A Hundred Years on Benefits

Apparently you may live to be 120.  According to the headline on the Daily Mail yesterday, that is.  What scientific foundation (if any) there is for this claim, my reaction was to think, may I?  I mean, the way they phrase it, it sounds as if this possible longevity is some kind of option we could activate.  Just tick the box and add forty or fifty years to your lifespan.  Trouble is, I'm still not clear as to where I check this particular option.  After all, if I had those extra years, just think of the number of additional old exploitation movies I could watch.  Obviously, I'd be so decrepit once I passed ninety, (they mentioned nothing in the headline about slowing or stopping the ageing process, without which extended lifespans would be pretty pointless as you wouldn't be able to fully enjoy the extra years), that watching films will about all I'd be capable of doing.  The other downside is that, inevitably, we'd all have to work for more years than we do now, as there is no way they'd leave the retirement age at 65 if we were all living to 120 - everyone would effectively be retiring in middle age.  Which, come to think of it, is another good reason for me to exercise my Daily Mail mandated right to live to 120: I wouldn't be middle aged any more,  I'd have at least another decade before middle age set in.  Bring it on!

The Daily Mail being what it is, I'm surprised that they seem to have missed a trick by not turning this into a scare story.  I'm sure that they only envisage nice, white, middle class people having the option to live to 120.  But what if the 'wrong' people acquired such longevity?  that's right - you'd have workshy 'benefit scroungers' claiming their money for additional decades. Even worse, they might be illegal immigrant 'benefit cheats'.  That really must be the Mail's worst nightmare: idle foreigners capable of claiming British taxpayers' money for a century at a time.  And what about single mothers?  We all know that they only keep having kids so that they can claim benefits and 'free' council flats, don't we? Well, if they had increased longevity and the ageing process was slowed down, imagine how many more children they could have?  They could produce so many in a 120 year lifespan that they'd have to be provided with mansions rather than flats to accommodate them all.  There's another Mail nightmare: Griff Rhys Jones evicted from his London mansion by the council to house seventy year old single mother of twenty kids!  Yeah, that's it - increased longevity of the unwashed lower classes will inevitably result in councils compulsorily purchasing mansions to accommodate them, putting millionaires out on the street!  It would be worse than Labour's proposed 'mansion tax'!  Damn, I should be working for the Daily Mail, shouldn't I?