Good evening
on what is a historic moment in history,
a truly momentous moment
and I want to take this opportunity to discuss something
which up until now has been swept under the carpet:
old people.
Quite frankly there are too many of them.
I'm going to say it simply
and you can quote me on this:
there are too many old people in Britain today;
we can't cope
they're putting pressure on our public services,
they're forcing wages down through doing low-paid jobs
and volunteering all over the place;
they're hanging about on street corners
talking to each other in their own odd ways
they go to their own special places
segregating themselves off from the rest of us
failing to integrate.
But the real matter
and let's have a grown-up conversation here
is the fact that we can't cope.
There is a finite number of people we can handle
in these islands
and if you look at the statistics
you can see the way that old people go on and on living
these days
means that the population is going up and up and up.
This puts a massive pressure on society as a whole
and let's face it,
Westminster won't talk about it.
This is a failure of the political class.
Well, now we've got a chance to sort this out
ourselves
without interference from Europe.
We can control old people ourselves.
We can do this is a sensible, grown-up, humane way.
I suggest that we need to talk about culling,
perhaps starting with ninety-year olds
and then consider whether the old age pension
is really something we can afford.
I suggest we can't
and the advantage there is that this may well
encourage some old people to die sooner.
Again, we could look at the pressure that old people
are putting on housing.
One way to deal with this is to think about special centres
or camps
where old people could be grouped together in huts.
All this is to be talked about in an open, mature way
but whatever happens,
today has given us this great opportunity
to talk about such things.
Thank you for listening
and good night.
