“Be careful what you wish for”, says Charlie, ever the cynic.
Pre-bingo coffee time in the community centre and we’d been discussing the election and what the different parties had on offer for our generation. Charlie clearly did not trust them. Nor did we, but then none of us really had the faintest idea what we were talking about because, essentially, there was no material on which to base our arguments, beyond the accusations each party made against its opponents. When I got home I did some research and was amazed to discover how little detail was available on policy options.
The Greens had published nothing since 2010, when they had favoured a non-means tested universal pension worth 60% of the median wage. Ukip, with the oldest voter base, was similarly out of date, having added nothing to its 2010 proposal to combine benefits and pensions in one package.
At a recent meeting with Saga, Cameron linked the mantra “A Britain that rewards work” to the elderly, on the principle that “if you’ve done the right thing, you will get the benefit of living in Britain”, it being “a fundamental duty to ensure dignity and security in retirement”.
Labour indulges similarly weasel rhetoric. “Old people are a national asset and old age should be enjoyed” informs a strategy to ensure that “end-of-life care takes place in the community”. The party’s present preoccupation is warding off accusations that it will raid the pension tax breaks to fund reductions in student fees.
The primary concern of the Lib Dems appears to be to put clear orange water between themselves and their coalition partner’s intentions to ringfence all benefits for elderly people regardless of the wealth of recipients.
The only concrete proposals I could find, two months before the election, were the Lib Dems’ priority on social care and the importance of local services, and Labour’s concern to encourage lifestyles that prevent pre-geriatric conditions squandering resources that could otherwise be devoted to care of the elderly. None of them addressed the real issues, because the political class persists in viewing the electorate as commodities, to be assessed simply in economic terms.
A few weeks back on Question Time, Germaine Greer, reprising GK Chesterton some decades earlier, acknowledged that “I am the problem”. And so am I, and millions of others. Tinkering about with fuel allowances, bus passes and TV licences ain’t going to resolve it. We have progressed from slippered pantaloon to demented incontinent. My care costs will be exorbitant; I won’t get better; I don’t contribute; I am “complex dependent” and as I live longer, my stakeholder entitlement – through tax and pension contributions – is open to actuarial challenge.
From the Code of Hammurabi to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, humanity has sought to legislate respect and to protect the lives of the most vulnerable through social contracts of collective altruism. Longevity, however, has taken us into hitherto uncharted waters of the human narrative and demands a new moral compass.
I am certainly vulnerable but I am emphatically not a national asset. I am a liability and “dignity” is the least of my worries when I am trying to pull my socks on, searching frantically for my spectacles or confused about what I came upstairs to do.
So, you might reasonably ask, what am I looking for? Let’s first deal with what I am not looking for. I do not want political preferment in return for the grey vote. I do not want to be the football in a grudge match between the tribes of Westminster. I do not want to be the cause of inter-generational conflict. I do not want my comforts to be bought at the cost of social injustice.
Like most of my companions, the transformation I am looking for is a means of moderating the distress and discomforts of my eighth age. I want a robust and adult conversation about the value of longevity, about its quality.
Does it actually have any? And did anyone ask for it in the first place? Is it, as Charlie implied, even on the human wish list? If there is no way out before the fog of dementia closes in, then at least I want some alleviation from its encircling gloom.
That can only be made possible by a settlement between exponents of politics, philosophy and economics who possess the honesty to engage with real issues. Surely among this uberclass of the great, the good and the godly there must be sufficient numbers with the emotional literacy required for such a conversation.
