The Spectator

Letters: Unfair care costs will turn the red wall blue

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Take care

Sir: Your editorial (‘Counting the costs’, 8 January) makes valid points regarding the funding of social care. The good people of the north in the red-wall seats will be rightly appalled. A couple who have worked hard and made their own way onto the property ladder must wonder what they have voted for. They sit on a property worth £100,000 to £200,000. If they need a care home, they will see their children’s legacy disappear into the hole of care costs while knowing that they are subsidising the same care costs of millionaires. This is deeply unfair and, I daresay, anti-Conservative. There should be no care costs on a modest legacy of, say, less than £250,000. This will ensure people are not disadvantaged in the ‘levelling up’ agenda and feel they are treated fairly and the care costs are more fairly distributed. Otherwise I believe those loaned red-wall seats will return red.

Joe Hanson

Preston, Lancs

Following the science

Sir: I found myself nodding in agreement to the articles by Kate Andrews, Philip Thomas, Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray last week (8 January), as they called for a more measured response to Covid. What I have found most baffling about the approach of our government and public health officials has been the constant appeal to science and data as a basis for policy-making, but the simultaneous application of policy that fails to reflect what we know about the virus. Some failures to ‘follow the science’ include Sage’s modelling; the reasoning for vaccine passports (though they provide no known reduction in transmission or vaccine hesitancy); incongruous lockdown rules. In almost any other area of work, such failure would be called up immediately: instead they trundle on and therefore so must we.

In reality, well-applied science and public policy (the vaccination programme, for example) have done much to get us through this pandemic, but policy requires a trusting and supportive public.

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