LAUSR

Old people are the enemy. Or so says their increasing demonisation in some Western cultures. This goes beyond longstanding stigmatisation as ugly, unproductive, and obsolete. It casts old people as avaricious and burdensome, apparently effortless and insatiable accumulators of secure pensions, owned homes, and social care. The narrative is adversarial. It pits those infantalised as ‘baby boomers’, born roughly between the mid1940s and mid-1960s, as particularly threatening to so-called Millennials, born between 1980 and 2000. In the UK, the focus of this article, this pernicious ageism is epitomised by former Conservative cabinet member David Willetts’s 2010 book, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back. Rhetorical violence against old people is longstanding, widespread, and a problem for the whole of society since it betrays the human right to protection from discrimination. However, it is a particularly acute problem in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 for two coinciding reasons. One, the demographic proportion of old people is growing. The Office for National Statistics projects that, in the quarter century following 2012, the number of people in the UK over 80 will more than double to 6.1 million, and the percentage of the population over 75 will rise from 7.9 to 13 per cent. This demographic change is not in itself a crisis. It 1. Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London: Verso, 2013), 58.