Suddenly retirement is all the talk again. Last week’s Government announcement of an end to the default retirement age propelled me into a round of media interviews. The dizzy headiness of it all! For a brief period I could imagine being a politician or some other maker of the news.

Actually, what strikes one is the banal ordinariness of life in the media, as much as anywhere else. One session saw me in front of remote controlled microphone in the BBC’s Millbank studio. Some unknown engineer switched me onto about a dozen local radio stations in the course of a couple of hours.

The nice thing about such invisibility is that it doesn’t matter a toss what you wear or how you look – it’s the voice that matters. I was able to pitch up on my bike still wearing a sweaty teeshirt and nobody was remotely concerned. Just as well that  sweaty odours are not transmitted with radio waves!

In contrast, I am told that in public speaking and presentations, it is physical appearance that counts. Hence of course, the ubiquitous interview suit that provides the smart appearance, however unneeded.

One company I know of adopted a policy of holding initial interviews on the telephone to eliminate irrelevant factors from interviewers consideration. They describe it as an age positive policy and I guess it is, even though it implies that older is less superficially appealing. They have to see the applicants eventually of course, but by that time they have made their first impressions

In a You and Yours BBC magazine programme following up on all this yesterday,  the majority of callers were in favour of ending the default retirement age. I held up TAEN’s banner and commented on the calls, along with experts from the small business world and the legal profession.

There were the usual worries of course. Was the ending of the DRA going to be the thin end of the wedge, forcing people work longer? What about people in physically demanding jobs? Surely they should not be made to retire later?

My impression is most people see that this is about choice. There are still the old hoary chestnuts of how a compulsory retirement age allows employers to “let people go with dignity,” when they become older and less productive.

Personally, I can think of little more undignified than being forced to quit a job simply because you have reached a certain age, especially if you need the money and are doing the job well. I don’t suppose for one moment that this will be the last time I hear the argument however.

I noticed only a little of the intergenerational bickering that seems to have been bursting out in some of the newspapers. Is this an easy way to fill column inches in the silly season, I wonder?

The letters page of The Times was full if this kind of thing yesterday. There was also a provocative opinion piece in the Sunday Times (a so called “news review” item) by Eleanor Mills, arguing that the “…baby boomers are hogging the best jobs, feather-bedding their own comfy existences”.  Dynamic young people were struggling for work, volunteering or working for nothing, whilst large numbers of “oldies” were worried about leaving work.

Mill’s solution was to “tap into this body of sprightly, energetic senior citizens who don’t want to go gentle into that good night,” by getting them to volunteer for the Big Society project. Sorry, I don’t think this is the answer.

In response Jill Kirby of the Centre for Policy Studies wrote an economic riposte. One or two of the You and Yours phoners-in felt that older people were stealing the jobs of the young, but actually the impressive weight of economic evidence points in quite the opposite direction.

It offends me to see this pointless guilt tripping of people in their fifties and sixties some of whom talk of retiring to give the young a chance. I imagine that some actually do so.

“Get real” is my response. If an older employee stands aside in the mistaken belief that they will be doing a service for the young, the chances are that they will find it really hard to get a job again should they wish. In any case, it won’t have done any good.

The fact is that the economy doesn’t work like this. Mostly, the labour market does not behave as a ‘lump’ of jobs of a fixed size, but instead as something that can be stimulated and grown so that there is no real fixed number of jobs to be shared around. If capable people remain in work rather than taking their pensions or claiming benefits, more demand is created, giving rise in turn to more jobs.

Older workers in jobs create more jobs for younger or older people to do.

A number of The Times letters bordered on a kind of tit for tat rivalry between the generations, which I guess is part of the traditional banter of intergenerational flak. Like the ageist birthday cards, one may not like it but in itself it may do no particular harm if it is left at that.

Mind sets and attitudes are influenced by such things however. While stoking up the fires of conflict with headlines like, “Get out of my job oldie” might make good copy, it is a ludicrously naive sentiment for a serious newspaper to allow its columnists to utter.

One might imagine the reaction were “oldie” to be substituted for some other epithet across the rich spectrum of equality strands now protected by law. I won’t go on, but think about it. You can imagine the outrage!