The narrative of ageing permeates our world. The way ageing is described can reinforce or reduce ageism. It can change the stereotypes that we all hold. This is the argument of the Centre for Ageing Better. It is also the purpose of a study published by them.

“Discourse Analysis” is a tool that can help to flush out those hidden narratives. It relies on first creating a database to represent a given sector. For politics we might include two years of Hassard. This is the parliamentary report. It captures verbatim the proceeds within the parliamentary chamber. We would add to it a broad selection of the policy papers from government departments. Finally, we would add in a large selection of MP’s tweets.

We then tell the discourse tool to sift through all that data. It looks for all the words and phrases relating to ageing. Its job is to spot the important narratives. To do that it compares what it found with the British National Corpus. This is a 100m word collection of representative English from a wide range of sources. It checks the frequency of the usage of words and phrases. It looks for usage that is far higher than the National Corpus.

The Government Narrative.

Governments do not exist in isolation. Their narratives permeate society through media reporting. It turns out the “older worker” as a phrase is used 349 times more than in the National Corpus. This is followed by NHS (194x); Young People (180x). The next in line is “funding” at 25 times. When they looked at the phrases rather than the words used, the pattern becomes clearer. There were three themes.

There is a strong healthcare “crisis” theme. The NHS is frequently used as an example. Often this is associated with specific shortages: beds; ambulances. Others focus on the annual “winter crisis”. All these equate ageing with a crisis instead of a process that happens throughout life. Reporting that older people will always be a growing burden is highly damaging. It risks creating a self- fulfilling prophecy.

When the discourse analysis focused on these health issues specifically, one of the strongest themes within it was dementia. Dementia seems to be used as a marker for mental diseases. Even more for diseases with potentially massive social care costs. This serves to feed the population’s concern about the disease. This is despite the fact that the incidence is falling (Newsletter #134 “Keeping Up”).

Within these Newsletters, I have shown that a health care crisis is a myth. There will indeed be millions more people over 80 by 2050. At the moment much of care is funded by the individual not the State. Many more people are remaining in their homes. 42% of people over 100 in the UK are living at home alone (Newsletter #130 “The 100 year Life” ). A quarter of them say they are on “good” or “very good” health.

The second major theme is economic. It still has overtones of crisis and portrays older people as a burden. It infers that they pose an economic burden that has to carried by Society. Much is made of the dependency ration. This is the number of people “retired” divided by the number of people working. It is indeed falling. There are many arguments against this burden idea. People are working voluntarily longer and certainly past retirement age. State pensionable age is already increasing around the world. The existing and planned changes mean the “dependency ratio” will remain flat. We are living healthier for longer. The period for which we a “dependent” is growing by weeks for every year increase in life expectancy. In the meantime, we are caring for our families and volunteering. Different kinds of work.

The third theme is the “intergenerational crisis”. It is true that the “Baby boomers” are wealthier than their children. Fairness is invoked and resolves around the triple-lock, pension relief and housing. The economic portrayal is a fight between generations. This denies the vast inequalities within age bands. This is not a fight between generations but between rich and poor of all ages. Again, within these Newsletters we have seen that there is no such fight. The wealth of the baby boomers is being passed down to the next generation. Standards of living will be maintained across generations. It may not be equitable. There will be a new distinction between inheritors and non-inheritors. It is the allocation of Government spending between young and old that is out of balance. (Newletter#100 “Its Not Fair” ).

Explaining the Narratives.

The investigators talked to a number of opinion leaders within politics. They asked for their perspective on the results. Why was the narrative potentially so negative? All pointed out that it was the role of parliament to allocate resources. They had to make choices between alternatives. As a result everyone was “making a case” for their preferred allocation. This drives the language to the extremes. The language is all economics and finance.

Lord Best also made a insightful comment:

The other point being made is that there is no forum to debate the issues around ageing and longevity. Parliament works through the lenses of the Government Departments. The department of health sees ageing through the lens of the NHS. Employment through the lens of the workforce and the number of older people who have stopped working. Housing through the lens of trading down, new builds and housing stock. The big picture of ageing and longevity is lost. No one looks at the demographics trends across all age groups.

In January 2022 the Office of National Statistics changed their population forecast. They reduced fertility from 1.8 to 1.6 children per female. It reduced the forecast of the number of children by one million. The Department of Education had massive cost savings. They plateaued their forecast for life expectancy and increased the number of (tax paying) immigrants. This reduced the forecast total population by 10m citizens. 10m less people for the Government to support. According to the Office of Budget Responsibility this means that the Government needs to find £35bn in extra taxation each year to fund public services for the ageing population by 2040. Rather than the £145bn implied by ONS population forecasts from 2014. 35BN sounds like a lot but is only 2.6% of GDP. (Newspapers seldom mention that total UK GOvernment Expenditure is close to £1200BN).

The Government Narrative

The narrative feeds the association between ageing and mental and physical decline. In the language used it focuses on ageing as a destination -being old. Instead of ageing being a journey that takes place through life. Talk of inter-generational conflict only reinforces this. The economic arguments increase the stereotypical idea that “the old” are a burden. This ignores all the ideas of a “longevity dividend” (Newsletter # 82, #83 and #86).