IT’S all very well for Norman Wisdom. If you’re in your late eighties, fit as a fiddle, can fall convincingly over an invisible brick and still yell “Mr Grimsdale!” at 100 decibels, then deciding to retire at 90 doesn’t seem so bad.

Most of us aren’t like that. Yet this week we were warned of the prospect of working well into old age. According to Adair Turner, the chairman of the Pensions Commission, more than 12 million people are not saving enough for old age and pension income will drop by a third in 30 years unless we pay more tax, save more, or accept a later retirement age.

This raises an unpleasant prospect: more of us living longer but still working, or living off a pittance, while suffering increasing ill-health. Medical advances have already resulted in a huge growth in the number of people living with cancer. If ageing people are also struggling to make ends meet, there could be a further health toll. With any luck, it’s a preventable scenario. But it does pose an important question that no one ever dares ask. With all the Government ’s obsession with choice, there is one choice that we are never presented with: do we actually want to live into old age? Do we want there to be a constant assumption that because we have the means to extend life, that’s always the right option?

It’s a moral debate that has just been thrashed out in the courts over babies by the parents of Charlotte Wyatt, but it has a relevance for all of us. Will future generations, if offered the choice, really choose to die before they get old? Will more people be writing advance directives — documents expressing a wish not to be treated in certain circumstances?

Experts and policymakers are banking on the fact that we have it in our power to make the question irrelevant: that if we make the right choices about public and personal finance, if we all make efforts to keep healthy, if investment in the health service continues, then there’s no need to think the unthinkable. It’s a lot of ifs.

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