Last Laugh Looney Coalition with the Scottish Nationalist Party

As expected, Scotland continued to vote differently to the rest of the UK and although the Conservatives gained a few seats, the SNP still retained a significant majority in Scotland. However, the Last Laugh Looney Party did manage to capture over 1 million votes, given that there was little support for either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in Scotland.

The kilt wearing, whisky drinking, older population in Scotland, were nothing like as keen on remaining in the European Union as the younger Scots.      In the main the older population had no great affinity with the European Union, but they weren’t too keen on a Conservative Government in Westminster either.      That’s why so many of them voted for the LLLP.

The rump of the SNP, having failed to negotiate anything in Westminster, were open to negotiations with the LLLP and therefore agreed to pass over all the Scottish islands to the LLLP in exchange for their support for independence from the rest of the UK.

(Sadly post Brexit, the European Union, decided that they didn’t want to accept Scotland if they didn’t have the whisky or the Scottish islands).

 

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Last Laugh Looney Party Coalition – Island Negotiations

The centrepiece of the Last Laugh Looney Party Manifesto was to enable older people to move to a self-governing, tax-free haven in the islands on the coast of the UK.  In return older people would sell their houses in the UK and forego all their rights to free health care and tax free benefits like bus passes and winter fuel allowance.

Negotiations with the chastened Conservative Party are going well. They are keen to form an alliance with the LLLP, since no other party seems to like them very much.    The idea of getting rid of lots of troublesome old people seems to appeal to Theresa May.    Especially after so many of them didn’t  vote for her, because she threatened to take away their houses in her proposed “dementia tax”.

The new Conservative/LLLP Government would agree to purchase all Older People’s houses at inflated prices to compensate them for giving up their pensions to hasten their move offshore.    The Queen had to be consulted  but readily consented once  she was told she would still be Queen of the off-shore islands and could keep Osbourne House on the Isle of White.

This would all be done during the two year Brexit negotiation period during which time the LLLP would support the Government and all older people would agree to vote for the final outcome.  All with the ultimate condition that they then become free to establish:-

THE LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY ISLAND REPUBLIC

 


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Last Laugh Looney Party Coalition with Conservatives

We now know the results of the 2017 General Election and as expected the Conservative Party has been re-elected.     But it has a smaller  number of MP’s than it really hoped to get which will make the Brexit negotiations in the next two years much more difficult.

The Last Laugh Looney Party secured 3 million votes, but only one MP in the constituency of Torquay.  They also did well in Eastbourne, Worthing, Brighton, Ilfracombe, Weston super Mare and Skegness.  You will notice that these are all seaside locations where there are high concentrations of older people.   This puts the LLLP in a strong position to negotiate with the ruling party before they start the Brexit discussions in a fortnight’s time.

I will report in my next blogs on how the negotiations are going.

 

xxxxxx

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2017 All the other Party Manifestos

Strictly speaking, as this is now voting day for the election, there should be no canvassing today.  However, I will use it to at least sum up all the other Party Manifestos’ comments directly about older people, in the same format as I used in the previous post as the Conservatives.

PENSIONS — the triple lock has been retained by all the other Parties who certainly don’t want to risk losing any older peoples’ votes and are not concerned about the cost of a promise they will probably not have to honour.

WINTER FUEL ALLOWANCE  — this too has been retained by all the other Parties. Which is strange, particularly in the case of the Labour Party, who introduced this allowance in the days of Gordon Brown and now find themselves protecting wealthy pensioners.       In the case of the Green Party, you would have thought they could have dropped this allowance altogether and saved some money, given their strong convictions about global warming.    The SNP, on the other hand, have devolved powers and will keep the allowance in Scotland, firstly because they believe it’s much colder up there and secondly because the UK Government will be paying for it.

FREE BUS PASSES —- these will be retained by all the other Parties, although I doubt many MPs ever use buses.    In the Green Party’s case you would have thought they would ban all buses given the amount of diesel fume polution they send into the atmosphere.    Perhaps a fleet of green electric golf buggies would be a better policy :-).

INHERITANCE TAX —- all the other Parties make great play of enabling older people to pass on the value of their houses in an inheritance.      Hence the cries of shame in relation to the Conservative Party’s proposed “dementia tax”.     At the same time, it is rumoured that the Labour Party in particular, intend to significantly increase inheritance tax by reducing the tax free allowance.

SOCIAL CARE COSTS —- all the other Parties are being very careful not to offend elderly voters and therefore they have nothing to say about Social Care.     They are all very good at criticising the current situation, but their only solution in improving it is “MORE MONEY”.        They obviously have no regard to the changing demographics amongst the elderly population and the dramatic rise which is forecast in the number of over 85’s in the next 10 years.     With this kind of cowardice amongst politicians, the inadequate state of Social Care in this country will never be resolved.

HOUSING —- The country has a desperate housing shortage and all Parties, Conservatives included, are promising to increase the supply of new housing.    The promises are all in the order of 300,000 new houses a year, which is pie in the sky!    The current output of new houses is less than 150,000 a year.    This is accompanied by a number of ragbag initiatives, many of which have been tried and failed in the past:-

  • speeding up the planning system;
  • building on brown field sites;
  • building on green belt sites;
  • not building on green belt sites;
  • building prefabricated factory built houses;
  • building whole new towns;

In relation to this, only a small proportion of this housing would be for older people.   So even it were to happen, it is unlikely to make a very big impact on the growing, elderly population.

Only the Last Laugh Looney Party has an incredible housing solution to this problem :-).    Moving older people and their assets off-shore away from all this political prevarication.

VOTE FOR THE LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY TODAY !

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2017 Election manifesto — Conservatives

In the final days of the 2017 General Election canvassing, I will sum up each party’s proposals on the specific issues that relate to older people.    Here is a start with the Conservative Party proposals.

PENSIONS — triple lock changed to double lock. The automatic 2.5% annual increase is dropped.   This won’t matter if inflation rises anyway.    Our basic state pension remains one of the lowest in Europe.

WINTER FUEL ALLOWANCE  — will be means tested in future so will no longer be given to wealthier pensioners.   They will have to trust in global warming.    Or they could move to Scotland where it will still apply because kilts are quite chilly.

FREE BUS PASSES —- will also be means tested (I think ?).  But of course there are less and less buses anyway.

INHERITANCE TAX —- unchanged, but tax free allowance still due to rise to £1 million if you have any money left when you pop your clogs.

SOCIAL CARE COSTS —- this is the biggest and most controversial change, which may have cost them a lot of votes.   It has been labled the ” dementia tax ” by all the other parties.   Crass presentation of a complex issue may cost them a lot of seats and maybe even the election itself.    Lack of honesty in the past on this issue is now coming back to haunt them.

You have always had to pay for your own social care unless you have less than £23,400.   Your house is only taken into account when you die.      The  Conservatives are proposing to increase the asset test threshold to allow you to keep £100,000.      This should be good news but only if you understood the rules in the first place.    It enables people with relatively low value houses to pass on an inheritance instead of having it all gobbled up in paying for care, if they need it.

Belatedly, they said their would also be a cap to care costs but no figure was put on it.   That is how the  “dementia tax”  tag came about.

Posted in ELDERLY UK POLICY | 1 Comment

Election Overload.

At the moment in the run up to the snap General Election we are being assailed from all sides by politicians in the newspapers and on tele with sound bite slogans.   Then sometimes on soap boxes at carefully selected venues with a wallpaper background audience of nodding supporters.

Following their every move, we have a feeding frenzy of journalists latching on to every word and attempting to translate what the politicians said, into what they think they really mean.

Next come the pollsters, unable to wait for the election itself.     Ever eager to analyse what people think, before they think.      Illuminating us with  endless insights, which will probably be wrong according to the next poll.

Lastly we have the junk mail.    Pictures of politicians shaking hands and smiling.   Promising anything you want.   All at no cost to you !    In fact you will probably get money back !    And a free pen and a sticker for your window.   Any thing that might get your vote.

This is definitely the era of ” Twitter Politics “.    140 characters of misinformation.    One minute wisdom.    All to enable us to navigate through the next five years.

The LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY looks more attractive every day 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

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Social Care – What’s Next ?

My last blog looked at the fundamental problems behind the crisis in social care for older people.   Now let’s look at the political parties election promises of how to address it.

All the opposition party’s ignore the big picture and focus on the short term issue of capturing the senior generations vote.       Their common solution is to reaffirm their intention of keeping the triple lock on pensions, which ensures pensions will rise by the increase in either wages, prices or 2.5%;  whichever is the greater.    This does little to help the poorest pensioners and nothing to address the issues of poor quality care.

The Conservative Party did at least try to grasp the nettle.   By proposing that home owners use the value of their house to pay for care, which is some thing I have long advocated.     They also extended care funding to include domicillary care and raised the means test entitlement from  £23,500 to £100,000.     However, the details of the policy were not properly thought through and were greeted with a backlash of negative press headlines.     Belatedly the Prime Minister announced there would be a cap on the total costs, but with no indication of how much that would be.        What a mess !

On average people live in residual care for under three years, so might have to pay upto two years of costs themselves, say around £60,000.    A cap above that would prevent them from paying the catastrophic costs of a long term illness.     Hopefully the insurance industry could be encouraged to cover the intervening £60,000.

Sadly, none of this addresses the quality issues in social care nor the forthcoming dramatic rise in the population of older elderly.    Once again the issue has been ducked, because politicians don’t want to lose votes by giving people bad news and older people don’t want to face up to the fact that they may not have saved nearly enough for care if they need it.

 

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Social care confusion

I have argued in this blog for years that the only way to release significantnt resources to pay for good quality social for older people is to unlock the equity many older people have in their houses and then expect all those who can, to pay for there own care.

The problem is that there are many barriers that stop this from happening and it will probably take a crisis to clear them away.

the problem is :-

  • When the NHS was established nobody expected longevity to increase as much as it has, nor did they anticipate the epidemic of dementia in these extended years.
  • Older people and their relatives have been led to believe that all health care should be free, even though this has never actually been the case.
  • Dementia, in particular, has always been an area of deliberate obfuscation, because firstly of the difficulty of diagnosing it; secondly, the relatively high cost of lengthy stays in residential care; and thirdly, the perhaps the understandable reluctance of the NHS to accept it as a health problem, which has passed the responsibility for caring for people with dementia to either their relatives, often an elderly spouse, or handed it over to Social Services.

The fact that the older elderly population will double in the next 10 years means that ” the crisis” is upon us now, as the pressures of these issues escalate.      These changing demographics demand an answer, even if compassion does does not.

The Government was already slowly edging toward the issues with a promised report in the autumn.    Now this has been overtaken by the forthcoming snap general election and a hastily cobbled together manifesto.     In an opportunistic, bold and maybe foolhardy move, Theresa May included a proposal to address the social care funding shortfall by shifting more of the burden on to older people, by including the value of their house in the means test evaluation, but allowing them to defer the payment in their lifetime.

I believe this is the right thing to do, but the hasty announcement has mas made its implementation doubly difficult.      Opposition parties have cynically seized on the idea and deemed it a death tax.    The media have not helped with shallow analysis and simplistic headlines. Leaving the population as a whole ill-informed and ill disposed to the proposal.

 Not a great start to reforming social care !

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G.P.’s Charging Fees.

GP’s are once again raising the issue of charging for an appointment to see your GP.     (You can see all my earlier posts on this subject by clicking on GP’s in the Tag Cloud )

You can tell an election is coming !   The issue has been talked up by the doctors union at the last three elections.   Each time all the political parties have run away shouting  the sacrosanct mantra “the NHS should be free at the point of delivery”.     I am far from convinced that charging is a good idea, BUT, something has to change.

  • More and more GP’s are retiring early.
  • Many practices are unable to recruit new doctors.
  • Some practices are closing altogether.
  • New patients can’t easily get registered.
  • Appointments can be difficult to get quickly.
  • Being not able to see your GP often means more people turn up at A&E.
  • If they are elderly and are admitted, they often don’t come out quickly.
  • Gradually the whole system clogs up.

Underlying this situation is the dramatic growth in the older population and the high levels of chronic illness in the older age group. Nobody wants to face up to this situation, but the G P’s can’t avoid it — unless they retire !

There is a good evaluation of GP’s charging fees commissioned by the Kings Fund not too long ago.    A £10 appointment applied to everyone would raise between £3.5  to £4.5 billion for the NHS.     It concluded it probably would not work well and could have unintended consequences. ( You can see it by clicking on the following link  https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/reports/thenhsif/what-if-people-were-to-pay-10-to-see-a-gp/)

So what is to be done :-

  1.  It has been suggested that they try a few limited pilots of charging, with exemptions for those people on welfare benefits or recurrent illness.    You can see this would be controversial straight away.    
  2. I would open some high street shops as walk-in centres manned by GP’s and nurses.  Open nine till five seven days a week, they would charge a standard £25 for a consultation and more if treatment was subsequently provided.  If you didn’t want to pay for treatment, you would be referred to the NHS and join the waiting list.  This should reduce the pressure on GP services.

 

Could be the start of a new era in health care with a focus on well-being and healthy living.

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Last Laugh Looney Party on PACKAGING

This week the Packaging Association had its annual awards ceremony.  I will bet there were not many older people there !

In this election people are not taking the LLLP seriously enough.     So today we are announcing our new policy on one of the big concerns for older people, which stops them quietly getting on with their lives in a stress free way.

PACKAGING

We have talked about this over and over in this blog.   ( See earlier blogs on this subject by clicking on PACKAGING in the Tag Cloud)

Arthritic fingers don’t make unwrapping easy and shrink wrapping is almost impossible to remove.      So the LLLP  PROPOSES THAT  POLITICIANS SHOULD BE SHRINK WRAPPED FOR A DAY TO SEE HOW THEY WOULD LIKE IT 😀

Child proof bottle tops are no better.     They will also be outlawed in future. if you vote for the LLLP.   Little children should be taught to not be nosey and leave things alone that don’t belong to them !

Then there are all those heavy, bulky, stapled together, glued, tied and taped cardboard boxes, which are usually twice the size of what’s inside.    They have got to go!     How many injuries have happened trying to open these things ?      That is probably why the NHS is clogged up with old people 😀

 

 

The LLLP NO-PACKAGING POLICY has been fully costed and the £1.45 billion saved will be spent on the NHS to employ courteous nurses who actually speak to old people 😀

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