SCAPEGOAT: someone who is made to take the blame for the failings or misdeeds of another.

What a useful tool scapegoating has proved for incompetent or corrupt politicians; the Jewish people above all have suffered; how useful it was to identify them as the cause of the financial collapse following the First World War, the German people swallowed the big lie and turned a blind eye to their persecution.

Our governments used the mechanism here to explain away the banking corruptions and incompetence which led to the collapse of the financial markets.

It wasn’t, after all, the risky dealings unsupported by collateral it was, we were told, the too generous Welfare State that was at the root of the problem; we needed to deal with the shirkers, with the young women who got pregnant to get a council flat and the people with disabilities who were faking their condition to avoid honest work.

Enter Austerity.

Sadly too many of us fell for it and said yes to the ‘austerity’ programme.

Our latest cohort of scapegoats is the elderly population.

Propaganda tells us that their protected final salary pensions, their triple-lock state pensions and their dominance in the housing market are the cause of the financial misery of the younger generation.

The NHS would be in so much better fettle if these ‘bed blockers’ would just take up their crutches and walk out, Accident and Emergency Departments could cut their five-hour waiting times if they were not cluttered with these doddering oldies.

The realities are somewhat different; 1.9 million pensioners live below the poverty line, one in four people over 65 struggle to survive to the end of each month, the waiting list time for elective surgery is anything up to a year and should we need nursing home care our own home will be sold to pay for it.

Rich, sick old people are not the cause of the problems of today’s younger generation, they are scapegoats for the outcome of a political agenda we voted for.