ABSTRACT
The campaigns and speeches of the 2005-2010 period provided this book with a rich seam of activity and material in which to evaluate the impact of ageing on the content and forms of media and political communications activity. This chapter further reviews the impact of population ageing on the interface between politics and the media based on some of the evidence generated by this book. Ageing may be rising in prominence as an issue of interest within the mass media, but despite the increased attention, negative stereotyping remains a key feature of press content alongside pessimistic framing of the social and economic implications of an ageing society. Media narratives are not in harmony with the apparently evolving political discourses analysed in this research and yet the political parties’ new rhetoric also fails to chime consistently with their own policy directions. The rhetoric of conditional entitlements remain firmly in place in a period where pensions and income benefits have become less conditional, indeed state pensions in this period were tentatively edging towards citizenship orientated grounds for qualification. There were significant political exchanges on ageing issues in the 2005 and 2010 campaigns, but it was in the 1997 election that pensions dominated the final exchanges in what became a bad tempered row between the Conservative and Labour parties. This chapter, adds the 1997 campaign to the discussion of the rise of the grey vote as a factor in general elections, but perhaps with a slightly surprising conclusion. The democratic implications of the increased use of segmentation are also discussed alongside the prospects for continued inter-generational solidarity in the Britain of the near future where industrial cities such as Sunderland will have the demographics of today’s retirement towns such as Torbay.
