Johann Hari

So Ruth Kelly has hit her Paedogeddon, the moment when Britain’s paediatrician-bashing hysteria consumes even the cleverest cabinet minister. In Brass Eye, Chris Morris imagined a Britain where paedophiles disguised themselves as schools in order to lull children, and where real celebrities – step forward, Dr Fox – explained that paedophiles have more genetically in common with crabs than with other human beings. Welcome to Morris-Land.

In the midst of a howling mob, nobody cares to notice that the Department of Education made a string of perfectly sensible decisions. Look, for example, at the man who has been touted as “the most disturbing case”. William Gibson had consenting sex with a 15 year-old pupil before I was even born – and then married her and settled down to start a family. Is this a bit scummy and scuzzy? Yes. Does it mean he is a recidivist paedophile who should be kept away from his job – teaching in an all-boys school, by the way – today? Of course not. I would very happily see my nephews be taught by him. Almost all the “scandalous” decisions made by ministers are similarly sane.

But at the same time, a string of real scandals – at the opposite end of the age range – has erupted, and there have been no cries for an investigation and no ministers hounded in the street. In the smallest stories at the back of some newspapers, you might have noticed the revelation that there is an epidemic of abuse directed at the elderly in Britain’s care homes. Help the Aged have discovered that one fifth of the residents of old people’s homes are suffering from malnutrition after being given disgusting sub-standard meals. Many of them are dying prematurely as a result. (Jamie Oliver, where are you now?).

At the same time, it has been revealed by the journal Age and Ageing that 26,000 of the old people who are rebelling against the misery and malnutrition of our care homes are being drugged into submission with “chemical coshes” – anti-psychotic or sedative drugs that they don’t need and don’t want. The government’s demand that the drug regimes of over-75s should be reviewed once a year – hardly an onerous demand – are being ignored by 92 percent of NHS trusts, ensuring many of them are bunged onto surreptitious sedatives until they conveniently die.

Far from dealing with this elder abuse, we are actually making it worse. Local councils – knowing nobody cares about the old – are massively increasing charges for meals-on-wheels and home helps, leaving old people to live in stinking hovels and even more to be forced into care homes where they will be starved and drugged. This is what happens when you demonise council tax and demand it be cut, cut, cut: I just hope all those self-righteous old I-will-go-to-jail-rather-than-pay-my-council-tax protestors never need proper care.

What does it say about us that we have showered indignation and rage onto a tiny, tiny risk directed at children in around ten schools, but can barely muster an indignant cough when it comes to very real and crippling abuse directed at old people in over 2000 care homes?

These twin crises are lay the neuroses of our culture bare. We have become hysterical about paedophiles because we have become an increasingly paedophilic culture, with a mainstream porn culture where Barely Legal is the most popular tag-line, and where make-up for ten year olds is flogged in Boots. There is actually a positive event underpinning the paedophile hunt: our children enjoy far better nutrition than any other generation in history, so they are going through puberty much younger – read a Louisa May Alcott novel and you realise that as recently as the nineteenth century, her Little Women began menstruating at sixteen. This shift has obviously disturbed the naïve Victorian picture of childhood, since our children are – physically and literally – no longer the same as theirs. The response to this change has been panic.

The mass blanking of the old is a response to another huge, hard-to-digest shift. As a nation, we are getting older: by the next election, half of the electorate will be over 50, a situation that has never occurred in any democracy, ever. We are all heading to the Cuckoo’s Nest care homes – so we have gone into mass denial, jabbing our faces with poison to wipe away wrinkles and turning to plastic surgery on an unprecedented scale. It is a jabbing irony that as we become an elderly country, we ignore the elderly with ever-greater ferocity: if don’t look at the Ghost of Christmas Future, maybe it will never come.

So while Ruth Kelly is flayed for nothing, does anybody ever know who the cabinet minister responsible for old people’s homes is? After ringing around six senior Westminster hacks, we finally figured out it is probably John Prescott. But what does it matter? We’re all too busy queuing for a face-lift or hounding imaginary paedophiles to make a fuss.