Andy Burnham has pledged to reform social care (Alamy)

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This is a bold pledge – such reform is likely to be complex, politically contentious, and most of all, expensive. Election campaigns have turned and political careers foundered on similar promises. It is nonetheless encouraging because it presents a chance for genuinely transformative policymaking to restore Britain’s social contract, as I argue in my report for the Social Market Foundation today.

There are a number of potential models for a nationally funded social care system – it could be funded through national taxation like the NHS, or from a dedicated levy; a mandatory social insurance system, like in Japan and Germany; or a system similar to Theresa May’s could draw more heavily on housing wealth. All these would entail raising significant revenue when the tax burden is high and the cost of living is rising, but there are advantages as well. 

Any new system must be nationally funded. Currently, old age social care provision is a duty of local authorities, and a major contributor to the parlous state of local government finances. Councils in England spent around £9.2bn from their own budgets on old age social care in 2024-25; that’s 22 per cent of all council tax receipts. These rising statutory costs have forced councils to cut non-essential services to the bone, leaving them less able to respond to local priorities and undermining local democracy.

The burden is not distributed equally or fairly. Nine of the 10 councils spending the smallest proportion of their council tax on old age social care are in London, with the highest-spending authorities concentrated in lower-income parts of the North and Midlands. Though it sounds counterintuitive, a purely national funding system for old age social care would help Burnham deliver on his pledge to put power and resources back in the hands of local communities. Councils would be free to spend the cash they raise on local services, and local councils, rather than central government, could determine spending priorities.

This could allow the PM to finally sort out England’s outdated, inefficient and unfair council tax system. Based on home valuations from 1991, the system has fallen dangerously out of sync with the distribution of wealth. Absurdly, Buckingham Palace incurs a lower council tax bill than a typical three-bedroom semi in Hartlepool. Council tax is deeply unpopular – one study ranked it last among 23 possible tax-raising measures.

The main barrier to council tax reform has been the fear that revaluation will generate a backlash from those required to pay more, particularly in London. Even if most bills were lower, the geographical concentration of “losers” would make for a serious political problem for any government, let alone a Labour administration holding 59 London seats. If, however, old age social care was funded nationally, council tax reform need not be revenue neutral. A reformed local tax system needing to raise £9.2bn less could be more rational and progressive without large swathes of the country paying significantly higher bills.

Our new report examines this possibility, finding that multiple models of council tax reform become more politically feasible in this scenario. Under the most politically feasible model, this social care saving at lower bands could cut the share of households facing higher bills from 35 per cent to just 4 per cent. In London, the number falls from 2.24m to around 670,000.

Rather than undertaking one difficult and politically dangerous reform, Burnham might be better off attempting two simultaneously.

Barney Dowling is a researcher at the Social Market Foundation

If you ever feel dumb, just remember there are people out there who think Ali G is a pisstake out of the black community. If you ever fret that your grey matter has seen better days, perk yourself up with the reminder that there are folk so stupendously thick, so utterly unburdened by wit, that they think Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockery of white men is an attack on black men. I promise, nothing will make you feel smarter than watching half-wits and arseholes yelp ‘Racism!’ over a caricature of wiggas.

The Ali G controversy really does have it all, doesn’t it? It’s like a singularity of woke, a blinding collision of the dead-eyed literalism and funereal humourlessness of every virtue-draped muppet who calls himself ‘progressive’. No sooner had it been announced that Cohen was resurrecting his best-loved character – well, we loved him in the Nineties, when we weren’t all mentally ill – than ‘the left’ was polishing its pitchforks for a good old-fashioned orgy of censorious hysteria. It’s so 2019!

The thing that stirred the cancel-culture ghouls from their thin slumber is a new movie called Ali G: Who Iz I? It’s a faux-documentary in which we catch up with Ali G mingling with unsuspecting members of the public while spitting black patois and adorned in absurdly outsized ‘ghetto wear’. He sports dreadlocks now and a rastacap. G, of course, is a white dude from the dreary commuter town of Staines in Surrey whose real name is Alistair Leslie Graham and yet who loves putting on a durag and saying ‘Iz it coz I iz black?’. Because it’s a pisstake of tragic white men. Lordy, how many times.

The trailer – which looks great to me, not least because it has comic genius Morgana Robinson as Ali G’s knocked-up girlfriend – has triggered unholy caterwauling among the wit-impaired. It’s being ‘slammed as racist’, reports the Hollywood Reporter. X is a riot of the dumbest people alive accusing Ali G of doing ‘blackface’. These are the same bozos who watch Blazing Saddles – Mel Brooks’ gloriously profane satire on racism – and say: ‘Is this racist?’ No, it isn’t, you’re just very, very dim.

Apparently, the joy-starved literalists who live among us have fired off nearly 40,000 emails to cinemas begging them not to show Cohen’s blasphemous movie. You’re telling me there are tens of thousands of people in my society who are so pathologically vain they think they have the right to annihilate any culture that bruises their porcelain psyches and that I should be worried about a comic doing a Jafaican accent? Nah, you’re all right. People who want to save us from ‘offence’ are infinitely more scary than people who want to expose us to it.

If you watched the trailer for Ali G: Who Iz I? and thought to yourself ‘This is anti-black’, I don’t even know what to say to you. All the targets of the mockumentary ribbing in the trailer are white. That was always the core of Ali G: to milk for laughs the paralysing liberal guilt of stiff white people. He’d ambush establishment figures who were so terrified of appearing uncool or bigoted that they’d nod along to any old gibberish rather than risk calling out an ‘urban’ kid. Blackface? Bollocks. That crude old ‘humour’ was about ridiculing powerless black people; Ali G ridicules our eggshell culture that was built by the powerful.

The Ali G storm speaks to the impossibility of humour in the sterile wastelands of woke. Literalism and fragility are the enemies of comedy. A generation trained to take offence, to unpick every novel, painting, TV show and gag for even the faintest whiff of unwitting bigotry, is never going to be amused by anything. I recently saw a clip of Gen Z’ers being horrified by Little Britain’s Marjorie Dawes as she fails to understand the perfectly understandable Indian woman in a sari in her weight-watchers class. Imagine watching that and thinking it’s mocking Indian women rather than a certain kind of tone-deaf middle-class woman – rarely have I despaired more over the state of our education system.

There’s hypocrisy, too. There always is. The same people who need a lie-down over Ali G will tell you that a 6’2” cock in a frock is literally a woman and you’re Hitler if you say otherwise. They’ll whoop as male comics with estrogen-bloated moobs take to the stage to crack spectacularly unfunny jokes about the struggles of being a woman. ‘Blackface’ bad, womanface good. We’ve also seen radical Muslims raging against Ali G and his ‘racist’ fancy dress. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll get my lectures on sartorial sins from people who don’t shove women into black binbags. Sackface is a far larger problem than blackface.

What could it be about this chap Mr Cohen that Islamists – and their suicidal simps on the silver-spoon left – hate so much? It’s a mystery, isn’t it? Actually, it’s not. That’s the final ingredient in the Ali G storm: anti-Semitism. Spend five seconds on social media and you’ll see green-ink frothing about what a scummy Zionist Cohen is, and how he might even be an agent of Mossad, and how he’s definitely a Muslim-hater because all Zio-Nazis are Muslim-haters, right? I’ve said it before: scratch an Israelophobe, find a fascist.

It’s so clear now: reports of the death of woke were greatly exaggerated. For here it is, noisily re-spawning in a riot of stupidity, hypocrisy, autocracy and racism. Don’t let them win. Go and see Ali G. Laugh with the Jew who makes prigs and bigots lose their shit. Booyakasha.

These are strange days, readers.

It’s getting hard to tell who’s on which side.

To be honest, we’d take George Foulkes’ offer in a heartbeat. It’s not ideal, because there should be no limits on democracy, but the UK government can perfectly lawfully deny another indyref indefinitely anyway (and seem entirely inclined to), so we’d be losing nothing, and according to polling we’d be starting from a winning position.

His tweet was responding to this Daily Record editorial:

…to which the SNP’s army of online dolts have responded with predictable fury despite it being a remarkable concession from the firmly Unionist newspaper. The Record didn’t say the VOTE in the referendum should have to be over 60%, just that sustained polling over that level should be the trigger for the referendum to HAPPEN.

(And since polls have a margin of error and the change option usually falls away on polling day, it would represent our best chance of winning anyway.)

But as Unionists hold out apparent olive branches and (frankly unearned) opportunities for real and measurable progress towards the SNP’s ostensible goal, how is the SNP responding?

With a deafening chorus of “WE CANNAE DAE IT!”

In the last 72 hours, senior SNP figures including the FM have insisted that:

(1) they won’t do a deal with Reform to get a referendum,

(2) that any route that isn’t a referendum won’t work, and

(3) that even if a legislator from the current governing party of the UK comes out and explicitly OFFERS a second referendum, they’re going to put their fingers in their ears, pretend it never happened and just pray that he goes away.

That’s pretty much every possible road towards independence rubbished and closed down. Even uber-loyal idiot comic The National is struggling to grasp it all.

Which is understandable, because it makes no sense. After years of simply stalling on the pursuit of independence, the SNP now appears to be in full headlong retreat, running for the hills as fast as their legs will carry them with the Daily Record and George Foulkes and Reform running after them going “Come back! Don’t you WANT a referendum?”

But the SNP won’t hear a word of it. “Please, please, please don’t let us get what we claim to want”, they wail.

?

Because these days of unending power, money and status without responsibility ARE their good times, and they don’t want anything to change.