Did any party conference really tackle these three major crises?

Conference season is over. Most of the country won’t have even realised that it was happening of course, but now it is definitively at an end. Cameron’s speech yesterday was the final round of a shadow boxing match that has lasted weeks, and acheived great heat, if little light. A huge amount of time was spent at all three major party conferences discussing the financial crisis. Ed Miliband has begun to try and tackle the political crisis. Yet have any of the three major parties really shown the scale of ambition necessary to deal with some of the other major crisis in our society?

The Social Care crisis – Labour has a Shadow Minister for Social Care – Liz Kendall – sothe party is clearly taking the issue seriously. Yet any attempt to tackle the crisis head on by forming cross party consensus on it seems to have fallen by the wayside ever since Andrew Lansley and the Tories attacked Labour’s plans as a “Death Tax”. Yet this is a crisis that is getting more acute by the day, and there’s a demographic timebomb waiting to go off. It is estimated that the failure to develop a proper solution on Social Care is costing the economy £5.3 billion per year, while councils are cutting provision for the vulnerable by up to 10%. Who will care for Grandma? No-one seems to have the answer yet. Andrew Dillnott must be wondering why he wasted his time…

The housing crisis – Ed Balls announced at conference, to much fanfare, that Labour would spend the proceeds of the 4G mobile phone spectrum sale on building 100,000 new affordable homes. Whilst it’s nice to see that home building is now back on the agenda, the ambition is terriyingly small. Shelter estimates that 3 million new homes are needed by 2020. That’s over 300,000 new homes are needed EACH YEAR to solve Britain’s housing crisis. Unfortunately I fear that until affordable housing becomes a middle class concern (and it’s going that way), the solutions suggested by all of the major parties will be woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

The youth unemployment crisis – Ive written about this before at length, but surely anyone who isn’t outraged by the terrifying scale of youth unemployment shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near elected office? Lets reel off just a couple of the most stark statistics – there has been a 100% increase in young people claiming JSA for more than six months since May 2010 and youth unemployment in some regions is running at 25%. “Britain can work”? “Rebuilding Britain”? Tell it to the kids at the college near my flat, who I regularly overhear discussing whether or not they will ever get a job. A generation is being laid to waste here – quite literally lost – and the inability, or worse unwillingness, of government to intervene is an absolute tragedy. Miliband says solving the crisis of youth unemployment would be his first priority after the election of a Labour government. It will need to be, but by then for many young people it could be too late.

Perhaps the real tragedy is that these are all crises that all three major political parties claim to want to solve. And yet their paucity of ambition is only matched by their unwillingness or inability to work together. If we aren’t careful, we’ll wake up in a few years time to a squeezed youth who are completely disenfranchised from our political system, with no jobs, no homes and no financial support from “the bank of mum and dad”. That bank will have been rendered insolvent by the cost of baby boomers paying for their own parents to be cared for in their old age. And where will those young people turn? And to who?

That doesn’t even bare thinking about.