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Does Andy Burnham really believe that cross-party consensus is going to resolve the decades-long stalemate on the funding of adult social care? Of course he doesn’t, not least because he wouldn’t be giving a speech about it this morning: he would have succeeded back in 2009 when he made his first set of proposals on the matter.
The new prime minister is probably the figure who bears the greatest scars on their back out of everyone who has attempted to reform social care – and that includes people who’ve been plugging away at this without much reward, such as the economist Andrew Dilnot.
When Burnham was health secretary in the last Labour government, his plans for social care had initial – and entirely superficial – ‘cross-party consensus’ from the Tories, who then branded them a ‘death tax’ in order to win votes. Now, he wants a meeting with Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey to discuss moving things forward, a mere 17 years after he first had a go. What’s the point?
British politics is so unstable now that cross-party consensus does look a little more appealing
