The National Care Service: A Victim of Elite Class Struggle

Despite years of negotiation between the Scottish Government, Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), unions and local authorities, the National Care Service had barely gotten past the ideas-board stage before it was scrapped by Maree Todd MSP at the end of January. As the Glasgow Disability Alliance pointed out in response to its publication, the Bill fudged questions of who was responsible for what in the proposed system, and how its rules would be enforced. The Bill also left its relationship to other legislation intolerably unclear. It guaranteed little more than a government committee in an already bloated bureaucracy, patiently awaiting empowerment by secondary legislation.

If we are to succeed in our next attempts to bring a nationalised and user-friendly care service onto the agenda, our strategy must begin from a clear explanation of how the NCS coalition collapsed, and a precise understanding of our opponents’ interests, incentives, and capacities. What follows is a provisional sketch for such an explanation.