My parents have become insufferable.

Yep. 76 and ranting on about immigrants and insists on calling people coloured despite me correcting him many many times
the irony? My mums great grandad was black. And an immigrant

Just let them get on with it, my long dead parents were as you describe, constantly moaning and giving negative opinions, now I'm 65 myself I just can't be bothered to get worked up about issues of the day, live and let live, I still work full time and a few moaners are colleagues, I just nod and say few words when they rabbit on, let them be themselves, you'll miss them when they're gone, I know I do !😊

My mum in her mid 70's watches GB news & is reform but the main issue for her is immigration. I think as she lives in a area where white British people (16%) are now the minority & growing up it wasn't like that for her. It is hard for some people to accept the change.

It's got nothing to do with age and everything to do with GB News. I know loads of 60 plus people who haven't swallowed the GB News pill and, while they understand the negative impacts of certain types of illegal immigration, they can also grasp that illegal immigration is only 1% of all immigration. And that there are other and far more pressing issues in this county than immigration! GB News is a propaganda T.V spectacle - not 'news' ffs. When I had the misfortune to flick through the channels the other day, some twists on GB News were actually trying to say that the balaclava-wearing men protesting at Dover are all lovely men really and it's only 'the establishment' who are threatened by hoardes of men in black balaclavas. They are ridiculous people on that channel. All the advertisements are for stair lifts or retirement homes! You can easily tell a GB News watcher by their parroting of the GB News set lingo - 'men of fighting age', 'the establishment,' blah blah blah. And no, I am not a Labour voter, nor am I young. I'm mid-50s.

OP can you do something with their TV subscription that accidentally signs them out of GB News?

Yup, pretty much describes my parents (mid to late 70s). Topics of convo are golf, people from golf club, moaning about filling in econsults, why cant they just ring (dear lord its been econsults for years now, just accept times change!), benefit bashing, migrants, whatever is i the Daily Mail or the Sun, health conditions , moan moan moan pity party. It's very tedious. They are stuck in a timewarp where things were better in my day

My dad, in his early 70s, does my head in because he is exactly like this. All he does is sit at home, drink too much, complain about his health/state of the country/immigration/neighbours/the government and watch GB News and read the Daily Mail. It got noticeably worse when he discovered YouTube and now he sits and watches that all day too, so you can imagine what the algorithm feeds him. I can’t bear it and no longer go over there because of it. I can count the number of times he’s seen DD on my hands and she’s 4.

My mum, who is the same age, doesn’t do it because she has other interests and actually leaves the house.

My mum doesn’t hold those views but yes, she’s just turned 70 and in the last 6-7 years has reduced her topics of conversation to just the same 5 or 6. No matter what you talk about, it veers back and there’s no actual conversation anymore. I told my mum that my 45yo husband was in hospital for a major stroke four days after our daughter's birth and in under a minute she’d related it back to her neighbour’s flipping dog and how worried she was that it might bark. No compassion, empathy or even acknowledgement of what I was going through, just a segue back to one of her topics.

OP, I’m with you. It’s exhausting and genuinely horrible - like the people they were have gone and you’re just left with an AI robot that has been trained on a very limited dataset.

Interestingly, my dad is 78 and holds the same views as your parents but is in no way like that. You’re able to at least talk to him.

You should tell your dad that one of the richest towns in the country is in North Yorkshire!

I have never watched GB News but still think that excessive immigration is a problem. Cutting people off/NC for different views (ie non- approved non-left wing views) is rather juvenile. If someone goes on and on/ moans etc then that is tiresome, but it would be whatever their political leanings.

They are your parents and they are entitled to their views. I would just let it wash over you and either change the subject or ask them about how things used to be.

Mine are in their 80s and I just accept that the country has changed beyond all recognition since they were young and they are finding it hard to adjust. I focus on asking them about things when they were young where possible and change the subject to less contentious things if it gets too close to the bone.

@PleasePleasePleaseDontProve have you ever had in-depth philosophical and political discussions with your parents throughout life? I did with my dad but not my mum. As I got older I began to understand topics more clearly and developed critical thinking. It's only since being older that I realise my dad was talking nonsense a lot of the time and my mum's opinions change like the wind, usually in a right wing direction. It's maybe that your life experience is now making your parents viewpoints clearer, although they always had them.

I'm in my 60s and I'm not like that. My mum is in her 80's and she isn't like that. My gran is over 100 and she's not like that. Older people are not a homogenous group!

Very similar to my DM, though in her 80’s, not 60’s.

Lots of little things become a drama, loads of medical details shared and an awful habit of interrupting a conversation with her latest ‘theme’ - just dropped in, nothing to do with anyone else, totally different to the conversation taking place.

I wonder if it is a stage of life, just like young children are egocentric (Piaget’s theory of cognitive development) - a child's inability to see a situation or the world from another person's point of view - there must be an equivalent in the cognitive development in older people. A stage we will all go through as we age.

I’m sure a psychologist will correct me, or hopefully explain more!

I do, however, get great satisfaction in balancing the Daily Mail/GBNews views, by leaving her my Saturday copy of The Guardian each week. 😉😂

When I remember my late grandparents (younger silent generation I think, late 1920s) they had some very politically incorrect views and you'd absolutely cringe at some of the things they came out with. However they weren't angry and miserable like people like my parents are. I don't know if it's because they were more social and only used the internet to keep in touch with family.

OP, I had EXACTLY the same experience with my late parents! It manifested in different ways, as they were never political, but they became utterly insufferable, really right-wing socially, and it went on and on and on.

In their fifties, they were very different. They never once pressured me about marriage, or kids, or anything like that, and they were very encouraging and supportive of my career.

Fast-forward to their mid-sixties. They had become grandparents via my sister and I had got married. Oh my God, it was like beings from outer space had replaced them. They suddenly became like something out of 1750. I phoned a lawyer once about some issues we were having with our block of flats, and my mum told me that that was something my husband should sort out! And I have a BA and an MA from Russell Group universities and a career, and suddenly they were treating me like some bimbo. I once hammered a nail into the wall in a cupboard to hang up the clothes dryer, and my dad asked me why my husband wasn't doing things like that.

They went on at me to cook my husband's dinner, and to clean, and oh my, the PRESSURE to have children went on and on and on. The comments about how selfish people are who don't have them, how they spend all their money on themselves, and my dad even curtain-twitched about a woman who lived about ten houses away and the different men she had staying over! While you do have to drive past that house to get out of the cul-de-sac, I would never, ever, in a month of Sundays notice what cars were parked in that driveway or when.

They got older, retired, became grandparents, and changed into a pair of socially conservative complete nightmares who never stopped trying to impose their 1950s views on me and try to make me conform to that stereotype of a housewife. And they were NEVER EVER like that before.

I can only think that this is some very weird, deep psychological response to entering the final stretch of their lives. Such a pity as it really strained my relationship with them in their final years, and I did not enjoy their visits.

Maybe it's you - and all these other questionable posters complaining about their poor parents who may have just wised up to what's going on around them - maybe you should do the same and think about a time when they won't be here - calling them out because they might watch GB News - disgraceful

YANBU. GB News poisons people.

I do miss my parents, but I honestly don't miss some of their behaviour from their years mid-sixties on. They caused a huge amount of stress.

Don't correct your parents. a) it's rude and b) they are your parents whom you owe respect. You are both giving your DC bad role models for behaviour.

My dad is in his 80s and he is insufferable since my mum died four years ago, I think my mum kept him in check, he is very influenced by these ghastly "delinquent" friends, all make, widowed and horrendously sexist!

He developed a deep suspicion of "the media" I had to challenge him on this and I've told him repeatedly to look only at reliable, trustworthy news sources and be conscious of their biases.

My children also call him out, when my DD was 12 she went out with him and he was complaining about fat women shrieking in a cafe, DD told him that is unacceptable and maybe he should take the log out of his own eye. God I love that sassy girl.

🤣 it’s called the generation gap. You should hear their opinion of you.

I remember my own father was asked to look after my young child for a short while (5 minutes). His response? "No. I've done my time" e.g. he couldn't be bothered. Thanks Dad for the support with your first bloody grandchild. Selfish b**

All the while his focus is on bashing people of colour, immigrants, refugees, going on and on about Brexit and being miserable, like his own parents before him.

I put it down to cognitive decline in his case. He's struggled a lot with various health issues which have left him stuck at home and he's not the same engaged, sharp person he once was.

Whilst he's always been a difficult man pushing his opinions on others, these days has even less ability to see others' points of view or understand when something is propaganda or whatever and his views were the opposite of now in the past.

I'd wager some of the other people's older relatives going down similar paths might also have some cognitive decline going on.

NO I'm not accusing everyone who watches GB news to have cognitive decline, but brains change as they age and it would figure that some people might lose the ability to understand or relate to others in the same way they once did - here's one of just many studies:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.14.699282v1.full

I just want to say, my parents' nightmarish transformation from fully supporting my career and education to telling me to stay home barefoot and pregnant and that phoning lawyers was my husband's job etc. all happened years before GB News was a thing. And way before small boats/current immigration issues etc. They changed around 2006, when I got married/they retired/my sister made them grandparents. So it can happen without the febrile atmosphere we currently have in the UK about some issues.

Decades ago, my mother used to quote what she'd read in the Times (single mothers were to blame for everything). And my father used to enjoy making racist and misogynistic comments about people on television - eg. Martina Navratilova was not a real woman, apparently. He used to make nasty disparaging comments about friends and relatives, too. It's not all about GB News, though I'm sure that's made it worse.
OP doesn't seem to be prepared to take actual action to try to improve things - that would involve spending time with her parents, I suppose.

@SuperGingerI was at Evensong at St Paul’s yesterday and one of the readings was about needing to remove the log from one’s own eye before telling your neighbour to remove the speck from theirs. Love she told him that: smart girl!