We are living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than ever — it’s one of the greatest advances of our time, and yet our politicians prefer to see it as a disaster. ‘We are facing a time bomb,’ says the Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, a health minister. He presents the numbers as if we are supposed to be appalled: ‘by 2030 England will have double the number of over-85s. The number of over-65s will have increased by 50 per cent.’ In other words: oh my God, we’re all going to live.
It’s odd that the Liberal Democrats should be so alarmed by the fact that there will be half a million of us who have celebrated 90 or more Christmases — three times as many as there were in the 1980s. Mr Lamb’s ‘time bomb’ is nothing to dread. It means that this Christmas many more families will be celebrating across the generations.
Of course, Mr Lamb has half a point. Longer lives mean greater demands on care and hospital services. The pensions minister also has issues to address: extrapolate any trend far enough into the future and you can foresee disaster. But that is to ignore the possibility that action can be taken to solve the problem. On any issue — climate change, population growth, oil supply — there are ways to predict that we’re all doomed. But they seldom come to pass, thanks to human ingenuity and progress. Things often go badly wrong. But more often than not, they go wonderfully right.
Who would have thought, for example, that pensioners would be driving the British job-creation miracle? David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith rightly boast that there are more people in work now than ever. But we seldom hear that a third of the rise in employment is accounted for by the over-65s.
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