Can age-old remedy heal nation divided?

FACES wrinkled with age, their eyes sparkle with a mischievous light and the words these senior citizens speak really command attention.

‘Climate change? That’s a you problem – I’ll be dead soon.’ ‘Tax cuts for the rich? Sure, I’m rich as…’ ‘Young people: Don’t vote.’

It’s a so-called ‘attack advert’ from the United States, paid for by Democrats and aimed at getting millennials off their backsides and into polling booths to oust Donald Trump.

But it underscores the greatest political division of our times which, amazingly, is not rancorous Yes/No on independence or Leave/Remain on the EU. It is young versus old.

Putting the generations at each other’s throats is a trick beloved of several parties and, as with so many aspects of the political race to the bottom, the SNP was to the fore.

Barely had 2014’s No vote been delivered than Alex Salmond was declaring: ‘Scots of my generation and above have impeded progress for the next generation.’ His canard was that independence was wonderful and it would have been delivered, but for old fools too frit and too selfish to embrace its brilliance.

The silent whistle had been blown and soon the separatist attack dogs responded. MP Pete Wishart tweeted a cliché about old folks being senile and social media was lit up by gowks claiming independence was a certainly once elderly Unionists dropped off the twig.

‘Us v them’ is always the black heart of the SNP and it was all too simple to portray ‘us’ as bright young things with vision and ‘them’ as old fogeys lacking the intellect to appreciate the Nationalist genius. It is dangerous twaddle.

All old folk are not wandered or self-centred any more than all young people are political savants. Nor does it follow all young people will continue to vote the way they do now.

The adage, ‘If a person is not liberal in their twenties, they have no heart, and if they are not conservative in their forties, they have no head’ is as relevant now as when John Adams, second president of the United States, coined it centuries ago.

Nationalists might post more ‘tick, tock’ on Twitter than Timex, but time in politics is neutral. Ageism is no more acceptable than racism or bigotry and we, of every political stripe, owe it to society to push back and not to accept it from – of all people – our elected representatives.

THE Gray Panthers were advocacy groups which sprang up across 1970s America. Their core belief was that far from an enforced withdrawal from society as a prelude to death, older people should instead offer the benefits of their experience and hard-won wisdom.

Founder Maggie Kuhn railed against being forced to stop work at 65 and called retirement homes ‘glorified playpens’. Yet the Panthers’ motto was ‘Age and youth in action’ and they pushed for teenagers to be given more rights and responsibility.

Time Scotland uncaged our Grey Panthers because inter-generational solidarity, regardless of political leanings, is healthier than the division the witless Wishart and snake-oil salesman Salmond and their ilk seek to sow.