No, they can be bigoted, as the gay marriage debate has shown, but be kind – their views are from another time
Not for the first time, the late Marxist historian Professor Miliband has featured in one of his son's political speeches. Addressing the Google Big Tent event last week, Miliband junior again worked the professor, or "Dad", into the beginning and finale of an address about responsible capitalism, presumably in the hope that a really effective invocation of this paragon might persuade Eric Schmidt to pay more tax. Dad, as many of us now know, was in the navy. "He used to talk about those days in the navy, where people of all backgrounds, all walks of life, came together for a common purpose," Ed dilated. "That's what I call one nation."
Leave aside this rosy picture of an era that was still beset by poverty, race hate, homophobia, sexism, virtually every ism in existence – and it is fortunate for Ed's speech that his dad was not, unlike so many dads of yore, a complete bastard. If the wonderful Alan Johnson were now leading the party, for instance, a veil would have to be drawn over the behaviour of his father, Steve, unless, that is, he could draw on him for cautionary effect, as an example of the dire consequences for one nation if all dads were likewise feckless, inebriate, heartless deserters of sick wives and small children.
But even the most decent parents of the relevant generations can make unreliable role models. Although all of Miliband père's attitudes were no doubt as peerlessly progressive as Steve Johnson's were disgusting, many parents and grandparents would require their opinions to be glued into historical context or, better still, thoroughly expunged before they could be safely advertised as mentors. Advanced age, to judge by much current commentary, is no excuse for not thinking like a young person.
Mercifully, natural wastage means that fewer and fewer Britons are going to have to deal with relations who, in defiance of equalities legislation, persist in speaking the language or displaying the attitudes of a darker, pre-hipster age that, some of them stubbornly insist, they actively preferred.
And yet, as the swivel-eyed affair and the gay marriage debate have indicated, large numbers of these elderly individuals remain active, creating particular problems when they cling to employment with a doggedness that would be exemplary if only it didn't also apply to their thoughts on diversity and inadvertent hate-speech. Domestically, the frugal habits of the 1940s and 50s have long been hailed by women of the Cath Kidston mindset, who can acquire, even if we have no plans actually to use, apparatus such as sewing boxes and peg-bags, knitting needles and ready-cut patchwork.
The challenge, of course, is how to deploy the best aspects of older generations – eg honour, stoicism, authentic crochet bobbins – while accommodating, or preferably purging, distressing opinions of a similar vintage. To date, the reputation of, say, Mary Berry, aged 78, appears to have survived, just, her cheerful denunciations of feminism ("a dirty word") and what one columnist called "her poisonous views". Her comment – "You've got to persuade them [men] gently to do things, and of course when they come back they say, 'Oh, wasn't that fun'" – was particularly devastating to women who had plainly hoped for greater vision on gender relations from a veteran swiss roll authority. Not that Joanna Lumley, aged 67, and Ann Robinson, aged 68, have recently done much better with the message: "You'll get fat, you fool."
As for older men: the response to last week's Norman Tebbit incident, in which we saw an 82-year-old man shamelessly giving voice to opinions dating back to his wartime, one-nation era youth, must have implications for generational hostilities to come.
After it featured in an interview in the Big Issue, Tebbit's brutish fantasies about a lesbian queen and, one gathers, gay marriage to his son, were quickly denounced, en masse, on Twitter, and thereafter by commentators delightedly calling the old guy out as a miserable bigot and relic – both undoubtedly apposite descriptions, if they missed out the bit about being blown up, with his wife, by the IRA, and the impact that suffering like that might have on someone's outlook. That aside, Tebbit sounded, unsurprisingly, like a notably unsympathetic product of a dominant culture in which the young were raised to think of homosexuality as, when not comical, unspeakable.
Supposing the polling on gay marriage is accurate, and if there's anything in the impressionable years thesis, a lot of otherwise decent, stoical etc over-70s probably think like him. Since they can't all go for re-education, perhaps they should keep their thought crimes to themselves, as recommended to Mary Berry? Alternatively, since they are safely outnumbered, marginalised and unarguably on their way out, is there a case for cutting elderly opinion at least some of the ideological slack that a multi-cultural society demands for younger, faith-based moralists? The 33-year-old Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan got into a lot less trouble than Tebbit last week when he wrote about his "struggle with this issue of homosexuality".
Certainly, such credit as Hasan has accrued, for relaxing his once hardline views, should surely be extended to Tebbit, who announced his change of heart, for what it's worth, on the fitness of homosexuals to be home secretary: "Our openness about homosexuality has changed the circumstances and my view has now changed too."
But, as Sir Gerald Howarth, aged 65, has just demonstrated, with his much-derided line about "aggressive homosexuals", we should not expect too much flexibility. Asked how she felt about sitting near this obviously very timid heterosexual, Margot James, the MP for Stourbridge and a lesbian, allowed him, with enormous grace, a little age-related context: "I think my dear, late father would have agreed with him." Like her, like President Obama, who once spoke about his white grandmother and race, most people will have heard older friends and relations come out with the supposedly unsayable, flinched, and not loved them any less. As the president allowed: "Good people – people who are not in any way racist – are still subject to some of these images and stereotypes and it is very hard to get away from them."
True, our relevant bigots are not remotely lovable and they are in Parliament, theoretically in a position to keep alive the prejudices of the 50s. But last week's overwhelming vote for gay marriage only confirmed the speed with which public opinion has moved – is moving – on this issue, leaving older people with no option but to get used to it. That this may not always be the work of a moment has become more obvious to me since the recent, justifiable fury of trans people indicated that a good many middle-aged, supposedly enlightened journalists, raised before the expressions "trans" or "cis" became current, are probably less aware of the rights of this minority than are our own children, who duly consider us incorrigible bigots and relics. A process delicately known as cohort replacement will, as always, take care of that.