ABSTRACT
Old age and older people are frequently characterised by negative imagery. Even a recent social work periodical, from which more sensitivity might be expected, recently carried the headline ‘dementia time bomb’. The concept of a time bomb seems to be the most beloved cliché of journalists and feature writers who commonly refer to changing population trends as inherently problematic for society. Phillipson (1982) has characterised this as ‘the crisis of old age’. After the Second World War and until the 1960s, policy discourse about old age was dominated by the role of the welfare state to provide security beyond retirement. The 1970s and 1980s saw a fiscal crisis of the welfare state, its expansion compromised by global recession and panics about the affordability of welfare. From the 1990s onwards we have seen residualisation of the welfare state in providing for old age with consequent scapegoating of older people as a drain on society.
