or it could just be that we were/are broke

I know it's tempting to ascribe a machiavellian style motive to it all, but sometimes the simple answers are the correct ones: we dont have buckets of surplus cash, politicians are generally pretty inept at deploying what we do have, and the voting public isn't terribly keen (generally) on the higher taxation that would be needed to deliver everything that the voting public actually wants.

And then the public goes and does stupid things like Brexit just to make life even more complicated and give Govt even less time and resource to try to fix things.

All that said, I don't know why there is such a reluctance to putting in an end-to-end health & social care system which has a more joined up strategy for dealing with the underlying problems. It should all be managed and funded by central government rather than passing the buck down to local authorities who have their own funding pressures and varying priorities.

And we all need to accept that this stuff costs ££££ that we don't have so we either need to pay (a lot) more or accept less public spending in other areas - welfare, education, transport infrastructure, defence. There are no easy choices.

Posted By: CWC, Feb 17, 08:20:07