\n<\/p>\n
M<\/span>y guess is you keep across the news. You know Andy Mountbatten-Windsor has just had the worst birthday ever; that tall hotels in Dubai don\u2019t make for a great holiday right now; and that Keir Starmer\u2019s engagements diary for 2027 will be remarkably clear.<\/p>\n Still, there is one headline I\u2019ll bet you haven\u2019t seen, even though it directly affects your life. It\u2019s about your life, and mine, and those of our families and friends and neighbours. I didn\u2019t spot it either, until a few days ago when the Guardian ran a reader\u2019s letter.<\/p>\n It came from Alan Walker, a retired professor at the University of Sheffield. Why, he asked, hadn\u2019t this newspaper made more of the latest \u201cshocking\u201d figures on healthy life expectancy? I looked up the report from the Office for National Statistics, and he\u2019s absolutely right: the findings are indeed \u201cmomentous\u201d, and they should be on the front pages, because they expose a serious truth about the state we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n The figures show this: a child born this morning in Britain can expect to be in good health only until they are 61. The last 20 years of their life will be blighted by illness: dodgy hearts, painful joints, an inability to get about. Our healthy life expectancy has been dropping for years; it is now the lowest since 2011, when records began.<\/p>\n For most of the past 100 years, the UK and other rich countries have made outstanding progress on life expectancy. Year after year, decade after decade, the outlook has just kept getting better. Whereas a century ago the average life expectancy was about 50, today you can hope to live into your 80s. And now in Britain one of the great success stories in human history is going into reverse. Over the past 15 years, improvements in life expectancy have essentially stalled, while our allotment of healthy life is getting shorter.<\/p>\n How important is this? \u201cIt\u2019s huge,\u201d I was told by the epidemiologist Michael Marmot. \u201cIf our health and life expectancy is in decline, it\u2019s about as clear a sign as you can get that our society is in decline.\u201d In the 1980s, Marmot studied the Soviet bloc and saw illness increase. That\u2019s one way you could tell those societies were on the verge of collapse.<\/p>\n Now it\u2019s starting to happen in hypercapitalist countries. Scientists increasingly worry about \u201cmidlife mortality\u201d in Britain: people in the prime of their lives dropping dead. In Donald Trump\u2019s America, where life expectancy is plunging, more women are dying between the ages of 25 and 44 than did in 1990. Sick lives are the product of sick societies.<\/p>\n Healthy life expectancy UK graph<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t have to be like this. While our healthy life expectancy has been dropping, in Sweden it has been rising. That\u2019s real progress. Not GDP going up 0.1% or Rachel Reeves forecasting an extra couple of billion in fiscal headroom \u2013 but whether you live or die, are well or sick.<\/p>\n Yet in a society as unequal as the UK, how well or sick you are depends on how rich you are. The NHS provides free healthcare, but it can\u2019t pay your bills, free your flat of mould or keep your kids fed.<\/p>\n A little while ago, I interviewed the chief executive of the hospital where I was born, North Middlesex in London. On an office wall hung a map of her patch, marked with life expectancies for each part. The working-class suburb where I was raised, Edmonton, ranks among the most deprived in the country; the middle-class suburb where I currently live is among the least deprived. I could see them on her map, along with figures suggesting my two small daughters can expect almost a decade more of good health than girls living in my old home, just three miles away.<\/p>\n That is injustice. It could be improved, but British governments have made choices that mean poorer children get old sooner and die earlier than richer children. The fact our healthy lives are now getting shorter is also a political choice. Much of the choosing was done by George Osborne and David Cameron, by Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, who imposed year after year of spending cuts.<\/p>\n In their book Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK, the public health experts David Walsh and Gerry McCartney point out how Tory and Lib Dem policies effectively killed ordinary Britons. According to their modelling, those service cuts, benefit caps and welfare freezes put an end to the lives of 345,000 British people. And it left the UK disastrously placed for Covid.<\/p>\n Walsh and McCartney write about Moira, a nurse whose partner inflicted violent abuse, leaving her with the kind of injuries that no hospital can fix. She refused all state support and kept nursing, until her injuries caught up with her. Austerity robbed her of the basic dignities of life. Too ill to attend an interview for social security, she was sanctioned off benefits. A few years afterwards, she died of cancer. \u201cI am absolutely certain that the stress she endured caused her to give up her fight against her illnesses,\u201d her daughter, Nichole, says. \u201cWithout the stress we would have had a little more precious time.\u201d<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t bad news for everyone. Cameron went on to a finance job with a reported \u00a37m payout, Nick Clegg got to work in Silicon Valley for Mark Zuckerberg, while George Osborne appears regularly on a podcast, pockets millions from investment banking and enjoys the status of chairing the British Museum.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, austerity politics continues to blight this country, with so many of those welfare cuts still in place and swathes of our public services close to falling over.<\/p>\n Few news stories matter to you more than how long you and your children live and how healthy you\u2019ll be. Yet most newspapers buried this report. Some didn\u2019t even mention it. When I rang Walker, I asked why he thought that was. He talked about the power of the pharmaceutical and junk-food industries, how the NHS fretted about waiting lists rather than healthy lives. Personally, I wonder if the answer isn\u2019t more political. Starmer could have made the centrepiece of his manifesto living longer, healthier and better lives. He could have introduced policies designed to make that so, just as the Swedes did 20 years ago. Then the press would have had no choice but to cover it, with the ears of hostile papers pricked at all times for the sound of missed targets.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t do that. His team talked about growth being the centre of everything, the core of every department\u2019s mission. They went for wealth, not health. They chose to tolerate inequality. They opted for more of the same as we\u2019ve had since 2010. That choice says much about Westminster\u2019s priorities. People in power don\u2019t look at life expectancy because, politicians and voters alike, we\u2019ve all got used to expecting less from our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My guess is you keep across the news. You know Andy Mountbatten-Windsor has just had the worst birthday ever; that tall hotels in Dubai don\u2019t make for a great holiday right now; and that Keir Starmer\u2019s engagements diary for 2027 will be remarkably clear. Still, there is one headline I\u2019ll bet you haven\u2019t seen, even<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[14417,23586,2990,14418,376,337,1522],"class_list":{"0":"post-45995","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-aditya","9":"tag-brushed","10":"tag-carpet","11":"tag-chakrabortty","12":"tag-death","13":"tag-life","14":"tag-story"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}