The minister for loneliness will need all the friends she can get

Well, now they’ve appointed a minister for it.” Elizabeth’s comment prompted considerable ribaldry. It’s post-bingo time in the community centre and we’re talking about loneliness. According to a 2017 report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness more than nine million people in the UK often or always feel lonely. Old people know about this and we are concerned that the prime minister’s call to “address the loneliness endured by the elderly” (as well as carers and the bereaved) is too narrow a focus.

It is about belonging, and belonging is about taking part, and taking part is about being of use, of being engaged. Loneliness is not about being useless but being unused. It is about being unknown, disappointed, deprived of something to look forward to.

We crumblies may not have a lot to look forward to, but nowadays there is plenty for us to do. There has been an explosion of initiatives to combat older people’s loneliness, from Men in Sheds to Pies and Pints, to Knit and Natter groups, as well as nationally conceived projects including Alzheimer’s cafes. So for the majority of old people, feeling lonely is of our own making: we simply need to get out more.

Neither is it an end-of-life condition. Rather it is an indiscriminate disease that has become an epidemic. There are some obvious pathogens: the deconstruction of community, the conversion of citizen into consumer, the politics of envy. We are no longer “bowling together” and family life has been unravelling for some time now. Since the 1980s we’ve been gaining comfort from consumer materialism and convenience in exchange for our identity. The public square has become privatised and we have lived individual, unconnected lives behind locked doors in gated estates, as we gorge on delivered groceries, box sets and now Just Eat takeaways. We have been slowly losing touch with each other and with reality. The latest strain is a digital virus, detectable only to the analogue eye of our pre-electronic generation. It is demolishing real sociability and replacing it with virtual reality. A techie elite has hijacked the narrative, causing a quantum shift in human interaction. This threatens the human genius of community which has been the primary driver in the species’ journey from family to gang to clan to tribe to nation to federation.

Loneliness is a cultural construct, a lifestyle issue. It is the child of a very male marriage between social illiteracy and the neoliberal paradigm. Making Tracey Crouch minister for loneliness offers a political statement of serious intent to restore the child to health. Being up against powerful vested interests, she is going to need all the friends she can muster.