There is already a postcode lottery in the NHS performance varies considerably. We need accountabiity, innovation and joined-up Government.
The Opposition cannot deliver a 1979-style transformation without making difficult decisions, or only picking fights with easy targets such as non-doms and parents of private-school children.
Each party has savaged the other’s efforts to tackle the problem with the same lazy attacks. Now the only common ground seems to be to kick the problem into more long grass.
Conscripting school-leavers to serve as corvée labour for councils crumbling under the burden of social care would be socially poisonous and morally absurd.
Immigrants, too, get old. Assuming standards of medical care remain, or improve as the science advances, enormous movements of migrants would be constantly required just in order to pay the bills of earlier waves.
In the end, I’m with Nigel Lawson: these alternatives would produce marginal gains at best, and at worst decades of distraction from the real path back to a stronger health service.
The intellectual heft of figures like him will be vital in ensuring that it moves forward, rather than languishing in the same ideological dead-ends that sunk it in the first place.
Although politicians like to elide them, long-term thinking and putting difficult things off until tomorrow are not the same thing.
A small sliver of the housing wealth that is largely in the hands of those of us who have benefitted from rising house prices would go a significant way to filling the funding gap.
And this is the fundamental problem: it allows us to dodge a broader long-term industrial strategy, precisely because the short-term labour fix is so easy.
We kick off a ConservativeHome project on strong families, better schools and good jobs today – indispensable means of achieving a smaller state and a stronger society.
In Central Bedfordshire, Council Tax is being frozen. One reason is early intervention for elderly residents, delaying the point where they need to move into residential care.
Basic services – the NHS, policing, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, you name it – have gone to rack and ruin. Life expectancy has fallen sharply. We still have, to our shame, by far the worst drug death levels in Europe.
Maintaining the current welfare state will mean wringing even more taxation out of a shrinking working-age population – and a growing grey vote means politicians have little incentive to change course.