A Minister for the Lonely is all well and good – but it’s families who really need to start caring

THE irony is too glaring to ignore. We live in a world of 24-hour media in which billions of people spend countless hours each day tapping away at social media and texting friends.

Yet 9 million people live in miserable isolation in Lonely Britain, and 200,000 elderly people go for weeks without talking to a soul.

So appalling is the situation that the Government has appointed MP Tracey Crouch to be Minister for Loneliness.

She will lead a drive against the social epidemic that experts say can be as unhealthy as smoking, in that the toll on mental as well as physical health is incalculable.

Remorseless

And there’s no doubt it’s a social plague that must be tackled. Three years ago, the Office for National Statistics found Britain to be the ‘loneliness capital’ of Europe, with citizens less likely to have strong friendships or know our neighbours than people anywhere else in the EU.

Loneliness affects people from all backgrounds and of all ages — from the young mother stuck at home in a new area, to the middle-aged divorcee who finds the grass is far from greener, to the carer looking after a loved one, and of course the one in three people over 75 who say their loneliness is remorseless.

Jo Cox — the Labour MP murdered in 2016 by a farRight fanatic — was passionate about the need for society to combat loneliness, and for the past year MPs Rachel Reeves (Lab) and Seema Kennedy (Con) have co- chaired the Commission on Loneliness set up in her name.

I’ve read their report and ‘Call to Action’ from cover to cover, and admire its inspirational message that loneliness must be combated ‘one conversation at a time’.

They say everyone must be involved, from MPs to employers and so on. The trouble is, for all the ambitious plans concerning community action, we’re left with one allimportant question: ‘What about the family?’

For more than 12 years I’ve been writing an advice column and receiving thousands of letters, which is how I know it is impossible for government to legislate to make people happier. In 2007, not long after I joined the Mail, I wrote this:

‘Recently I have come to see loneliness as a great modern taboo. In this world of frenetic communication more and more people feel there is nobody who wants to communicate with them at a meaningful level.

‘My advice column makes me realise how many problems — from bad marriages to a sense of life’s pointlessness — have sheer loneliness at their root.’

Two themes have cropped up again and again — loneliness within an unhappy marriage and after divorce, and the terrible isolation of elderly people whose family just don’t bother.

A certain grandmother has written more than once because she needs to get her misery and confusion off her chest. Her son and daughterin-law no longer allow her to see the grandchildren, and she doesn’t understand why.

This — from a woman of 73 — is also typical: ‘It was only when I got to 60 with a broken marriage that I started to feel the awful pain that comes with loneliness. I’ve just spent the past three days not speaking to a soul — no knocks on the door, no phone calls. My boys don’t bother very often and they live a long way away.

‘This area is so unfriendly I wouldn’t dare knock on anyone’s door as I know I wouldn’t be invited in. I’m beginning to give up.’

Reading such letters, I ask myself, what went wrong in that family. Why do sons ‘not bother’? Why are grandparents left out in the cold? Often a family misunderstanding or row is the cause, made worse by problems with in-laws, misplaced pride that is never defused with an apology, and (of course) selfish laziness.

Urging people to talk to their elderly relatives is a start: too many of those in middle age think that if they text their old mum once a week, their duty is done. No matter that she hates her mobile phone and forgets to charge it.

But it’s hardest when bereavement is the root of the loneliness. I have many letters on this subject. A man whose wife died after 61 years of marriage wrote: ‘So now I’m all alone and the feeling is indescribable. We wanted children but it never happened. All I long for is to join my wife and feel happy again.’

It would certainly help that poor man if somebody stopped by for tea and a chat.

Of course in the past he might have been helped by his church community, but the secularisation of Britain has cut off that lifeline. Once I was berated by a lonely reader for recommending activities at her parish church. She savaged me for suggesting ‘ such a thing’ — as if I’d told her to peddle drugs for pin money.

I do feel nostalgic for the days when the church mattered and people did knock on other’s doors. Even as recently as my Fifties childhood, people may have been much poorer, yet they remained in their localities and looked out for grandparent and neighbour alike. Families were more stable, separation rarer.

Desolation

Modern divorce rates mean that many people are driven to ask this question posed by one sad lady: ‘I feel so isolated. Is it possible to rebuild life after 50?’ Like many in her agegroup she’d read stories of love ‘second time around’ and was very discontented with her husband: ‘ We never even looked at each other.’ But she discovered loneliness within a marriage was as nothing compared to the crippling desolation of life outside.

On city streets I look around me, knowing that unshared problems lurk behind most faces. That includes the young, whose generation communicate largely by text and social media, which is about as useful to the lonely as trying to get warm by a candle flame. Studies also show an increasing sense of alienation among under 30s — for different reasons to the elderly.

The young have to live with other people’s seemingly perfect lives on Facebook or Instagram, and are forced to spend their days measuring themselves against not only their peers but the expectations of the wider world.

For some, that becomes an overwhelming challenge.

The ‘Call to Action’ in the Jo Cox Commission report ends with the point that it’s not just government that needs to act, but ‘each and every one of us’.

Indeed. For the chief duty of care for any family should surely rest squarely within the extended family. My parents live about five miles from my home, and I would consider myself a pretty bad daughter if I didn’t see them at least twice a week. Why? Because — apart from the love — I owe them.

Independent

Of course some older people are fiercely independent, and after two or three days staying with you over Christmas or Easter they’re desperate to get home to their creature comforts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stay in touch with them all the time.

Ultimately most people feel defined by relationships. But unless we work on them — consider how we speak to our loved ones, how we’re bringing up our children, how we treat our friends, whether we should check up on an elderly aunt, and so on — those relationships will wither and die.

Old-fashioned ideas such as ‘duty’ are relevant here. After all, it doesn’t take much effort to pick up the phone.

It was heart-breaking to read this week that family breakdown in the UK has led to an increasing number of ‘pauper funerals’ — when the deceased has no family members in attendance, and the only mourners are the funeral director and someone from the local authority, which pays the bill.

Visualising the loneliness of such an end should be a wakeup call to us all.