Isolating the over-50s? It's an idea whose purpose is to sow discord

“Nuclear option” is a sloppy phrase to use about viral transmission – so it’s unsurprising to discover that the option is, itself, quite sloppy. As reported in the Sunday Times, the government has discussed asking people over 50 to stay at home, as part of a suite of measures to prevent another full lockdown.

Don’t panic: it wouldn’t be all over-50s, just the ones with as yet unnamed co-morbidities. Fitness fanatics in their 50s are tearing across social media, complaining that they’re already far healthier than their binge-drinking thirtysomething neighbours. You can expect that outrage to run and run (they make great triathletes, the over-50s), long after the actual scheme has been abandoned. And the idea is vanishingly unlikely to make the transition from gossip to fact.

For a start, it shows a poor understanding of family composition: many people in their 50s will still have teenagers and young adults living at home. Their children, unless the plan is that they also shield, should be going back to school or university, not to mention restarting the economy with their social lives – which would completely negate the extra protection afforded their parents by remaining at home. Before the crisis, one in five people aged between 50 and 64 was a carer for an elderly relative; that proportion has surely risen, now that even the elderly who were not previously housebound are considered too high risk to go out.

It is puzzling who, in this nuclear plan, would be left to shop and care for both elderly and middle-aged people. I dread to think how large the word “Ocado” appears in the wordcloud of these blue-sky meetings.

Second, there has been apparently no consideration of the knock-on economic effect: no talk of a tailored furlough scheme, no indication of who will be able to afford to “eat out to help out”, once all the boomers are out of the picture.

Finally, the potential impact is huge: already, 2.2 million people have spent spring and the start of summer “shielding” in enforced isolation, at huge cost to their happiness (“wellbeing” is the more commonly deployed word, sounding more serious-minded; I absolutely insist, however, that “happiness” be returned to the discourse). It is impossible to estimate how many more would be affected by the over-50 quarantine since its details are so flaky, but we can feel pretty safe with “a lot”.

In truth I doubt this was ever a real idea, and the dead cat theory is already pretty widespread – people speculating that the Conservative party released this extreme talking point in order to distract our attention from other, more shaming events, such as the accusations of rape and sexual assault against one of its MPs. However, “dead cat” is becoming an over-generalised and insufficient concept, when it comes to analysing the actions of a government whose incompetence is often indistinguishable from deliberate destructiveness, whose ignorance is impossible to distinguish from untruth.

It’s not enough to say, “this is a distraction”, and simply too easy to think of the proliferation of unfortunate headlines they may want to distract us from. When the Conservatives drop these bombs into the public conversation, it is with a purpose: the stupider the idea, on paper, the more likely it is that its discursive effect has been quite carefully planned. To return to the dead cat, some of this feline carrion is just there to smell bad and some of it is carrying cholera, and it might benefit us to make the distinction.

There was already an undercurrent, not so much of generations pitted against one another, but certainly of having to make sacrifices for one another, in the fight against coronavirus. Its mortality rate is famously low in the young, and yet that is the generation that feels the restrictions most keenly – in the interruption to their lives, their education, their employment prospects. People generally coped with the cruelty of this imbalance for the simple reason that nobody operates only within their own generation; it is in the nature of human intimacy that a good portion of the people we care about are a lot older or younger than us.

Mostly, we’ve kept the peace by avoiding absolute positions and rarely spelling out the trade-offs or where they might lead. Very few people, except on the far right, are stridently asking how much of a young life it is reasonable to put on hold; we tentatively trust to the future, to vaccines, luck and good government, and shelve issues about whose life comes first. That’s quite a fragile peace, and when it breaks down – when the media starts blaming the young, for protests, raves, going to the beach, and when we start to perceive selfishness in other generations as the driver of our own hardship – behaviour and decisions based on altruism become less and less likely.

It’s hard to see how the large-scale restraint that we may well need again can be summoned up, to a drumbeat of mutual resentment. Yet it’s much easier to be a failing government in those conditions, when everybody’s indignation is directed in these amorphous, demographic directions. And it’s hard to create a really full-blooded war between generations if middle-aged people remain neutral in it, worrying about both young and old.

The over-50s are being wound up deliberately, in other words. The discord is strategic, and they shouldn’t rise to it. Though that’s easy for me to say. I’m only 46.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist