• TURNING down a request for a representative of the National Pensioners Convention to join a Question Time panel, the BBC said that an elderly person might “melt under the studio lights”. This is a typical response from the national media and the “powers-that-be”.

They are often heard talking about the plight of pensioners in the health and care system, but they shy away from organised pensioners standing up for our rights and for the rights of future generations.

Their starting point is that we are no longer economically valuable – that is, we are not making a profit for a boss. But UK pensioners save the state more than £40bn a year in unpaid caring and other voluntary work, estimated to rise to £75bn by 2030, and we are organised in the National Pensioners Convention (NPC).

The NPC is the biggest independent pensioners’ organisation in the UK, with more than 1,000 affiliates, representing around a million members; it is non-party political, but deeply political, taking up the cudgels with all governments, whatever their colour.

A delegation of 18 members of Islington Pensioners Forum attended the NPC annual Pensioners’ Parliament in Blackpool earlier this month, joining retired people from all around the UK: nurses, train drivers, teachers, scientists, local government workers, postal and telecoms workers, care workers, civil servants, shop workers and many others… men and women from all ethnic groups and creeds.

Nobody was “melting” in the heat of the Blackpool lights. And we had a good time, dancing till midnight in the Winter Gardens ballroom.

The NPC is not just about slogans and resolutions. We are about action and concrete policies: a living state pension, free social care, continuation of our bus pass, safety on public transport, defence of the NHS and public services… and generations united.

That last point is important. We are tired and angry at the Intergenerational Foundation and many politicians saying that there is a rift between young and old. That older people have “pulled up the drawbridge” on future generations. Don’t they know that we have children and grandchildren?

It is consultation at the Pensioners’ Parliament (providing experiences and views from grassroots pensioners themselves) that informs NPC policies finally decided at delegate conferences.

Together with members from Tottenham and Wood Green Pensioners Action Group and Hornsey Pensioners Action Group, the north London contingent to this year’s Pensioners’ Parliament was at least 50 strong.

So watch this space! We are building a strong alliance to defend pensioners’ rights and we are determined to stand up for younger generations – for the right to youth and sports clubs, proper app­renticeships, an end to tuition fees.

We may be old, but our voices ring out for the future.

DOT GIBSON
Deputy general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention
and secretary of Islington Pensioners Forum