The blistering speech that tells me Britain’s social care deadlock can finally be broken | Polly Toynbee

If anyone can convince politicians and public of the need to pay for a national care service, it’s Louise Casey. With her involved, I now have hope No government in my lifetime has been dealt a worse hand than Keir Starmer’s. Austerity-broken public services, an empty Treasury, a jittery bond market freaked out by Liz Truss and then stricken by the arrival of Trump 2.0 with his bully-tariffs. Now Britain’s ally is setting the Middle East on fire in a murderous war, exploding oil and gas prices. This needs repeating regularly, lest anyone forgets the obstacles blocking this government’s best intentions for change. One of those good intentions in the Labour manifesto was the creation of a national care service. Louise Casey, respected troubleshooter, was given a commission to review adult social care and solve its impossible dilemmas. She showed her thinking in a blistering speech last week. With her trademark brutal honesty, she laid bare the chaos in ramshackle care services on the verge of collapse, as near-bankrupted councils fail to cope with the “seismic challenge” of soaring dementia cases. With all the wars and crises around the world, it was practically overlooke