The Tories are in revolt about social care – and Boris Johnson’s ‘clear plan’ won’t work

T he spectacle of the Tory party in a frothing fury is a stirring one. Ministers brief freely – Jacob Rees-Mogg’s head high above the parapet – while every WhatsApp groupuscule of Conservative MPs rampages against raising national insurance to fund social care and the NHS.

It’s hard to find a loyal voice, beyond the ministerial payroll dutifully sent into TV studios to be knocked about. The angries storm at the prospect of breaking manifesto promises – not to raise the three main taxes and not to break the pension triple lock (though their hunting horns were strangely muted over the broken promise not to cut foreign aid).

The Tory press puts on a splendid firework display. “The last thing we need is a new wave of taxes to squash enterprise,” flames the Mail on Sunday; “Tories at war over ‘idiotic’ tax increase,” splashes the Sunday Telegraph. Quotes garnered elsewhere are a rollicking good read, including Marcus Fysh, MP for Yeovil: “Ministers who want to be socialists shouldn’t be ministers any more.” An unnamed MP says: “What they are proposing is a one-size-fits-all social gulag … a horrific dystopian future.” Anger at the net zero climate target gets thrown into the mix too.

On the other wing, a wiser cacophony – from the likes of John Major, Damian Green, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond – calls out the gross injustice of raising this levy via national insurance. The lowest-paid workers start paying on earnings of just £10,000, while 66-year-olds pay nothing, with zero levied on dividends or rents.

As the BBC’s Andrew Marr put it brusquely to multimillionaire minister Nadhim Zahawi, a worker renting in Hartlepool will pay hundreds more, while someone, “let’s call him Nadhim Zahawi, who has millions and millions of pounds in rental property in central London, will pay nothing at all, diddly squat. Now that is not fair.” Marr poked him with the generational injustice too: “A 25-year-old on £20,000 will pay £104, but a 66-year-old earning £55,000 pays absolutely nothing.”

Expect these objections to be reprised in every media report. The government will pretend to correct generational injustice with a one-year break in the triple lock pension “saving” £5bn: that’s not a saving but correcting a statistical freak when an earnings plunge followed by a bounceback caused an apparent 8.8% wage rise. Matching that would gift pensioners a super-bonanza. But here’s a grisly saving hidden in the Office for Budget Responsibility budget report: £1.5bn will be recouped in state pensions from the thousands of Covid dead.

Boris Johnson will plough on: most of his MPs and all his cabinet will kowtow. Why? Because YouGov finds two-thirds of voters are willing to pay extra national insurance to fund the NHS and social care. For that, the government relies on public ignorance. People prefer paying national insurance in the false belief it pays for their NHS and pensions, though it’s actually just another, less fair, income tax – a relic chancellors like for that convenient illusion.

Even so, social care is a potential political landmine. Many voters don’t realise it isn’t free: when they hear of having to pay a cap of, say, £80,000 before the state takes over, some are outraged, not appreciating this protects the rest of their inheritance. That’s what tripped up Labour health secretary Andy Burnham’s excellent plan in 2009, damned as a “death tax”. That’s what sunk Theresa May in her 2017 manifesto, damned as a “dementia tax”.

Here’s Johnson’s greatest risk. Unless he reforms national insurance to levy it on the retired and on unearned incomes, this unfairness will break through the political sound barrier. He can forget “levelling up” – a slogan that would finally be killed stone dead by this, alongside the £20 universal credit cut in the coming weeks just when thousands of young workers crash out of furlough into unemployment.

Labour’s Keir Starmer rejects using national insurance for this levy, while Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, tells me: “The broadest shoulders should pay the most. Any tax rises must be fair across generations and all forms of income, including assets.” But when asked “So what would Labour do?” the party spokespeople resist, waiting to lay out their tax reforms at the election. In the white heat of this row, there’s no time for such caution. In the Commons they need a crisp reply right now: get this right and they can land blow after blow in the coming autumn of spending austerity.

In one way, Downing Street relishes the crescendo of a Tory party row: voters like leaders resisting their own party’s ideologues. Besides, Johnson needs a phoney “big spender” disguise for the cuts ahead.

But this care crisis won’t vanish from the news. Those doing the caring see no sign of the “clear plan” Johnson claimed to have on his first day in No 10: “We will fix the crisis in social care once and for all,” he said then. The £10bn likely to be raised for care falls short of the £12.5bn investment needed just to return to 2010’s meagre funding. Most will go on relieving costs for property-owning families in the south-east of England – with far less for improving the quality of care or abysmal pay for staff, who are leaving in droves.

What’s more, the “plan” is to give the NHS the first tranche for reducing waiting lists, as that is the public’s top concern. In both services there’s a raucous laugh at the fantasy that when those lists are gone (really?) any remaining cash will transfer from the NHS to care. There will be nothing left from an NHS degraded after a decade of underfunding greater than any it’s ever faced.

Glumly waiting for funds, Mike Padgham, head of St Cecilia’s four care homes in Scarborough, and who also represents 250 small care home owners in the north of England, asks: “Where’s the plan?”

“Raising money is welcome,” he says, “but who does it go to? Is it for councils and is it ringfenced?” He needs to raise his carers’ pay to NHS rates, as once promised, but sees no sign of raised fees to cover that. “I’m losing staff.” And like his members he has 10% vacancies. The “no jab, no job” rule will see more go: when I visited recently he had six vaccine refusers. He’s only persuaded two, “but I can’t let four go, with winter coming on”. He’s written to residents’ relatives to ask them to volunteer to help, “it’s that desperate”. As this levy is already promised many times over, there will be vocal disappointments.

Standing back, how odd that Boris Johnson, of all people, nailed his reputation to the unlikely cause of social care. If he does use national insurance, such an unjust tax may yet stir outrage even in a country usually undertroubled by inequality. He may yet regret entering this graveyard of other leaders.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist