Perhaps the least fashionable cause in Britain is the welfare of our elderly. At least 35,000 old men and women will die from the cold this winter: a staggering, scandalous figure. We are a rich country, there are many ingenious and inexpensive ways to heat a house, yet every August, when the number of ‘excess winter deaths’ are disclosed, the extent of our national incompetence or indifference becomes clear. No one asks why so many more pensioners die each winter in Britain than in Norway. The winter cull of our elderly has become accepted as part of national life.
Had 35,000 died from the heat, there would have been an outcry. Seven years ago, a heatwave was blamed for 2,000 deaths across the country — and it was regarded as the most urgent political priority. Alarmists like Sir David King, then chief scientific adviser, claimed that global warming was a greater threat to Britain than terrorism. But what of the cold? Why such a silence from Westminster? Is it because those who die of cold are often in their seventies or eighties and may not make it to the polling station? It’s easy for a politician, warm and full after a subsidised lunch, to forget that they too will be old and vulnerable one day.
But the elderly are without doubt those to whom we owe the greatest debt. They are the generation who defended this country, who went on to build it with a lifetime of labour — and of high tax contributions. The generation who were promised and paid for a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state should be entitled to dignity in old age. Instead we tax their pensions, and leave them to die of diseases contracted while in hospital, or of cold.
Some £3.5 billion is earmarked towards helping the elderly in winter — yet, as so often with this inept and deceitful government — the money misses its target. About 50,000 of these payments go to pensioners living on the continent, many retired in Spain. The so-called ‘winter fuel payment’ does not even allow for the rise in council tax bill. And this tax, for what? The average household pays £25,000 to the government each year — yet this week some neighbourhoods have had to shovel the snow from their own streets. Rather than help the elderly, the welfare state often seeks to frustrate the care which others offer. Take the case of Jean and Derek Randall, found dead in their Northampton home last week. A neighbour tried to warn the council that they were facing difficulties, but was told that her concern was irrelevant as she was not a family member. The horizontal ties which bind communities to each other are gradually supplanted with vertical ties binding the individual to the state. And while these ties bind, they offer little support.
It is sometimes said that the hallmark of a nation is how it treats its most vulnerable. The hallmark of a welfare state is how it treats the people who built it. Someone is dying from the cold every five minutes in Britain this winter. We can and must do better.
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