On the Scrap Heap

It is stale news now that a year ago this month, the Tories managed to win the general election. This was their third consecutive victory and, with an increased majority, was almost unprecedented in British politics. It would also be stale news to list the promises which they and the other parties made in their bid for power, but one thing seems certain. The electorate swallowed Mr. MacMillan’s impertinent assertion and agreed with him that they were indeed having it better than ever before. The Prime Minister’s words have not yet begun to stick in the throats of his supporters; except maybe for some millions of old folk. Many of these no doubt gave their vote to the Tories and are still living on their pensions and Mr. MacMillan’s promises of better things tomorrow or the day after.

“A share in the rising prosperity of our country . . .” What a delightfully vague and empty phrase that is. Most old folk will remain pretty much the same as they were before those words were uttered—alone, unwanted, and very poor. B. E. Shenfield, quoting official sources in his book Social Policies for Old Age, points out that about a quarter of the pensioners in Britain today are so impoverished that they are eligible for National Assistance. So much for the “share.” A microscope would be needed to find it.

Frailties of old age are sooner or later the lot of all of us who manage to live long enough, and no one will deny that the task of caring for the aged calls for a skill and devotion second to none. Geriatrics, a branch of medicine dealing with care of old persons, has not been established more than about sixty years and the hard and unstinting efforts of the pioneers such as Dr. Nascher in Vienna and Dr. Warren in this country, are only in recent times becoming generally known. Some idea of the enormity of the work facing medical staffs is given by Dr. Kenneth Hazell when he says that 85 per cent. of the 56,000 chronic hospital cases are persons 65 years of age or over. (See Social and Medical Problems of the Elderly).

But when this has been said, there remains the inescapable fact that the deterioration associated with growing old is accentuated and the work of doctors severely hampered by poverty. Here, for example, are some of Dr. Hazell’s own impressions gained after visiting countless old people in their homes. His words do not make pretty reading, and to many of us they will have a familiar ring. Somewhere we have heard them all before—and we shall hear them again in the future.

All too often, he says, the houses visited were in the back alleys of city slum areas, built many years ago and “entirely lacking in architectural beauty.” They were usually of the “two down and two up ” type with outside lavatory, no bathroom, and merely a cold water tap in the scullery. It is the pitiful lot of many poor souls to be confined literally for years in these damp and cheerless hovels where even a short illness can prove fatal, not just because you are old, but equally because successful treatment is hindered by such dreadful conditions. Typical is the case of one man of 81, living alone in a cold damp bungalow, whose slight chill developed into severe bronchitis within two days, and who was saved only by timely removal to hospital.

Trying to make do on next to nothing, it is little wonder that many suffer from severe malnutrition. W. Hobson and J. Pemberton have published the results of a study conducted in Sheffield and have stated that some old patients weigh as little as 4½ stone on admission to hospital. It is in the big cities, they tell us, where cases such as these are most common, and along with Dr. Hazell. they remind us that starvation and deficiency diseases are certainly not things of the past, although overwhelmingly it is the poor who suffer from them.

One of the many bitter ironies of Capitalism is that our isolation grows as we get older. One would have thought it well nigh impossible to be alone and unwanted among a rapidly expanding population, but the horrible truth has to be faced that in Britain today about a million single old persons are living alone. Because of this, they often remain without care or attention of any kind, even after sustaining an injury or becoming otherwise ill. One of the worst cases in recent times was that of a man who lay dead in a house for several weeks before anyone thought fit to investigate. When the police eventually broke in, they discovered that his wife had been with him all the time, but in the words of the coroner, she was too old, ill and mentally deranged to realise what had happened.

Such sad tales are not isolated cases. The whole story of working class old age is indeed a dismal one, but the blame for it cannot be laid at the door of any one government or party. The best that any of them can do is no more than to skim the surface. They cannot make any essential alteration to the position of this growing minority of near-destitutes. Various parties have tried to deal with the matter over the past fifty years or so, starting with the Liberal Government’s pension scheme in 1908. The next few years saw various changes and extensions, and in 1946 the Labour Government’s National Insurance Act, which increased pensions to 26s., was supported by Tories and Liberals alike. Since then, further increases have taken place, yet in 1960 the problem presses as heavily as ever.

Trevor H. Howell, M.R.C.P., has written an illuminating book on old age, called Our Advancing Years. At the end of his second chapter, he says: “We have now come to a time when old age alone is no longer a cause of acute poverty.” But old age never has been a cause of poverty, acute or otherwise, and pensioners are not poor because they are old but because they are old workers. This is at the heart of their plight. Aged capitalists have no need of pensions, national assistance or any of the hundred and one charities which feature in our private properly society.

For they are the owners of the private property and it is the lack of ownership by the majority which makes and keeps us poor. Old age merely accentuates this—what one could call the ultimate in a state of poverty which has been with us throughout our working lives, characterised by the struggle to make both ends meet and with the mockery of pensions to remind us that we have lost the battle after all.

An alleviation of our poverty we may get from a pension, the abolition of our poverty, never. Poverty is with us all the time and in this so-called affluent society it is still true that about 10 per cent. of the population own about 90 per cent. of the accumulated wealth. The rest of us have a pretty limited access to the means of life through our wage packets, and with the approach of old age, even these cease. Capitalist society is not really very interested in the old ones, and for an obvious reason. It is simply no longer profitable to employ them

In face of such an uncomfortable truth the reformers can do precious little, for they work within the framework of the very setup which has created the tragedy of old age. In fact, it has been alleged that the advent of the welfare state has seen a sharpening of the problem. In recent times one charitable organisation has even been obliged to leave ill old men on street doorsteps in an attempt to get them into hospital.

There is surely an urgent need for working people to reach an understanding of their position in the capitalist scheme of things and to appreciate the need for the removal of a system which insults us with pensions and countless other futilities, and which is quite incapable of really satisfying human needs. It is capitalism which turns what could be a period of reasonable contentment into a time of loneliness and despair. The Socialist answer is worthy of serious consideration—by young and old alime.

E. T. C.