We may very soon be forced, by law, to interact with elderly people, instead of wholly ignoring them. The government is making it a crime for employers to discriminate against people because of their advanced years. It may even become a crime to use a potentially pejorative phrase like “advanced years”; there will be officially sanctioned euphemisms and only the elderly will be allowed to refer to one another, with knowing irony, as “coffin dodgers” or “old scrotes”.

This most bad-tempered and forgetful sector of our population will now be herded into the service industries, where they will fail to hear the phones ringing or the desperate entreaties of shoppers standing 2ft in front of them.

Meanwhile, our shops and businesses will be awash with weak tea and urine, and the pervasive whiff of Werther’s Originals.

All of which seems fine, to me. As soon as the economists started bleating that our ageing population would create a burden we could ill afford, it occurred to me that the elderly should be rounded up in open-top trucks and forced to serve behind the tills in Starbucks, Topshop and Gap.

If we are living longer, it is likely that we are also healthier for longer too, and thus fit for work at a later age than before. The government has only just realised this, having already allowed into the country the entire population of Upper Silesia to do the jobs the rest of no longer wish to do and for almost no pay.

Soon our big businesses will be spoilt for choice as to which tranche of the population they can mercilessly exploit: sullen and ignorant young Britons covered in acne and bad attitude; Poles and Bulgarians with degrees in astrophysics; or, now, people who watched the Queen’s coronation on the shop TV in the high street.

One way or another we will find ourselves required to shout even louder in shops, or on the phone to the call centre. But at least we will be able to shop knowing that the wages of those serving us are being forced lower and lower. This is truly an excellent time to be middle-aged.

The government’s great skill has been to convince the elderly they are being done an enormous service by being sent out to work. Whereas my open-top truck idea was plainly motivated by a wish to benefit indirectly from cheap labour, the government has dressed the whole thing up as a discrimination issue — rather than a bald injunction to our senior citizens to chuck the blanket off their knees, pull themselves together and make for the jobcentre.

Old people will soon have the right to flog themselves to death for tuppence ha’penny. The fact that their pensions are nearly worthless (unless they are MPs, of course) and that this right will at some point become an obligation, is purely coincidental.

• You can say what you like about young people today, no matter how thick they might be, at least they seem to have pride in their appearance. Teenager Adam Sarghini broke into a London bus depot and torched 12 buses, but refused to stamp out the flames because he did not wish to ruin his new trainers.

  The inevitable court hearing heard that the scene of devastation resembled “a bombing attack on Baghdad” and that “hundreds of lives” were put in danger. But his new Nikes were untouched. Adam, 15, was spared custody precisely because he is very, very, stupid and had spent time on remand. We are not told the exact level of his IQ, but the court heard it is extremely low — between an otter and a Premiership footballer. The recorder was suitably lenient.

  Being stupid has long been a mitigating factor when up before the beak, as if the nature of the offence were not sufficient advanced warning of the accused’s likely defence. Magistrates cave in when told the miscreant cannot tie his own shoelaces and regularly watches Robson Green in Wire In the Blood. Stupidity gets you off — sociopathy, however, tends to get you banged up.

  Yet these two states are very easy to confuse. One implies a lack of true awareness of one’s fellow beings, the other a lack of concern. With Sarghini, one assumes his regard for his trainers proved to be the clincher.

  Throbbing with indignation at Greer

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