ALL through the 1990s I worked with a group of old people who produced a campaigning newspaper called Hackney Pensioners Press. 

I have dithered about using the word “old” in that first sentence. It is such a powerfully pejorative term that I almost censored myself, afraid that it would deter people from reading on. 

But that was what the editorial group called themselves, because that was what they were. They would not allow the word “old” to be used to downgrade and discredit them. 

Like older people in the general population, the majority of Hackney Pensioners Press members were women. 

There was one stalwart man, who attended every editorial meeting, and a couple of others who drifted in and out. 

But the solid core of argumentative, opinionated, enthusiastic learners and decision-makers were women in their seventies and eighties. 

My job was to boost their writing and editorial skills to enable them to amplify the voices of old people in the borough. 

What they brought was knowledge of how to get things done, courage derived from a lifetime of political struggle, an understanding of how to work collectively, and a burning anger at injustice.

But when they left our untidy office in pre-gentrified Dalston and got on the bus to go home, these marvellous, independent-minded, articulate people were invisible. 

Just old ladies with shopping bags. No-one suspected that, along with food from the market, those bags contained copy to be edited, proofs to be read, page plans and lists of ideas for forthcoming issues of the paper. 

No-one imagined that they had just come from a fiery discussion sharing their life experiences as Jews, African Caribbeans, Irish, Indians, English — thrashing out their ideas on pensions, housing, the health service, public transport, international affairs, religion, grandchildren, loneliness, relishing their continuing role in changing the world.

These old women inspired my own continuing activism. They taught me that age is an asset, and that we need to treasure the accumulated experience derived from a lifetime of struggle, thought, discussion, activism and understanding. 

I have fought from the very start of second wave feminism for women to emerge, confidently, from the ideological straitjacket which imprisons us in our own low expectations. 

I’m not interested in campaigning for women to reach the top of some exploitative hierarchy, but I want us to be active, creative and bold; to understand the overt and covert forces stacked against us and, collectively, to challenge them. 

What we have fought for and won so far means that younger women can now travel down at least some of the paths that we cleared with both pain and jubilation.

But now I sit in meetings of the Labour Party and other groups where members wring their hands about the “demographic in the room” and agonise about how to attract more young blood. 

In the wider world, people reaching for easy answers blame “the older generation” for the 2008 banking crash, Brexit and the housing crisis. 

And the woke brigade confidently inform us that the baby boomers don’t understand feminism. 

Meanwhile, we demonstrate, canvass and hand out leaflets; we prevent hospital closures and challenge the sale of our communal assets. 

But the message we older people — and particularly older women — receive, not explicitly, but very powerfully, is that we are worthless, or at least worth less than young people.

We don’t have to accept this. Older women like Doreen Lawrence and Martha Osamor have faced down the power of the racist state and its institutions. 

Old women have, over many decades, brought their skills, intelligence and commitment to campaigning against nuclear weapons, in support of the miners and in defence of their own jobs. 

Old women raise their voices in Parliament and beyond, fighting for the public services and benefits we will all need, deserve and pay for. 

Old women bring their talents and experience to supporting destitute refugees. Old women write, sing and march; we organise, lobby and occupy. 

We must not concede to an ideology that belittles us and makes us invisible in public places, that describes us, disgustingly, as a “demographic time-bomb,” a burden on the health service we have fought so hard to build and protect. 

There are around 12 million people aged 65 and over in the UK — that’s 18.2 per cent of the population. 

In 1948, when the NHS was founded, over-65s were only 10.6 per cent of the population. That is an achievement, not a tragedy. 

It is also an achievement that the gender gap in this age group is closing: men are also living longer. 

The steady increases in life expectancy over those years have now stalled, but that is a subject for another, though related, debate.

And now I’m getting old myself, and I’m still angry and still in the struggle, especially now that there’s a real chance to change this harsh and heartless world. 

We don’t want doors held open or seats offered because we’re grey-haired and female; we want to be visible and respected for our humanity; not because we’re old, but for who we are.