A inversão em curso do Estado Social pelo governo de Boris Johnson

«My job is to protect you or your parents or grandparents from having to sell your home to pay for the costs of care,’ said Boris Johnson after becoming prime minister two years ago. This was quite a statement. But to do it would cost billions and the Prime Minister had also promised, in his manifesto, not to raise taxes. So what to do? Should he keep his promise to the voters, or create a safety net for the asset-rich? It’s telling that he chose to protect the assetocracy.

The emergence of this new class in the space of the past two decades has changed politics more than any party likes to admit. Wealth has become concentrated in a group of people who now decide British elections. Before the crash, 7 per cent of British pensioners were millionaires, as measured by household wealth. Now, it’s 25 per cent — some three million people. A further three million are half-millionaires, with £500,000. That’s one out of every eight people eligible to vote.

At each election, parties compete to bribe this demographic. Labour’s ‘winter fuel payments’ and pension rises were the start, followed by the Tory triple-lock pension. The next step: to guarantee that no one would have to sell their house to pay for care, no matter how rich they are. This prospect was dangled in front of homeowners by Blair, Brown and Cameron, but none of them went through with it. They baulked not only at the expense but also at what it would mean. The traditional logic of the welfare state — that those with power and money help those with less of it — would be being turned on its head.After minimal consultation with his cabinet, let alone his party and the country, Johnson has now completed this inversion, with a £12 billion tax funding a new deal. Some of the money will at first be used to help clear an NHS backlog. Some will help families who can in no sense be described as rich.

But after the NHS waiting list has begun to ease, the tax becomes a care home insurance scheme, and the refusal to impose any means-testing has big implications. No one, no matter how rich, will have to pay more than £86,000 for their care in old age.

This raises tricky political questions: how can you justify increasing taxes on the working poor to safeguard the assets of the stonkingly rich? What, morally, is the problem with someone selling their house — or any other asset — to pay for care? Isn’t Toryism about providing equal opportunities, a ladder for everyone to climb? Why then would any Tory want to make life even easier for those already at the top of the ladder, at the expense of people on the lower rungs?

To understand, you need to do the electoral arithmetic. Age, not social class, has become the new dividing line between Labour and the Tories. The under-25s broke three to one for Labour in the last election — but this was no problem for Team Boris because the over-65s chose him by four to one. His gamble now is that the political backlash from tax rises will be balanced out by gratitude from affluent homeowners. 

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This week the Prime Minister called groups of backbenchers to No. 10 to explain his plan, but they left more confused than ever. He tried to sum up his thinking by saying in private what he no longer says in public: that it’s about the assets. ‘It stands for something very conservative,’ Johnson said to one of the groups of MPs he’d invited to No. 10 — ‘the right to pass on money’.

Is this really the Boris Johnson definition of conservatism: a protection racket, where the tools of the state are used to extract money from minimum-wage workers and pass it on to the better off?»

Excerto de Assetocracy: the inversion of the welfare state, Fraser Nelson na Spectator, explicando como o aumento de 2,5% das contribuições para a segurança social é dinheiro extraído dos mais pobres para financiar o bem-estar dos pensionistas proprietários