The senescent state

The following from 70 year-old Guardian columnist Alexander Chancellor, in an article sub-titled "This ageing (sic) business is getting out of control".

Having been born in 1940 rather than 2010, I am pleased to say that my chances of reaching 100 are extremely slim. There comes a point when one starts to say to oneself that one is glad that certain scary things – the flooding of London, nuclear war, the end of the world or whatever – are unlikely to happen during one's lifetime. It is comforting to know that one's risk of exposure to serious unpleasantness is getting rapidly smaller, but future generations may not enjoy that solace.

Take your pick, Alex old boy: you planning to die of cancer or heart disease? Perhaps preceded by dementia? Given the way elderly people are treated by the NHS, getting old in Britain offers the prospect of a prolonged "serious unpleasantness" that makes dying in a flood or  nuclear war seem quite appealing.

Only now are we waking up to the extent of the problems created by increasing life expectancy. There is a feeling of panic in the air as it is realised that within 30 years there will be only two working adults for every pensioner – half as many as at present. We are going to be made to work longer – forced retirement at 65 will soon be against the law – and to wait longer for our state pensions. It is good that one should not be forced to retire; less good that one should not be allowed to. While it makes economic sense that people should go on working into old age, there is no guarantee that they will be able to. There is no reason to think that their mental or physical capacities won't decline as early as they do now.

There is every reason to believe that mental and physical capacities now decline later in life: that's why people are living longer, you fool. That is what the Welfare State set out to achieve: the key is that tricky word "welfare" - which oddly enough is supposed to mean the mental and physical health of the population. The rising number of elderly people is a success story - it has only become a fiscal problem because the Welfare State has become a piggy-bank for healthy skivers who know how to game the system and a bureaucratic nightmare for what used to be called the deserving poor.  

On the other hand, forcing people to work after they should have stopped might paradoxically help to solve the problem by reversing the rise in life expectancy.

How much bull-shit is it possible to cram into one short sentence? State provision for old age has been deliberately eroded for 20+ years instead of raising the retirement age in line with increasing life expectancy, while private pensions have been repeatedly raided to pay for the bloated state apparat. That is what "forces" people to work after they might have wished to retire. And there is no evidence whatsoever that extending a working lifetime diminishes longevity - quite the contrary. Keeping busy is the single most important factor in maintaining both physical and mental health.   

Chancellor was once capable of thinking things through better than this, but now he extrapolates from his own declining mental ability to a generalization about the general population. Much the biggest problem posed by an aging population is the rapid increase in number of people living long enough to be overcome by dementia, and in a rational polity large sums of money would be devoted to finding ways of preventing or delaying the onset and progression of the several diseases that cause it.

But we live in Britain, so there is no hope whatever that logic will prevail in this, or in any other aspect of governance. Stupidity, not senescence, is our biggest problem - but the dysfunctional nature of our institutions argues that the Welfare State, as currently constituted, has grossly outlived its usefulness to become a rising burden on the citizens it was originally intended to serve.