Hi, I'm Anouche, and I'm Alfa, Steven's on holiday, and on today's new Statesman podcast,

we discuss the new social care plans, and you ask us, why isn't Labour calling for a

wealth tax? So Boris Johnson has set out his plan for funding health and social care for the next

three years. It's going to be a 1.25 percentage point rise in national insurance to raise 36

billion pounds of investment. The majority of this is going to be spent on the NHS and trying to

clear the backlog, first of all, with the remainder funding a care cap of £86,000, so that's the

amount, the maximum amount a person will pay for their care in their lifetime, and the remainder

going on improving the social care system. So it's thrown up a lot of questions, and we're recording

on the day that there is a vote on this tax rise tonight in Parliament, so we won't speak

about what the result of that could be, but it appears from where we're sitting now

that the rebellion that was expected from Tory MPs doesn't look like it will be as big as first

thought. And Alfa, you've been asking around about this, why are they suddenly so well-behaved?

Yeah, I'm wondering if part of it was actually that, I mean, we're recording the first week

back of Parliament. There was a real back to school feeling, I think, in Westminster with suddenly

no social distancing in the chamber. Lots of MPs, staff, members are back in Parliament for the

first time. Everyone's been quite excited, I think, and I think maybe the journalists have been

a bit excited too, myself included, which means that I think that everyone got in a bit of a

tizzy thinking that there might be a huge rebellion over this national insurance hike, which just

doesn't look like it's likely to come to pass at all, as you say, we are recording before the vote.

There was this sense that there was a storm brewing before Parliament returned, and Boris Johnson

was going to return on Monday to a huge row. And we saw, you know, former Conservative Chancellor

speaking out about the national insurance rise, Jake Barry, the MP whose chair of the Northern

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