Did some reading up on the dementia tax thing. How do people feel about it? I can see why the tories wanted to do something about it. To summarise if you have dementia you are likely to need 24 hour care. Other disease diabetes cancer etc is free. Current care for dementia is means tested including your house although your house doesnt apply if you have some relative/family dependent on your house. Currently the nhs spends 26 billion pounds on social care for dementia. What that doesnt say is how muhmch is recouped (or whether the 26 billion include this). This does sound like a massive amount of the budget going on this.
Green want to ignore the Leave Referendum vote. They remind me of UKIP under Farage. They have a credible sounding leader, and they're all a bunch of fruit cakes behind her
It was pretty chaotic and badly managed with people shouting over one another, which gave Rudd the opportunity to get out the 'coalition of chaos' line. It didn't change my mind, but I do think it will have helped Corbyn. He wasn't brilliant (Lucas was clearly the best performer) but he didn't have to be. All he has to do in these things is to demonstrate that he's not the monster that he's portrayed to be. This is why May didn't turn up.......
It can't be ignored and if we're going to look after people in their time of need then it needs to be paid for. We can't just let sufferers wander out into the traffic in their dressing gowns - and it might be you or me, one day. I believe there was a sensible suggestion on the table a few years ago from Andy Burnham (although he may not have invented it). The objective was to pay for this sort of care by taxing some of the value of your home (if you owned one) upon your death, before the estate passed to whoever was in your will. It was a tax on everyone - sufferer or not - that meant everyone paid (after death) to make life a little bit better for the growing care burden we're facing as a country. The amount was capped, so everyone paid the same. I believe his suggestion was £30K max. It attempts to minimise the effects of the health lottery by saying we'll all pay a bit, never mind who actually needs the treatment, in the interests of all of us.
Hmmm it's a good idea but no doubt people will moan about having to pay another tax. This is a classic left wing vs right wing, you're on your own jack or everyone should lump in together. You are right who gets dementia is a lottery. I would add to this is that people will get care for dementia but it's who pays. As you say a richer person has more disposable income and will be spending a smaller proportion of their wealth and will have more to pass on. A poor person will be paying with probably their life savings and will have less to pass on. Although classic may showing her weakness in U-turning, i'm not totally against her dementia tax idea. I would like to see how much is spent on social care in real terms after the means testing).
so if you have been a waster all your life its free while you waste away but if you have worked all your life and have minimal savings you get to pay for your care dosent sound like a fair system to me then again no inheritance tax here
The company I work for has invested billions of dollars into finding effective treatments for Alzheimer's, without success so far (one failed at the final hurdle last year - it worked, in that it did what we thought it would do but the difference it made to people was not enough to make it viable) but we are still trying. Many other companies and researchers are doing the same thing. Cameron and the French government were actually very good at supporting this. There will be treatments, I think within the next five years. But there will not be a cure, these treatments (and it's likely to be a cocktail of different things, like the amazing success in taming HIV) will slow, or in the best case scenario stop, progression of the disease. They will depend on a very early diagnosis, preferably before there are noticeable symptoms, which we are simply not set up to do at the moment - huge amounts of money are also being invested in simpler ways to screen - at the moment it takes an expensive scan with radioactive imaging media or a spinal tap. The drugs themselves will be expensive. In this country all the cost of this will fall on the NHS. The best possible solution would be some kind of preventative that we could all take, or that could be put in the water.....no one is even dreaming of this yet. The care of people with dementia should be by health care professionals in my view, this is a physiological condition, a physical disease. Take it out of the social care arena entirely, avoid the 'you pay for yourself' scenario. Payment should be a mix of general taxation and some kind of insurance scheme, where the majority of us who do not develop dementia subsidise those poor people who do. Premiums according to income. Of course it would be handy to have a continual supply of young, tax paying, low public service using workers to pay into the system, but our views on immigration would seem to preclude this. The good news is that the prevalence of dementia is actually falling, especially amongst men, due to lifestyle changes. So the numbers per 100,000 who will get dementia are going down. The real numbers are going up because of demography, the boom in numbers of over 65s. Eventually (probably not in my lifetime) these changes plus effective treatments will hopefully radically reduce the burden. The final part of the jigsaw for me is giving people the right to opt out definitively when their quality of life has collapsed or can be predicted to do so soon, i.e. assisted suicide. From about the age of 40 your wishes in the event of contracting a variety of diseases - dementia, motor neuron disease, etc - or when your quality of life hits a certain level due to pain, loss of independence, personality change etc, should be the subject of discussion with your GP, e.g. When the disease gets to stage x I want out, or never end my life unnaturally etc. These wishes should be recorded and reviewed annually, and adhered to when you reach stage x, if you ever do. At the moment my greatest fear is that I **** up the timing of my trip to Dignitas if the worst happens. PS it's not quite a lottery who gets dementia - genetics and lifestyle play a significant role. Sadly if you are already unfit and have a chronic disease the odds go up. Still not definitive predictors though.
I would not be at all surprised if Theresa is coming under pressure from her cabinet to do a live TV debate before next Thursday. Watch this space!
Another u turn, brilliant! I'd like to see her mouthing nothing's again live. It's difficult to look presidential standing next to Nuttalls with Leanne Wood screaming in Welsh in your lughole. Bet Strugeon would turn up for that one. Nah, she won't risk it.
I don't think there's much hope of that, sadly. Expect a week of Brexit, Brexit, Brexit and who can be best trusted to negotiate a good deal (or no deal). Here's one view, from Craig Murray, a former British ambassador.... All of which underlines a thought that has been pulling at me ever since the election started. May has continually tried to pitch this as a question of who you would wish to act as the negotiator of Brexit, either her or Jeremy Corbyn. But why would anybody believe that a woman who is not even capable to debate with her opponents would be a good negotiator? In fact she would be an appalling negotiator. She becomes completely closed off when contradicted. She is incapable of thinking on her feet. She is undoubtedly the worst performer at Prime Minister’s Questions, either for government or opposition, since they were first broadcast. Why on earth would anybody think she would be a good negotiator? As soon as Michel Barnier made a point she was not expecting across the table, she would switch off and revert to cliché, and probably give off a great deal of hostility too. The delusion she would negotiate well has been fed by the media employing all kinds of completely inappropriate metaphors for the Brexit negotiations. From metaphors of waging war to metaphors of playing poker, they all characterise the process as binary and aggressive. In fact – and I speak as somebody who has undertaken very serious international negotiations, including of the UK maritime boundaries and as the Head of UK Delegation to the Sierra Leone Peace Talks – intenational negotiation is the opposite. It is a cooperative process and not a confrontational process. Almost all negotiations cover a range of points, and they work on the basis of you give a bit there, and I give a bit here. Each side has its bottom lines, subjects on which it cannot move at all or move but to a limited degree. Sometimes on a single subject two “bottom lines” can be in direct conflict. Across the whole range of thousands of subjects, you are trying to find a solution all can live with. So empathy with your opposite number is a key requirement in a skilled negotiator, and everything I have ever seen about Theresa May marks her out as perhaps having less emotional intelligence than anybody I have ever observed. Bonhommie is also important. Genuine friendship can be a vital factor in reaching agreement, and it can happen in unexpected ways. But May has never been able to strike up friendships outside of a social circle limited to a very particular segment of English society, excluding the vast majority of the English, let alone Scots and heaven forfend continentals. The best negotiators have affability, or at least the ability to switch it on. It is a vital tool. That is not to say occasionally you do not have to speak and stare hard to make plain that one of your bottom lines is real. But that is by no means the norm. And you need the intelligence and sharpness to carry it off, which May does not. That is one of the many differences between May and Thatcher. Frankly, if I had the choice between sending in Jeremy Corbyn, with his politeness and reasonableness, or Theresa May, into a negotiation I would not hesitate for a second in choosing Corbyn. I am quite sure there is not another diplomat in the World who would make a different choice. May’s flakiness and intolerance of disagreement represent a disaster waiting to happen.
That's an impressive, and damning, analysis, which I completely agree with. Both on May's character and the nature of the negotiation - points which I have tried to make to Goldie far less eloquently on this thread. Murray is a bit of an odd character though.
no wonder May didn't want to participate last night. Talk about filling the audience with rabid lefties. Lynch mob mentality at it's worse. The other leaders on stage were no better either.
The audience was selected by ComRes to represent the population overall. I just don't think Tory supporters have much to shout about right now, not helped by May bottling it and sending a grieving Rudd in her place.
Just heard on the wireless that only 11% of Tory party members think they are running a good campaign, and the vast majority aren't even neutral, they think it's ****e. The Maytanic is holed beneath the waterline! Abandon ship! Man the lifeboats! Who's the new captain?
Who are the 11% that think it's a good campaign? They should be sectioned. A poll out today on voting intentions in London has Labour with a 17% lead!
Clever of Mrs May to assess the audience (using a crystal ball) when she decided several weeks ago that she wouldn't do this. Luckily, the Brexit negotiations will be with easier opponents (and, by her, they'll definitely be viewed as opponents) than a randomly-selected TV audience.
No surprise with those figures, London is a Labour stronghold. They'll do well in all the big cities but might struggle elsewhere. I've always thought at least 10% of Tories are totally detached from reality, so again, no surprise...
No surprise that Labour are ahead in London maybe, but that kind of lead would see them gaining seats.
Well now............I hope all you smart arses are right and things will improve under Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell! Andrew Neil currently ripping holy Tim Farron a new one in his interview. Farron really is an odious little toad.
