Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I rise after a speech like that and can only add to the mediocrity that I am capable of. A 62 year-old—for he has confessed his age—is moving into semi-retirement at Magdalen College, giving himself the opportunity to write and regale us with the riches of his mind, which he will go on doing for a very long time.

Half the reason I am here on a Friday morning when I have a thousand other things to do is of course to pay my tribute to the most reverend Primate for all that he has been for the nation at large. I doubt that there are many people who, like him, speak around the country and can command an audience that fills every hall where he speaks. Politicians would die for an ability to command such audiences. I know I embarrass him by going on in this way but it is tough—he will have to deal with that. He is younger than I am and made of stouter stuff. He has endured a great deal more than that in the past 10 years. I simply say that his capacity to engage with disciplines other than his own makes him a man apart. The speech he made today was an illustration of that. I just wish that his own church had been as generous to him as the British public at large feel towards him. I pray that one day soon the church may wake up and become more generous.

Let me move to the point. This business of the contribution of older people preoccupies all of us. The most reverend Primate has laid his thinking out before us in publications over the years. One that I prize a great deal is a little book called Lost Icons. It has about five chapters and each could furnish a debate of this kind. In the last chapter, “Lost Souls”, the most reverend Primate tries very hard to identify what it is that makes each individual essentially human and says that it is in some way to retain a sense of selfhood. He argues, very potently, that two things allow a person to maintain contact with their essential self. He goes on later to develop the theological dimension of that and is prepared to call it a soul but perhaps for this debate we may call it the self so that those without religion feel that they can identify with the argument, too.

The most reverend Primate argues that we maintain contact with ourselves as long as people do not take from us the right to face the ambiguities of life with a certain amount of freedom to see the nasty as well as the good, or the way that we resolve such tensions into our story. That is one of the ways in which we maintain ourselves. The other is love. That is not love in a Mills and Boon sense—that is fun but it is not quite that. It is really the idea that someone else is interested in me, someone who has had the opportunity to know me with all my faults and maintains that interest and gladness in my presence despite all that life throws at us. That is love: disinterested and directed towards me, maintaining my sense of selfhood.

I have done bare justice to a rich chapter in that particular book, but if there is truth in these arguments and that line of analysis, it seems to behove us all to remember it when people move into the last stages of their lives and we meet people with declining powers and fading faculties. It is at that stage that we need always to remember that the person in front of us has a self and to deal seriously with the material that we put in front of them—not to save them from the difficulties they are in but to help them to weather a storm or retain contact with their basic humanity. Love will certainly go on being interested in people in their last phase, right to the end.

The most reverend Primate and I share a pastoral ministry. A great proportion of my life has taken me to geriatric wards—as we used to call them—or other places where long-term care is offered. It is the very dickens of a job in such circumstances to be with a person who has a self but has been institutionalised out of having contact with it. If only we could activate the British public, ourselves included, to go on believing that the people we visit, who are sometimes going through dreadful times, are still human beings in the fullest sense—and, as the most reverend Primate and I would say, still have the image of God in them.

When I was a young man, I worked for a while as a male nurse in a mental hospital. For long periods of the day, when we had administered the drugs, I had washed and shaved the men and done all those sorts of things, I was left alone with my charges. I would talk to them. Generally, the mere fact that I had time to talk to them brought from some very disturbed people some very human responses. That was a mental hospital in the days when people were kept locked up in such places for extremely long periods. That is no longer the case but it makes the point that we remain capable of receiving love, care and attention even when, to the observer at a superficial level, it simply seems as if the lights have gone out. If we could develop a culture where we perhaps practically respond to human beings in that caring way, we would be a better society for it.

I say to the most reverend Primate and my friend—I dare to call him that across the Chamber—that, as he moves into fresh fields and pastures new, we wish him well. We wish, too, that he will continue to regale the country with his wisdom and not deprive us by disappearing into an ivory tower of all the goodness of heart and generosity of spirit that he has shown so lavishly over these past 10 years.