Over-50s are being driven out of work by wokery

We have heard a lot about the UK’s shrinking workforce recently, particularly the reluctance of the over-50s to return to work after the pandemic. In 2021, the Office for National Statistics found there were 180,000 fewer over-50s in work than before the pandemic and that trend shows no sign of reversing.

Why is my generation suddenly so work-shy? Come on, boys and girls who grew up watching John Craven’s Newsround, we are hailstones not snowflakes, for goodness sake. Yet, clearly, we now prefer to leaf through the Saga Spirit of Adventure brochure – Alfie Boe Live on the Morocco and Islands of Atlantic Cruise, be still my beating heart – than to update our CV or trawl through the smug tiers of LinkedIn.

Some of the reasons for the middle-aged deserting the workplace are purely practical. Failure by the Government to devise an affordable, dignified system of social care means many choose to look after elderly parents themselves. Lifetime caps on pension contributions also mean people are taking early retirement (this is causing major staffing problems in the NHS, with so many GPs and hospital consultants retiring before they’re 60).

It’s true that lockdown showed a lot of busy people that time at home with family could be more rewarding than the gerbil-wheel of a daily commute. But something else is going on here, I think: increasingly, the modern office feels like hostile territory to baby boomers. Relentless wokery is driving the more mature into retirement before it drives us round the bend.  

Gareth, a Planet Normal listener, wrote to tell me he retired last year from his job as a lawyer to a major public inquiry after three-and-a-half years engaged by the Cabinet Office. “The CO strives hard to promote a ‘woker than thou’ attitude (about the only department in which it does strive hard!) and since the pandemic this went into overdrive,” says Jon. “It encompassed the entire woke canon from compulsory ‘unconscious bias’ training through finger-wagging lectures on ‘micro-aggressions’, ‘white fragility/privilege’, critical race theory, BLM and structural racism, aka all the shibboleths of the progressive Left, but under a supposedly Conservative government.”

According to Gareth, the Cabinet Office “is symptomatic of the whole civil-service culture which treats the elected government with disdain and pursues its own ultra-woke agenda which is entirely contrary to official policy”.

Like many members of staff his age, he was appalled by the “all-pervasive propaganda”. He couldn’t stand a climate in which often entirely innocuous comments were treated as “micro-aggressions” and any deviation from the official view (formerly known as “a difference of opinion”) was treated as heretical.

The civil service, the NHS, higher education and far too many private companies have become a paradise for “recreational offence-takers” who love to air their concocted grievances. On one occasion, Gareth had a complaint lodged against him for using the term Anglo-Saxon. “Apparently, it has negative connotations for the woke. Who knew?”

I reckon there are an awful lot of Gareths out there. Talented, hard-working men and women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who, earlier in their careers, were not exposed to this relentless and rather scary politicisation of the workplace and don’t want to tiptoe about in what Jon calls “this divisive and pernicious Maoist culture”.

Why would any 56-year-old wish to return to work when chances are they will be judged for the crime of not being in possession of the correct pronoun (or even comprehending what that means)? Only recently, a reader told me that a position in the NHS trust where he worked remained unfilled because no one sufficiently “diverse” had applied. It was an important job, one which really needed doing, but far better to leave it vacant than appoint some old white bloke with the right experience, eh?

My generation may be getting on a bit, but you can say this for us; we will not allow ourselves to be brainwashed by morons. If the Government is serious about persuading the over-50s back to work, a good start would be to punish employers who discriminate against and despise us.