling with the question of who should pay for the burgeoning population of old people.The Adam Smith Institute’s solution is long-term care insurance. But when Mercantile and General, a financial institution, carried out market research, it found that while people welcomed the idea, there was a good deal of suspicion. Would such a policy be prohibitively expensive? Would it contain loopholes though which those most in need of care could fall? A new eye test, for instance, can detect those who are likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Will such people be denied entry into schemes, defeating the object of the insurance?Henry Caton, director of the Alzheimer’s Society, spoke at the Conservative Party conference on the problems of financing long-term care. “Property ownership is based on the idea that you will have something to pass on,” he says.
“The Conservatives are the party which has stressed thrift and family values. The difference in the future will be between those whose parents leave them a house and those whose parents don’t.“Is it reasonable to expect taxpayers to pay for expensive care so that people can preserve their inheritance? I feel very conflicted about it. You can quickly be pauperised paying for long-term care for which the NHS is divesting itself of any responsibility.”A spokeswoman at the Department of Health defended the Government’s position. Just as the old Department of Health and Social Security was divided into two ministries, there is now a separation between “clinical” care (provided by doctors) and “social” care, which can take place in the community Only the former is covered by the NHS. “People in nursing homes still get NHS care from their GP,” she argued.
There is nothing new, she said, about means-testing benefits.But the Shadow Health Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: “This problem has been coming for a long time. When John Major made his speech about inheritance cascading down the generations as a result of the policies of this Government, I made a speech saying it will cascade just as far as the first generation in which the parents need long-term nursing or residential care.”Ten years ago the Conservatives mounted a campaign to persuade council house tenants to buy their own homes. Much was made of the fact that they would then have something to hand on to their children. Those who continued to pay rent may yet have the last laugh.We would like to hear from other families with similar problems. Please write to Real Life, Independent on Sunday, 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB.(Photographs omitted).
THE LAST Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest man in the world. In his sumptuous palace lived more than 900 people, including a battalion of cooks. Feasting and junketing were continuous and, outside the shooting season, a stuffed tiger was propelled down a hillside for casual target-practice. But the Nizam was miserly: he saved cigarette butts, he refused his guests second helpings of icecream, and he always used the same stuffed tiger. Leslie Forbes, on The Indian Spice Trail (R3), was incredulous “Wasn’t it full of holes?” she asked. Her ancient informant, grandson of the Nizam’s chief minister, agreed: “Oh yes, he was well peppered-up.”
Thus did we drift back to her real subject: the food in the Nizam’s fabulous court. You could hear his eyes mist over as he swore that still, in his dreams, he could savour the gorgeous taste of the soup It was called, he said, slowly and reverently, Mock Turtle.
We had been led to expect something a little more aromatic, so Forbes tried again But she’d picked the wrong man. The only other delicacy of these ambrosial banquets to linger in his memory was “cheese macaroni”.
Kipling in Love (R4) is pungent with patchouli and etched in sepia, subtle and haunting. Ed Thomason’s dramatisation of these Indian stories does full justice to the genius of a writer too often dismissed as jingoistic, whose real concern is nearly always for the suffering individual. This week’s In the Pride of his Youth starred Sam West as Dicky Hatt, a man young and green as cardamom, who leaves his newly pregnant wife behind when he takes a job in India. The story is slight – the child dies, the wife goes off with his best friend, Dicky performs a daring stunt and then resigns his job – but it was superbly presented, with never a wasted word.
