Daily Mail, 18 November 2009

So the Government is to spend £670 million to offer free personal care for the most vulnerable elderly people in their own homes. Good, you may say. I’m not so sure. The more the state intervenes, the more we seem to treat the elderly with contempt.

The hallmark of a civilised society is the attention paid to the old, infirm and vulnerable. By that yardstick, Britain has become a disturbingly uncivilised, even brutal society. Many old people are abandoned by their families, dumped in sub-standard homes or left in hospital wards in a state of neglect.

How have we descended to this appalling state of affairs? The core reason is that in Britain, we do not venerate our elders in the way that other cultures do.

In Eastern, African or other Third World societies, or in European countries such as France or Italy, elders are not viewed as a burden or treated with contempt but are venerated precisely because they are old.

Age is respected because of the experience and wisdom it represents; elders are respected and cherished on account of the commitment and care they have bestowed upon their families.

In such societies, it is a given that elderly relatives live as part of the family. In Britain by contrast, people assume that it is the role of the state to look after them.

The government’s ‘tsar for the elderly’, Dame Joan Bakewell, said this week that thousands of pensioners were suffering tragic isolation and depression because the state was not doing enough for them.

But with great respect to Dame Joan, the tragic isolation she all too accurately highlights is in part because of precisely this attitude that it is up to the state to take care of the elderly.

This was not always the case. Once, the assumption was that elderly parents should be looked after by their children. But the welfare state has eroded that sense of duty and responsibility. It led people came to assume that instead of their having a duty to others, the state had a duty to them.

This has been greatly exacerbated both by the growth of feminism, with so many women now working and unable or unwilling to look after aged parents, and by the destruction of the traditional family.

With so many couples now parting, fewer are prepared to look after an older generation which has an ever-decreasing claim on familial affection or loyalty.

The result has been the widespread assumption that mum or dad will go to live in an old people’s home — which in turn is so often wholly inadequate because of the general attitude that old people are disposable.

No one says it is easy to look after an elderly relative. It often requires a high level of self-denial and even courage.

And for sure, increasing longevity means it is becoming ever more difficult to look after such dependants on account of the severe frailties that often arrive with extreme old age.

It is therefore all the more outrageous that the state does not encourage and enable people to look after their elders through generous tax relief for carers and the support services necessary to enable them to look after such people at home.

The core reason for such general neglect is that this is a post-religious, utilitarian society which values only what is considered ‘useful’ and sees no intrinsic value in human life itself.

Those societies that do value the elderly tend to believe that real value lies beyond mere utility, residing in the bonds that people have with others and in their obligations of love and duty expressed in their willingness to care.

Those bonds of duty have been so very badly undermined in Britain by the welfare state, which has turned us from a community of givers to a society of takers.

Our parents look after us when we are young and incapable of fending for ourselves. Surely the least we can do when they become incapable in turn is to repay them in kind by caring for them at the end of their lives when they are most in need.

But then there is something deeply repugnant about our society’s attitude toward the elderly in general.

Those of us who have seen how frail elderly relatives of sound mind have been treated in hospital have too often been forced to witness precisely the same shocking neglect.

As Dame Joan Bakewell observed, hospital staff have been neglecting elderly patients by not feeding them properly, for example; and many elderly people believed their doctors were taking their illnesses less seriously.

Their fearful suspicion is too often entirely justified. The reason is the chilling attitude now so prevalent within the medical profession that the lives of the old just aren’t worth as much as those of younger people.

So caring has been replaced by callousness. The elderly have become expendable and can be ignored or even disposed of.

This paper has reported many, many cases where elderly, incapable patients are deliberately starved and dehydrated to death on the spurious grounds that their lives are no longer worth living. In the eyes, that is, of the young and healthy.

And that’s the really awful point about all this. In part, this neglect on the wards has come about because of a widespread collapse in the ethic of selfless caring within the nursing profession.

But much more important is the prevailing ethos of our modern culture which holds that the only lives worth bothering about are those which are thought to be ‘worthwhile’ or ‘valuable’.

Old or incapable people are not seen as ‘valuable’. They are regarded as a burden, and an expensive one at that.

So elderly or mentally incapable people become disposable. This in turn raises a most disturbing prospect.

For as we all live to an evergreater age, dementia and all the other infirmities of old age are likely to become ever more prevalent.

In displaying such indifference and worse toward those whose minds and bodies are broken or enfeebled through illness or age, our society is not merely showing itself unworthy of the term ‘civilised’.

It is showing that it no longer respects or even understands what it is to be human.