by
Les May
LAST
Monday
the
‘i’
newspaper devoted more than a third of its letters page to three long
letters complaining that people over 70 have been referred to as
‘elderly’. The
day after Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown,
who likes to style herself as ‘a
leftie liberal, anti-racist, feminist, Muslim’,
decided
to devote her entire column in the paper to the same topic.
You
can get a flavour of it from opening sentences, ‘Who
are you calling “elderly”? Why should those over 70 quietly
acquiesce to house arrest?’ Being
something of a
snob
she could not resist the opportunity to tell us how wonderful she is;
‘I
have never worked as hard as I do now. I pen columns, broadcast,
write books, run a charity, speaks at events, teach at university,
and am reading dozens of books as chair of the RSL Christopher Bland
Prize for authors over the age of 50.’
Followed by what looks rather like self praise;
Look around you and you will see many others too, shining
and unstoppable
in their third age.’ (my
emphasis)
Yasmin
may suffer from chronic whingeing but she certainly does not suffer
from modesty.
This
is whingeing for
the sake of it. It suggests to me that older people have caught the
habit. so commonly seen in younger people, of complaining about what
people say
rather than what they do.
Open your mouth and say something some thin skinned individual,
sometimes
called a ‘snowflake’,
does not like and you are likely to be labelled as ‘racist,
homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, islamophobic etc’.
Whatever I may think of Boris Johnson, a.k.a. Pinocchio, he is
certainly not a racist.
For
those who claim to be ‘of the left’ whingeing
like this is
letting the noise drown out the signal. As in many other parts of
the world our biggest problem in
the UK is
inequality. What
Yasmin did not bother to mention is that there is a steep gradient
between poorer and better off women in terms of both longevity and
years without illness
or a limiting condition, a
fact that will
probably
be
reflected in deaths due to Corvid19.
Producing
a Twitter storm about
what someone has said or getting rid of the ‘Tampon
Tax’
is viewed as a major victory when
it has achieved little or nothing.
I calculate that women will be better off by a whole 1p per week
taken over their lifetime. Some victory!
When
I first heard that people over 70 might in a week or so be asked to
voluntarily isolate themselves for a period
months,
I interpreted it as there being a window of just a few days to
prepare myself and my wife for this. Instead
of whingeing the letter writers would have been better employed
thinking out the practicalities. Contrary
to Alibhai-Brown’s OTT comment, no
one is going to place us under ‘house arrest’. It
is advice; take it and protect yourself, leave it and accept any
consequences.
Will
Yasmin
and the letter writers
who object to the term ‘elderly’
be happy to forgo their pension, free prescriptions and free local
travel, three benefits they get precisely because they are elderly?
Thought
not!
***************************
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