Zack Polanski will not say sorry to Farage for sharing guillotine image

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has said he made an “inadvertent mistake” by sharing an Instagram post of a man wearing a T-shirt featuring an image of a guillotine and the phrase “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, but he repeatedly said he would not apologise to Nigel Farage. Aletha Adu has the story.

Burnham to give speech on social care as Louise Casey plays down cost concerns saying many families ‘already paying’

Good morning. Andy Burnham is this morning giving a speech on social care. He is not going to discuss in any detail at all the sort of reform to the system he wants to implement, but instead he will focus on his intention to build a political consensus on the changes needed. He will say:

For decades, governments have kicked this issue down the road because they’ve seen it as too risky, too difficult, and too complicated.

Politicians might have different views but I’m serious about fixing this issue and to do that, we have to find common ground and listen to others to find a way forward.

It’s time to draw a line under people playing politics when the human cost of that means carers struggling, families paying the price and our NHS buckling under the strain.

Pippa Crerar and Aletha Adu have the details in their overnight story.

Dame Louise Casey, the veteran Whitehall official who for years has been deployed by governments of all parties to solve some of their most intractable problems, is already leading a commission on adult social care reform and she will be attending the event with Burnham too.

She is launching what she describes as a “Big Conversation on Care”, which is designed to “give the public their chance to share their views and help shape the future of adult social care in England”.

Burnham’s desire to find “common ground” on social care is undoubtedly sincere, but is already looking problematic. The No 10 news release says Burnham has “invited the leaders of the two main opposition parties, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey” to a meeting today to discuss the issue. The meeting will go ahead, but neither Badenoch nor Davey will be there in person. Davey is in France, he has a son who needs care 24/7, and in a post on social media last night he explained that he would be joining the meeting via Zoom. Badenoch reportedly has a medical appointment, and she will be sending Stuart Andrew, the shadow health secretary, in her place.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has not been invited. Perhaps that is because his party has already decided what it thinks Burnham will propose (“a death tax”) and has spent the last few days promising to fight it “every step of the way”. But that has not stopped him complaining about being NFI’d. In a statement last night he said:

If Andy Burnham is serious about putting politics aside to solve Britain’s biggest problems, it’s remarkable that he’s chosen to ignore the party that led over 300 national opinion polls and represents thousands of councillors and millions of Britons across the country.

It’s now clear that Burnham is conspiring behind closed doors with the failed political establishment to foist further tax rises on the country.

The fact Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch are going along with this tells you all you need to know about their parties. This is the uniparty in action.

Casey was on the Today programme this morning. While she did not set out in detail what sort of reform she would like to see, she condemned the way dementia is treated as a “hidden problem” by the health sector, because it is not prioritised in the way that cancer is, and she said services needed to be more joined up.

The vision that we must have for our country when it comes to a National Care Service is that the public do not have to face this constant battle lines between who does what and how … The vision, surely, is that we have something that basically is simple and straightforward, that the public know is going to be there.

On the question of funding, she also made the point that many families are already paying for adult social care.

Incidentally, they’re already paying for [care]. So this idea that somehow somebody’s going to come along and say, ‘Hello, here’s a whole new service and a whole new tax’ is just kind of cloud cuckoo land.

I will post more from her interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The Cabinet Office publishes annual figures on the civil service workforce.

Afternoon: Burnham holds a meeting with the Tories and Lib Dems about social care.

Afternoon: Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, is on a visit in north London.

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