OPERATION Warm Welcome and the question of increased funding for social care were the topics raised by columnists in the newspapers.

The Daily Express

Leo McKinstry said the official British support scheme for refugees from Afghanistan was called Operation Warm Welcome.

“It is a title that reflects the Government’s sense of obligation to those fleeing the country after the triumph of the Taliban,” he said. “But no such generosity of spirit has been accorded to passengers arriving in recent days at Heathrow Airport.”

He said international travellers have been greeted by paralysing chaos at border checks, characterised by lengthy queues and five hour waits for clearance.

“What the British people want is a just, efficient immigration system, which should be a straightforward objective, given that we are an island nation,” he said. “But over the last quarter of a century, the political will to achieve that has been entirely missing. Obsessed with diversity, addicted to cheap labour, our leaders have consistently refused to impose effective border controls.

“The result is the near anarchy we now see at Heathrow and on the Kent coast.”

The Indepedent

The newspaper’s leader column said Parliament returns this week, and with it, ‘or the first time in a long time, may come proper politics’.

“There is no question that the social care system needs urgent reform, and there is no doubt it will be very expensive, but the question of how to pay for it is as thorny as they come,” it said.

“Even an income tax rise would affect people whose income comes from investments, or savings, or rent from properties. To raise national insurance is to directly transfer money from young people, who have comparatively little, to elderly people, who have plenty – particularly in housing wealth, though not always in readily accessible funds.”

The Daily Mail

Stephen Glover said the Prime Minister is expected to announce a tax hike to fund the NHS and social care.

“ Why should poorly paid young people, many of them already saddled with student loans, stump up extra NICs so that old people needing ruinously expensive social care don’t have to sell their own houses?,” he asked. “It is monstrously unfair — shades of Margaret Thatcher’s abortive poll tax? — and more than a little depressing that Boris Johnson should have come up with such a barmy plan in the first place.”

He said the one thing we know about the NHS is that it has an inexhaustible appetite for endless resources.

“All that can be said about the row over social care is that Boris Johnson hasn’t yet shown he has a solution — and Rishi Sunak hasn’t yet proved that he can restrain the Prime Minister’s alarming propensity to tax and spend.”