John Sutherland, 78, says his position as emeritus professor of English literature is like being on the scrapheap

There's a secret war going on right now, in our midst. It's not between nations or classes, races or creeds. It's between generations — Young versus Old.

The way I see it, a covert but State-condoned campaign is being waged against the nation's old people that amounts to nothing less than demographic cleansing.

Having just had my 78th birthday, I know which side I'm fighting on.

'We're all living longer, and that's a good thing,' is what every politician says to court the vote of people such as me.

They are lying. The truth is they think we oldies are an expensive, unnecessary nuisance — that it would be better if we were dead.

A 'war' on the old, I hear you say. Surely that's way over the top? But my experience suggests it's exactly that.

At one level, its weapons are attitudinal — the snarl, the snide, barely heard comment, the funny look. These days, I'm invisible when walking down a busy street. People bump into me and don't even register my mumbled protest.

I've worked out why. The women have no interest in me: I'm not a potential mate or sugar daddy. My sexuality quotient is less than zero. And other men, ever ready for combat, see me as no threat. A masculine zilch. This is how it must feel to be a ghost.

I once had a glittering academic career, but now I'm an emeritus professor of English literature. 'Emeritus' means on the scrapheap. It's like having a tombstone strapped to your back.

John Sutherland says a war has been declared on the old and it is time for them to fight back by staying active and eating right

But there are much more lethal fronts in this war. And casualties — hundreds and thousands of them.

Old people are being neglected or institutionally abused, even dying, in large numbers, unnecessarily and wrongly.

They are victims of systemic negligence — negligence so widespread that, common sense suggests, there must be an official policy behind it. A canny affirmative wink. Someone, somewhere, means it.

Just take a couple of newspaper headlines on one random day recently.

'Dementia patients face a care lottery' — which, since there are 850,000 of them, means a lot will be neglected.

'Thousands have surgery cancelled at last minute' — mainly operations for hip replacements and cataracts, the ones most common among the aged. Who cares about those old wrecks? Go to the end of the queue, old-timers.

Or get thee to a care home, even though the costs have shot up 5 per cent in the past year alone, and paying for care without raiding savings is becoming unaffordable even for the wealthiest pensioners. You don't have the money? Sod off. We actually don't care.

Not that being in a care home is much of a guarantee, given another report that same day of staff in one establishment taunting dementia sufferers by deliberately torturing in front of them the 'comfort dolls' they believe are real babies.

What had these poor old ladies done wrong to deserve such torment and insult to their humanity? Nothing. They'd merely hung around on planet Earth too long, outliving their usefulness or their ability to fight back.

They did not matter in the eyes of those paid to look after them. They were good for a laugh, that's all.

When it comes to this country's care programmes for the old, one needs no digital hearing aid to catch echoes of the Daleks' 'Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!'

Professor Sutherland says it is no wonder the state of elderly care in Britain has been declared unacceptable, with cancelled operations and a care home lottery. File photo

To my horror, I read recently that as many as 40,000 hospital patients a year are having 'do not resuscitate' orders secretly imposed on them without their families ever being told. Sentenced to death in secret.

This mass-labelling may well be based on 'rational' decisions by doctors and a 'cruel to be kind' resolve. But I fear the underlying attitude is a waste disposal exercise — done discreetly, hopefully with no one looking. Or caring.

No wonder that Age UK has declared the state of elderly care here to be 'unacceptable in a civilised society', with more than a million old people getting no help at all for basic care — such as getting out of bed, going to the toilet, preparing food or taking medication.

I call it un-care. Officially sanctioned. Malpractice, outright abuse and thoughtless neglect are so widespread as to suggest at best covertly sanctioned indifference and at worst a clandestine policy of constructive negligence.

Old people die. And, while they are going downhill, money can be made out of them. Caveat emptor, some would say. But old people can't, unlike car buyers, shop around until they find the deal that suits them.

Starve a dog to death, and the law will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Yet neglect an old person to death and does anything much happen?

To my mind, such attitudes constitute a declaration of war against the elderly by the rest of society. Well, if they want a fight, I for one am up for it.

Of course, I'm well aware that gerontophobia is a perennial fact of human societies. The young are not predisposed to like the old and never have been. The old are living reminders of what awaits. Each young person has a Dorian Gray self-portrait hidden in their attic. Themselves, aged 60-plus. They yearn to destroy it.

In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the young hero has a road-rage moment with an annoying old codger at a crossroads and kills him. Why? Because he's in the way. (We discover later, of course, that the man is his own father.) I fear such aggressive attitudes are increasingly — and dangerously — common these days as more people survive longer and die more gradually.

NOW GET READY TO DO BATTLE To prepare yourself for battle, here are some tips for those caught in that struggle — beginning with the injunction that you should never accept being categorised as 'seniors', 'the aged', 'the elderly'. Such homogenisations are often no more than packaging, all the better to dispose of you. Instead, assert yourself in the face of what is inevitable. Although it cannot be reversed, it can be confronted and contested. So . . . Stay fit: Deterioration of the brain seems to be something you have to expect. Those spared the worst mental decay will probably still experience some malfunction, if only a slowing of reflexes and the imperative of, for example, giving up your driving licence and mountain climbing. No more North face of the Eiger. Medical science has no immediate expectation of a cure for Alzheimer's, vascular dementia or those other afflictions which used to be called 'softening of the brain'. Arteries harden, brains soften. The way of all flesh. Your cerebral cortex will follow your biceps. But both can, to some extent, be preserved in good shape. The best advice from doctors is: 'What's good for the heart is good for the head.' Eat right: Cut down on eating red meat; bump up your intake of vegetables and fruit; avoid salt; don't, above all, smoke; stay around 120/70 blood pressure and less than 70 pulse rate. Lengthen the odds in your favour by joining a gym that emphasises body strength, not athletic fitness. Exercise in gyms, or on dance floors, which have a preponderance of younger members. Never clique with people your own age. Get a dog to walk: It's not really 'exercise', but it is therapeutically de-stressing. And dogs love you unconditionally. Stay active: For the older person, being bustlingly active in the kitchen or garden is probably more the issue than muscle-flexing and speed hiking. Take charge of your own life: The old are (when not mad as hell) prone to deference in the presence of authority, such as doctors. Don't be palmed off with a quickly prescribed pill. Among the caring and curing professions there is often an unspoken sense that 'you've had a good run, time to let things take their course'. Politely insist on prophylactic and diagnostic screening. Don't 'retire': It is very hard to work yourself to death — but relatively easy to retire yourself to death. Do something, gainful or voluntary, to fill the empty hours. Realise your assets: The old often find themselves surprisingly well off. Should you piddle it, selflessly, on the young? Or lavish it, selfishly, on No. 1? I recommend selfish. All these tips are things I have picked up from personal experience, observation and reading in the fight against what is being done to those at my time of life. Do all these things and, with luck, you'll emerge from this war in good shape. For as long as you're lucky enough to last. Advertisement

There are now more than eight million over-70s in the UK. More attain that age every year than come into the country as immigrants. In effect, Britain is migrating, internally, into mass senescence.

As a result, the 'old' — in their insect millions — have become a 'problem'. Worse than that, for the junior masses ranked against them, they are a hostile entity to be dealt with, neutered politically, eased into invisible non-existence or hurried on to make room.

Hostilities break out over seemingly trivial perks afforded the elderly: free bus passes, the winter fuel allowance, free TV licences for the over-75s and the triple-lock pension guarantee (under which pensions have risen every year since 2010 by —whichever is the higher figure — the rate of inflation, average earnings or a minimum of 2.5 per cent). Those damned oldies are nothing but a bunch of scroungers!

Giles Coren, above, wrote in the Times that the vote to leave the EU was the fault of 'wrinklies'

But the latest casus belli is Brexit, exemplified by the Times columnist Giles Coren (aged 47), who wrote that the vote to leave the EU was the fault, according to his article's headline, of 'wrinklies' who 'stitched us young 'uns up good and proper'.

He wrote: 'From their stair-lifts and their Zimmer frames, their electric recliner beds and their walk-in baths, they reached out with their wizened old writing hands to make their wobbly crosses and screwed their children and their children's children for a thousand generations.'

His conclusion was, with menace, the necessary disenfranchisement of the aged — by which he meant anyone over the age of 60. In other words, electoral castration. There was a mountain of similar ageist abuse and verbal violence on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. If some of the language used to describe the elderly had been used about any other group, there would have been howls of outrage.

But there is no verbal protection, it seems, for us. We're fair game.

And what, precisely, had we oldsters done to incur this falsetto wrath? Exercised our democratic rights. (I, incidentally, wrinkly as I am, voted Remain, but don't let that get in the way of your thesis, Mr Coren.)

The central aim in the war against the old is the same as in all wars — to destroy or displace the enemy and take over their resources, property and power.

That is on the brink of happening. A report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in July disclosed that 'pensioners have incomes that have 'grown so much' that they are now the least likely group to be in poverty'. The most likely to be impoverished were 'those between 22 and 30 years of age'.

One commentator concluded that 'a generation of hard-working young people is being left behind by an economy which is failing to provide them with the kind of secure, fairly rewarded work previous generations have taken for granted'.

Who was to blame? The grey-haired plutocracy. People like me.

There was a mountain of ageist abuse after the vote to leave the European Union, says Professor Sutherland. Pictured, Nigel Farage, who campaigned to leave

Apparently we are bed-blockers (denying our youngers the care they require in hospital); house-hoarders (denying the roof over their heads they deserve); and, through gold-plated pensioning, wealth-accumulators. It irks the deprived young. They want us gone so they can get the spoils.

A n increasingly tempting, if gothic, final solution is what the glum Martin Amis (once our enfant terrible, now 67), foresees — Necropolis. In a few years' time, he predicts, there will be a euthanasia booth on every street for right-thinking oldies to check into.

There will, for a certainty, be a relaxation on 'self-murder', as the Church used to call it, over the next few years. Bet on it. No more Dignitas final-destination trips will be required. Assisted death will be provided in the home country.

However, there is another route for us oldies to take.

Instead of surrendering to the young, we can fight back. Fight for your right not to die. Take your cue from the poet Dylan Thomas's beautiful, but terrifying, instruction to his aged dying father:

Dylan Thomas wrote 'do not go gentle into that good night' and Professor Sutherland says older people should do the same

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Rage on, old friends.

Traditionally, the old turned up their toes, faced the wall and exited without fuss. But not any more.

The Baby Boomer Bulge — those born just after the end of World War II — has reached 70 and crashed, like a tsunami, into retirement.

The gravestones of their parents' generation could have been inscribed with 'We gave no trouble'. Not so the baby boomers. Trouble was their middle name.

In elections, they voted en masse, strategically and astutely. Governments of the day took notice, hence plans to abolish the triple-lock protecting old-age pensions were abandoned earlier this year when advisers told the new PM that it would mightily annoy the grey vote.

And without that vote, Mrs May, hello back benches.

A self-assertive army of retirees (don't call them wrinklies: Botox handled that little problem) were changing the sunset years of the UK population. In image and fact.

Shakespeare described the seventh age of man as 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything', but the baby boomers have not given up their 'everything' readily. They have entered that decade with gleaming piranha teeth. A popular U.S. bumper sticker sums up their mood: 'I'm spending my children's inheritance.'

The old can't, in the long term, win — precisely because they are old. Their young foe will still be standing on the battlefield while the oldsters have gone to their reward underneath it.

Nonetheless, one can fight back and, in a state of comfortable siege, keep the young at bay for a good while.