Grim Up North

According to an article in The Times on 8 August, written by that paper’s Health Editor (Chris Smyth, ‘Northerners more likely to die early from diseases of despair’), northern ‘youngsters are 50% more likely to die early than young people in the south because of poverty and despair induced ‘diseases.’ Professor Iain Buchan of the University of Manchester has published research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health which has shown that “From the 1960s through the 1970s and 1980s there was no difference in the death rates of young people but a large gap opens up in the mid-1990s. There’s a stagnation of progress in the north.” Among people under 40, suicide, drugs, accidents and alcohol-fuelled liver disease are some of the biggest killers, with heart disease becoming much more significant after the age of 40, but in either group the northerners are very much worse affected it seems.

It has been true for decades that people have been more likely to die early in northern England. For the southerner, deaths under the age of 75 fell from 64 per 10,000 people in 1965 to just 28 per 10,000 in 2010, while for the northerner, in the same period, these deaths fell from 72 to 35 per 10,000 meaning that every year somewhere around 14,000 people die younger ‘up North’ than might have been the case had they lived in the South.

The unequal lifespan is there, but some may think that the difference isn’t so great when the figures in the last sentence are looked at. The real eye opener, however, comes when we look at just young people. First, those aged 25-34: northerners in this group are 29% more likely to die early than southerners in the group. This is a massive jump up from a gap of 2% in the 1960s. Even this pales into almost insignificance when we look at the group aged 35-44; In the North this group were 3% more likely to die than southerners of the same age in the 1960s, but this has now surged to a ridiculous 49%!

Professor Buchan in his work has said that the trauma of de-industrialisation seemed to be causing a “profound and worsening structural inequality” in England. “The solutions are about investment in jobs, infrastructure and social capital,” he argues. In similar vein, Ed Morrow of the Royal Society for Public Health, while pointing to the much higher rates of drinking, smoking, obesity and suicide up north, says that these are driven by economic patterns that create, for example, high streets in the north with a higher concentration of fast food shops, bookmakers and other ‘unhealthy’ businesses. “People in the north are playing with a handicap. Health follows wealth,” he states, adding that “this inequity can only be fully tackled through a fundamental rebalancing of the UK economy.” John Ashton, the former president of the Faculty of Public Health, has described the findings of Professor Buchan’s research as a “health emergency”, claiming that England had seen “a perfect storm of divergence of opportunity and hope” between the north and south. This is further backed up by another eminent expert, Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, who specialises in health inequality. He has commented that: “You could tell a story that the policy of de-industrialisation and high unemployment in the 1980s had a particular effect on the North.” And so you could Sir Michael, so you could!

The fact that the lion’s share of manufacturing jobs in Britain were historically north of the Watford Gap has meant that the de-industrialisation of Britain and the near total pauperisation of large chunks of the workforce has had a much more visual effect where the majority of unemployed workers are to be found, i.e., the north, but the misery of enforced poverty (austerity if you will) affects the working classes wherever they are. The fact that more of those condemned to poverty, and all the health issues that come with it, live in the north does not mean that if they upped sticks and moved south they would escape poverty. Equally, pauperised workers in the south don’t suddenly get someone knocking at the door with a large wedge of cash saying ‘here you are, southern worker, don’t want you affected by that nasty austerity do we?’

When looking at the spread of poverty in a previous article in Lalkar last year we used the table reproduced on this page to show where the poorest and wealthiest could be found. Of course, the poorest can be found in the south as well as the north. London has the highest percentage of both the richest and the poorest within it.

Another article on the Buchan Report, also from The Times (Lucy Bannerman, ‘Senseless austerity may be killing the poor’, 12 August 2017) admits this very fact. When talking of Sir Michael Marmont, it quotes him as pointing out that a short cycle ride from his home in Hampstead, north London, will take him to Somers Town near St Pancras, where the average male life expectancy drops by 11 years. That’s without leaving his London borough.

That second article ends with a warning from Sir Michael that The Times seems eager to promote. It reads; “I won’t predict the future, but I think we could sketch for ourselves what is the future that we want? Do we want inequality to increase at the rate that it has? Because society will work well for the top 0.1 per cent and it won’t work well for everybody else.”

The Times it seems has got the jitters a little bit and is calling for caring capitalism at home (of course British imperialism can run rampant abroad) because when the poverty gets to levels that cannot be hidden, cannot be blamed on workers’ idleness any more, and when the chronic mental illnesses cannot be blamed on the stupidity of the poor, when the diseases of drug and drink addiction spread like a virus among poor people trying to block out the reality of life in Britain in 2017, they know that a big problem is looming. For every poor soul that falls to drugs/drink in despair, another is becoming steeled by the filthy political system squatting on their very lives. These are the people in the north and south that are looking for answers, answers that will be provided by Marxism-Leninism.

And when enough of the poor have the answer, the warnings from the likes of Sir Michael and The Times will be seen for what they are, too little too late. We will take everything from them and fashion a better world for ourselves.