{"id":18582,"date":"2015-11-02T22:44:42","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T22:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=18582"},"modified":"2015-11-02T22:44:42","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T22:44:42","slug":"is-it-really-ageism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=18582","title":{"rendered":"Is it Really Ageism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 98-year old man was given a renewal quotation of \u00a320,000<\/a> on his car insurance in Wales. The story in Wales Online makes much of the fact that the chap in question, Ron Jones, is an Auschwitz survivor who used his car to sell poppies.\"Elderly<\/p>\n

This has nothing at all to do with Auschwitz (Mr Jones was a PoW, and in a separate part of the camp to the gas chambers) or poppy-selling.<\/p>\n

But it has everything to do with being 98 years old. The insurance company involved, Ageas, says that Mr Jones should not have received the quotation, and they\u2019re looking into it. In fact, he should not have received a quote at all as he no longer meets their eligibility criteria.<\/p>\n

The article also says that Mr Jones \u201cused to pay between \u00a3200 and \u00a3300 a year\u201d. This is as misleading as the stuff about Auschwitz and poppies, since Mr Jones\u2019 most recent premium was ten times greater at \u00a33,000 \u2013 no doubt as a result of his age. Mr Jones is undoubtedly someone to be admired for what he did for the country and for what he had to go through. And his poppy-selling is also worthy of admiration. But that doesn\u2019t alter the fact that he is 98 years old.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago there was chaos in Nottingham \u2013 throughout Nottinghamshire, in fact. An 87-year old driver had managed to get on to the wrong carriageway of the M1 at around 2am on a Monday morning and collided with a Transit van going the proper way<\/a>. The passenger in the van, 27-year old Michael Luciw, was killed. He was a \u201cfather, son, brother, uncle, grandson and nephew\u201d. He had a baby daughter. The M1 was closed for virtually the entire day as major carriageway repairs had to be undertaken and congestion across the county was massive. The 87-year old was named as Albert Newman, and he also died in the incident. Heaven only knows how he managed to get on the wrong carriageway in the first place, since all the junctions are designed to make that extremely difficult on that stretch of the M1 for any decent driver.<\/p>\n

No matter what the do-gooders might say, elderly drivers become an increasing risk the older they get. It doesn\u2019t matter if, like Mr Jones, they can claim never to have had an accident. Advancing years coupled with deteriorating faculties mean that the risk of having a catastrophic one increases, and that means innocent people like Mr Luciw (and his daughter who will never know him) become the main victims. You just have to face the fact that 87 is one hell of an age to still be driving \u2013 most people die long before that \u2013 and 98 is even more worrying.<\/p>\n

I know it sounds harsh, but Mr Jones isn\u2019t a victim in all this. Nor is it a case of ageism. It\u2019s just facing facts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A 98-year old man was given a renewal quotation of \u00a320,000 on his car insurance in Wales. The story in Wales Online makes much of the fact that the chap in question, Ron Jones, is an Auschwitz survivor who used his car to sell poppies. This has nothing at all to do with Auschwitz (Mr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,86,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-bad-drivers","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}