A NEW book warns that ‘Britain’s ageing crisis could tear society apart within two decades’. In Timebomb: When Ageing Explodes, Giles Merritt says that unless defused this ‘explosive force’ will devastate society.
He says that young people ‘are already condemned to pay much higher taxes to fund pensions and healthcare for older people, but will receive far less when they retire . . . The ageing timebomb won’t go off with a bang – it’ll be a slow, silent implosion that bankrupts our welfare state and shatters the social contract.’
Over-65s make up nearly a quarter of the population, expected to rise to one-third by 2050, while a ‘shrinking’ cohort of workers leaves fewer taxpayers to fund pensions, healthcare and public services. In post-war Britain, there were five workers for every retired person, but by 2019 it was 2:9, expected to be 1:7 by 2070.
The UK’s working cohort is projected to fall from 41million today to 36million by 2050.
Merritt, founder of the Brussels think tank Friends of Europe and closely involved in EU advocacy sees immigration as ‘a key solution to workforce decline’, although ‘public hostility and political reluctance have prevented serious action’; he says that Brexit, ‘combined with tighter immigration rules, has cut inflows dramatically’ and that immigrants ‘are not a cost – they are an economic asset’.
However Merritt ignores the real problem: the dwindling Western birth rate, with non-Western countries close behind. On average, European women are having 1.5 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; at 1.49, the UK average is the lowest since records began.
With fewer births recorded every year, no crystal ball is needed to predict declining population; but still, this ‘unexploded bomb’ is disregarded. The even bigger ‘elephant in the room’ is that every year, millions of children are killed before birth. While other lethal threats decline, the leading cause of death worldwide is abortion.
Still the focus is on the ‘ageing population’, and instead of calls for more births, we hear calls for more deaths – the ‘right to die’ – alongside the ‘burdensome old people’ narrative.
Killing must be the surest ‘anti-ageing’ treatment ever devised, and now even healthy old people are killing themselves, with the approval of leading bioethicists.
And despite Malthus’s theory (that population growth will inevitably outpace the growth of food production, leading to famine, disease, or war) being disproved time and again, vast amounts of money are devoted to curbing births.
Meanwhile the ‘unproductive’ elderly are more active than ever before, contributing billions of pounds’ worth of voluntary work – including free babysitting services and even elder care – to the economy. However, to introduce such points would spoil the narrative of ‘greedy lazy selfish old people’ – although judging by some of their loud and proud boasts on the subject, the same charge could with more justice be levelled at younger, ‘child free’ generations.
It is argued that they are having fewer children because they cannot afford them, but the real problem may be the decline in marriage, while the controversy over removing the two-child cap on social benefits suggests that old prejudices against the poor having ‘too many children’ persist.
If we cease to have children, society will cease to exist; but we will not solve the problem by bribing young people, by increasing immigration or even by killing the elderly. Society needs to value children for their own sake.
Meanwhile, the narrative has gone seamlessly from ‘population bomb’ to ‘ageing timebomb’; from welcoming greater longevity to lamenting the fact that the elderly are still hanging around.
