Leader: The respect agenda - The Guardian 26th May 2008

With age comes discrimination, and not always of the positive kind. Experience of life can bring wisdom and taste, but also a degrading decline in respect, categorising people not by what they know or what they can do, but by how many years they have lived. Perhaps in such a work-obsessed society it is predictable that productive life is assumed to end at the mandatory retirement age. What is undeniable is the intolerance of age, and the unblushing discrimination that accompanies it. Pensioners carry political clout: as a group they are more likely than the average to vote. But that does not help them get them better treatment.

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