Baby boomers, take it from a 91-year-old: a long life with poorer health is bad news, and unnecessary | Joan Bakewell

SSome things get better. When I was born – in 1933 – my life expectancy was about 65 years; if I were born today it would be 84 and a half. I am currently 91 and my life expectancy is four and a half years from now. My mother died at the age of 57, weakened by years of leukemia and then untreatable. I have survived her by 34 years. My father died at the age of 87 after 30 years of retirement full of gin and golf.

However, according to the latest research, some things are getting worse for the generations that followed mine. Although the life expectancy of baby boomers and those over 50 continues to increase, they live longer and have poorer health than previous generations.

Baby boomers always steal the headlines, perhaps because they arrived in the postwar years of hope. But for my parents’ generation it was more difficult. Then you only survived into old age if you had a robust constitution or inherited genes that helped you get through it. There was no National Health Service. As children, they each lost younger siblings to ill health. Doctors charged a fee to see them, and social services as we know them today simply did not exist. They both started working straight out of school at the age of thirteen: he in a modest managerial job at a small engineering company and she as a tracer (copying technical plans) at the same company. They had both grown up in Coronation Street-style terraced houses, with no bathrooms and only outside toilets, and their greatest hope was for a job that gave them clean hands, a steady wage and two weeks’ holiday a year. Their hopes became reality.

For my parents’ generation, the medical and social care we have today would have been beyond their wildest imagination – the utopian vision of political radicals and religious idealists. A wonderfully benign and generous social state emerged, inspired by post-war optimism and the victory of the Labor Party in the 1945 elections. It brought the revolution that many hoped for: there it was! It is! And yet, and yet… I’m starting to see the downside of it now. Knowing that the state is there to provide medical and social assistance – and all for free, if you know how the system works – creates a world that is different from the one I knew: a world of supposed assistance, which leads to dependency and the right to be entitled to it (and why not?). The assumption for many people is that they will live a long and healthy life. Why wouldn’t that be the case, when the NHS is there to patch us up when something goes wrong?

Growing older gives me a different perspective on what we call “quality of life”. I’m lucky: quality of life for me means being able to go to the opera. At 91, I also appreciate the value of the smaller things: friendship, digestion, good eyesight. For some of these things, I even have some power to maintain them.

But there is a sad paradox here: the paradox of growing older. It means that I have seen many of my idealistic expectations fulfilled: a health service, local government provision, an abundance of volunteer services and a network of resources easily accessible through your own GP or local library. But we have also seen greater health disparities.

The baby boomers born into a world of post-war hope are the generation now in charge. They still have a chance to make that sense of possibility a reality. I see a world emerging – even if it still has a long way to go – that will care for all its citizens and one day ensure that no one will suffer poverty, destitution or spiritual sorrow anymore, who even aims to reach homeless people and people with addictions. I see people living longer and society tackling the ailments and stresses they will inevitably face: weakened limbs, hair loss, walking problems, hearing loss.

Resources should be focused on the social well-being of the elderly. But as we do, it’s worth rejoicing at how far we’ve come. I have traveled much of that road myself – and as my life heads into the sunset, I want the next generation to watch a new dawn.

• Joan Bakewell is a broadcaster, writer and Labor peer. Between 2008 and 2010 she performed as Voice of the Elderly

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