Why I confronted Lord Sumption's ageist views

I took part in the BBC One debate programme The Big Questions on Sunday alongside Lord Jonathan Sumption, who made it more than clear that he holds no such belief. Lord Sumption was adamant in his view that older lives, lives with fewer years left, were inherently of less value than younger ones.

I find this position deeply troubling. Lord Sumption gave an example along the lines that he would happily lay down his life for the life of his grandchildren. I have great sympathy with those feelings. Indeed, as a parent, I share them myself about my own children. But to transfer those feelings into an approach to State policymaking to determine which lives are worth more in the vast and complex context of a global pandemic is dangerous territory indeed.

The ethical choices for government here – where do you put your money and effort knowing that you can’t help everyone perfectly, that there will be some suffering – are utterly brutal. They’re straight out of a philosophy textbook; a set of choices all with bad outcomes.

To put the death of an 80-year-old woman against the education, job prospects and life chances of a younger person on a set of dispassionate scales and come out with an answer for what is worth more is impossible.

But to even begin to navigate our way sensibly through these impossible choices, I firmly believe you need to start from the ethical position every human life has equal value.  

Sadly, however, Lord Sumption’s is not the only voice prepared to be openly and proudly ageist.

Lots of different groups are at higher risk of death and severe illness from COVID – older people, people with other health conditions, disabled people, obese people, south Asian people, Black people, poor people.

But when people start asking ‘is saving these lives a price worth us all paying’, it’s generally only age that people are prepared to use as the 'them' vs. 'us' dividing line. Somehow, we seem to find ‘othering’ older people like this and saying, out loud, ‘are these lives worth saving?’ an acceptable thing to say.

You hear the same discrimination in that phrase ‘it’s not just old people that die’, the tacit implication being that if it were just old people, we wouldn’t be so bothered.

I see Lord Sumption is trending. I was proud to have the opportunity to stand alongside the incredible @bowelbabe on @bbcbigquestions this morning and call out this sweeping and dangerous #ageism and #ableism. @NickyAACampbell @Ageing_Better pic.twitter.com/Vw2zptpRVO

— Catherine Foot (@csfoot) January 17, 2021

Instead of pitting one group against another, I think the only way to think about the road ahead has to be from a position of solidarity. Surely, we all want to protect each other, our children and our parents and grandparents, and find the way out of this together, with the fewest deaths and least long-term impact possible. We all want this virus to create the lowest damage in the short term, and in the long term.

And it’s simply not possible anyway to draw neat age distinctions between who benefits from lockdown and who pays. The impact on jobs, for example, is u-shaped – it is younger workers and older workers who are being hit hardest. And older people aren’t some passive vulnerable mass contributing nothing to the economy and society – 3.4 million key workers are over 50, and they are grandparents providing unpaid care for their grandchildren, wives providing unpaid care for their husbands, people spending in the economy.

But we do have to think long term. That spirit of solidarity, of protecting and helping each other, needs to last as long as the impact of COVID lasts. So just as heroic efforts are going on 24 hours a day right now to save lives, we will continue to need serious commitment in the months, years and decades ahead to redress some of the deep inequalities in our society that COVID has exposed and made worse. Investment in job support, in housing quality, in tackling poverty, and in education.

Of course, I’m not sure we’d even be having this debate if our numbers of deaths and our numbers of months spent with restrictions had been lower. Perhaps if we’d had an absolute focus on protecting care homes from the start, more support for those shielding, more effective test and trace, and so on, we would all feel like the price paid was fair enough.

And I wouldn’t feel the need to try to remind us all that age doesn’t determine your human value. There’s a lot of things to get angry about with this pandemic, but the fact that we are saving older people isn’t one of them.