Here we are again. The United Kingdom, once the workshop of the world and guardian of empire, now looks to a provincial Indian state for lessons in how to care for its old. Kerala, that sliver of Marxist-inflected greenery on the Malabar Coast, has pioneered a policy called ‘No One Grows Old Alone.’ And Westminster, in its never-ending quest to avoid actually fixing the social care crisis, parrots it as a ‘model.’ The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Let me be clear: this is not an attack on Kerala. The state has laudable human development indices; its literacy rate would shame half of Europe. But the idea that Britain, with its National Health Service and pensions architecture, should look to a developing region for social care inspiration is a symptom of something deeper: the abandonment of tradition and the fetishisation of the state.
Kerala’s plan is simple enough. It mobilises local volunteers, trains them, and pairs them with the elderly who live alone. It is a community-based scheme, not a bureaucratic one. That is its genius. But here is the uncomfortable truth: such schemes work in places where community still means something. In Kerala, extended families, though fraying, still hold a ghost of their old authority. Neighbours know each other. The local temple or church is a hub. This is a society that has not yet fully succumbed to the atomisation that the West calls ‘modernity.’
Britain, by contrast, has spent fifty years systematically dismantling every institution that once bound generations together. The family? A flexible unit of convenience. The church? A tourist attraction. The local pub? A gastropub for millennials with disposable income. We have traded solidarities for self-fulfilment, duty for rights. And now we wonder why the elderly die alone in cold flats, discovered only by the smell.
What the Kerala plan actually mirrors is the Victorian ideal of ‘philanthropic localism,’ before the state sucked all initiative into its maw. But our current overlords in Whitehall will not learn that lesson. They will see the Kerala model and produce a glossy White Paper with ‘targets’ and ‘pathways.’ They will fund ‘community champions’ and ‘befriending coordinators.’ They will create a bureaucracy of compassion.
And that is the core of my complaint. The state cannot love you. It cannot sit with you on a Tuesday afternoon and listen to your stories of the war. It cannot hold your hand as you die. The Kerala plan works precisely because it does not attempt to do so. It empowers ordinary people to do what ordinary people used to do: care for their neighbours. But in Britain, we have outsourced so many of our moral obligations to the state that we have forgotten how to be human.
I will be told I am romanticising the past. Perhaps. The Victorian era had its workhouses and its horrors. But at least it understood that the family and the community were the first lines of defence against destitution. The state was the last resort, not the first.
So by all means, cite Kerala. But do not pretend that a policy designed for a society with strong communal bonds can be transplanted into our anomic, hyper-individualist wasteland. First, we must admit that we have a cultural crisis, not a funding crisis. Then we might begin to rebuild the ruins of our social fabric. Until then, the elderly will die alone, and we will point to a faraway state as proof that we care.
