If only there were more amongst the older generation like Max Hastings who, at the outset of the pandemic on Tuesday 24 March 2020, wrote an article in The Times titled "My oldie generation is privileged and selfish. Over-70s are most vulnerable to the virus but the young will pay its fearsome economic price".Monday’s broadcast by the prime minister reflects the fact that we are witnessing the unfolding of a global tragedy, of which the economic dimension is likely to prove more devastating than the viral one. The old merit special compassion so long as they are alive because some are among the most vulnerable and loneliest members of our society. I, by contrast, am among the privileged old. But, as a 74-year-old, age empowers me to add what the young cannot say: should we die, we deserve fewer tears than do those who come after us.
We are the most fortunate generation in history, many of whom have shared in unparalleled prosperity. We have been spared the obligation to fight in a war; played our part in wreaking probably irreparable damage upon the planet; known wonderful times.
Polite discourse holds that the old are nice old codgers and biddies, benign grandparents, upright citizens. Individually, many indeed are. The old as a collective, however, are monumentally selfish. Consider how grey electoral power has been wielded, to serve our interests and injure those of our children.
Despite our affluence relative to the young, the grey vote has fought tooth and nail against the BBC’s sensible termination of our free TV licences; deterred politicians from means-testing free travel passes; resisted fiscal curbs on our pension privileges, and the entirely just depletion of personal resources to fund care home costs. Many of the most vociferous deniers of climate change are those who will not be around to suffer its consequences.
Politically active oldies shamelessly deploy those unworthy phrases “after working hard all my life I deserve . . . ”, or even “I didn’t fight in the war so that . . . ”. Scarcely a politician of any party dares to tell elderly voters that our good things are sustained only by heaping liabilities upon future generations.
Some of Britain’s most influential newspapers have become cynical standard-bearers for their overwhelmingly elderly readerships. They shrink from editorial advocacy of what is morally right or fiscally prudent; of what would best serve the interests of future generations. They merely seek, with impressive success, to terrorise governments into bowing to the will of geriatric Britain.
The great principle upon which mankind has functioned since the beginning of time is that each generation, as it attains senility, should pass the baton to the next, if possible with good grace. Today, many people of my age are haunted in the hours of darkness by fears not for ourselves, but instead for what we are bequeathing, or rather not bequeathing, to our successors.
My dear friend Margaret MacMillan, a magnificent historian roughly my own age, ruminated last week that she wonders if posterity will look back on what we are doing — crippling our economies rather than, in some measure at least, toughing out the pandemic — and conclude that we are mad.
There is probably no choice; certainly, the epidemiologists think not. But we should be clear-sighted about what is happening. Even if the public finances recover relatively quickly from government money printing, as experience after the two world wars suggests is at least possible, the social and economic disruption imposed by corporate bankruptcies will impact hugely upon the lives of the young. We, the old, should acknowledge that they are the people whose plight matters most here, because they are the future, while we are the past.
