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The
truth about ageing
She
was a 91-year-old beauty - and the sexual electricity crackled between
these two old people. Even at that age, we never give up; life is for
living right to the end. It is an universal urge and age an universal
scourge. Everyone's body is giving out; we are all looking into the mirror
feeling the same spirit as we did when we were teenagers and gazing
bleakly at the ravages of time. It
is no consolation to know that ageing is what gives life meaning because
it makes it finite. We still want to live fully to the end; to make the
impact at 91 we made at 21, the age my great-aunt said she felt all her
life. The
crisis is that in an era of ever greater inequalities, the greatest
inequality of all is what is happening to the old. The trite new headline
is that as life expectancy rises - men now live to 75 and women to 80, up
some seven or eight years since the 1960s - 60 has become the new 50.
Better health care, better drugs, better hygiene, better living standards
and more wealth have meant that the ageing process has been deferred. Scarcely
a week goes by without a report saying that the over-55s are joining
health clubs in droves, going on gap years like their children or that
more over-65s are working harder than ever. A bright new future beckons,
in which age is being fought back, and we will be as sprightly at 70 as we
were at 50. The
problem is that this is only true for a minority. Professional men now
live nine-and-a-half years longer than unskilled manual workers, the
widest gap on record. The death rates for under- 65s in our poorest urban
areas are two-and-half-times higher than in our richest areas. The
metropolitan talk is of working well into your sixties and the vital
importance of lifting mandatory retirement at 65; the lived reality is
nearly half of men between 55 and 65 can't find work. The
gift of living well into your sixties and seventies is being enjoyed by
the better off while those on lower incomes are decades behind in their
expectation of not just life, but quality of life. It is a source of
unfairness that is posing the greatest challenge to our institutional
arrangements ever - and which threatens to become one of the hottest and
most bitterly contested political issues around. Last
week, pensions joined How
fair is it on them to pay higher taxes and forgo wage rises just because
they live in a society which is ageing and didn't save enough 20 or 30
years ago to provide for its retirement today? Everywhere you look in this
debate, issues of equity and morality loom large. One
of the reasons the Conservative Party is in such a mess is that its reflex
response to these questions - choice, low taxes and privatisation - is
self-evidently inadequate. You cannot privatise how society wants to
organise the quality of life as we age. The
majority in any democracy will not countenance walking away from these
issues, constructing only a minimalist framework or leaving it up to the
hazards of individual choice and individual saving, not least because the
majority knows it needs some robust framework in its own best interest.
The only way through the maze is to try to hang on to some universal
framework through which we collectively navigate our way as we age, but to
make it as flexible as possible because of our differential experience. (framework:structure) Here,
New Labour is stumbling towards some half-reasonable answers. One of the
best policy pronouncements of last week was from Andrew Smith, Secretary
of State for Work and Pensions, confirming the innovative plan of offering
those who defer their state pension by five years a lump sum of £30,000.
Those who can work will work longer and be rewarded by the lump sum; but
that will leave more pension resources available for those who can't work
and opt for their pension, which now can be increased as fewer will be
receiving it. (defer:ajourner) It
is a smart and equitable way of dealing with the new reality; it sustains
the principle of the universal pension but builds crucial flexibility into
how it is administered. If enough people defer their pension, it may even
allow the state pension for early retirees to be pitched at a reasonable
level. The
same approach has to be applied elsewhere. The fairest way of relieving
pressure on the dwindling workforce is aggressively to insist that age
discrimination cease, so that those over- 55s have a reasonable chance of
working. But
there has to be honesty that many over-65 shouldn't be expected or asked
to work. Companies should discharge their responsibility to their pension
funds, but there has to be flexibility in how they deal with the vast
pension-fund deficits they have inherited from the past. The cash has to
come from somewhere; every pound contributed to narrow a pension-fund
deficit is a pound that could have been deployed in higher wages or more
investment. How
much should today's workers suffer for past mistakes? The only equitable
policy is to establish a government-backed universal fund that supports
particular pension-fund deficits. This
will, of course, be expensive; sustaining universality as we live longer
and deal with the errors of the past, even if we do so flexibly, is likely
to imply higher taxes. There is a limit to the kind of self-financing ruse
Andrew Smith announced last week. Yet
this speaks to a deep truth. Turning a blind eye to the growing
inequalities of those of working age is hard enough. Doing the same when
it means indifference to something at the heart of our experience - how we
age - is impossible. It is the old who will revive social democracy.
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |