Nothing new about neglecting old folk

 by Brian Bamford

ON the 28th, April, Milton Pena placed the following comment on this NV Blog:

'It’s Gerineglicide Derek, it has been happening for more than a decade and it has worsened by the Pandemic.

'I read that the life span of the elderly have been shortened by TWELVE years as a result of becoming ill with this virus and dying of it.'

On the 29th, April, Blanco Posnet posted:  

'I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.'

Social Care is a poor relation! 

YET, what is happening in the social care sector is not new.  For donkey's years under different governments social care has been the poor relation of the welfare sector. You can call it 'Gerineglicide' if you like.  Or as I would prefer 'constructive manslaughter'.  
It is 'constructive manslaughter' and not murder, since the intent is not to kill the victim, the mens rea required for murder does not exist because the act is not aimed at any one person.  Rather it is systemic in that it is built into the procedure for looking after the people at the end of their lives.
Most government including the current one under Boris have promised to resolve the problems of tackling social care, but have yet to come up with a satisfactory plan.  The public have allowed this to happen partly because they are confused and think that their end of life care will be tackled by the NHS.

Clean plate club & one step nearer the grave!

People are closing their eyes to what's happening, and have been for ages.

Alan Bennett in his diary entry in 1995 describes events at a care home his mother was in, in Somerset:

'The turnover of residents is quite rapid since whoever is quartered in this room is generally in the late staged of dementia.  But that is not what they die of.  None of theses women can feed herself and to feed them properly, to spoon in sufficient mince and mashed carrot topped off with rhubarb and custard to keep them going, demands personal attention of a helper per person.  Lacking such one-to-one care, these helpless creatures slowly and respectably starve to death.'

A neighbour of Mr. Bennett's mother has some difficulty:

'Joined the clean plate club, Lily,' says the girl who is feeding Hilda, her neighbour.    'Aren't you a good girl?'

Mr. Bennett says Hilda doesn't want her sweet and 'it is left congealing on her the tray while tea in lidded plastic beakers is taken round, which goes untouched also.'  And he adds:  'So another mealtime passes and Hilda is quite caring and with no malice or cruelty at all pushed one step nearer the grave.'

Whose fault is it?

Not the government's surely?

 Alan Bennett says:  'Her own a little.  Her relatives, if she has relatives.  And the staff's of course.  But whereas a newspaper might make a horror story out of it, I can't.'

What would Milton Pena or Blanco Posnet do?  Or, come to think of it, Charles Charalambous and those who signed his Woke Manifesto for trade unionists and other lefties, do about this?**

Alan Bennett concludes:  'Demented or not, if Hilda were a child there would be a story to tell and blame attaching.  But Hilda is at the end of her life not the beginning.  Even so, were she a Nobel Prize winner, or not a widow from Darwen but the last survivor of Bloomsbury, yes, then an effort might be made.  As it is she is gradually slipping away, which is what this place is for.'

We need something better than slogans, rhetoric and virtue signalling to tackle these complicated questions.  Essentially the problem in this country with regard to elderly people is a largely cultural one, as Alan Bennett's considerations suggest.*  Milton Pena is a Chilean-born surgeon who arrived in Britain with his family in 1974 after being forced to flee General Pinochet’s brutal regime.  Being Chilean he will probably have found it hard to understand the English attitude to old people as expressed by Alan Bennett and all too deeply embedded in our Anglo-saxon attitudes.

* 'Untold Stories' [2005] by Alan Bennett 

** www.northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com Virtue Signalling & Petitioning Governments?

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