“We got there in the end – a remarkable national effort”: that’s how former chancellor George Osborne celebrated the government meeting his deficit target on the day-to-day budget two years late. “It was the right thing to do,” was David Cameron’s smug echo.
It’s easy for the architects of the Tories’ ideologically driven austerity to be triumphalist, given they did not suffer the consequences: the worst squeeze in wages of the major industrialised countries except depression-ravaged Greece; the slashing of social security for low-paid workers and disabled people; the surging child poverty. New research suggests that austerity played a key role in the Brexit vote, which plunged Britain into national crisis, too, and which turfed both men out of office, although both continue to prosper, Cameron with his “trotters up”, as Danny Dyer so memorably put it. But there is another devastating consequence of their austerity that is too little discussed: that it kills.
According to newly published figures from the Office for National Statistics, Britain’s improvement in life expectancy has slowed at the fastest rate of any leading industrialised nation other than the free-market citadel of the United States. Since 2011, the rate of improvement for men has collapsed by over three-quarters; for women, an astonishing 91%. For decades, life expectancy steadily rose in Britain: and then, suddenly, just as the Tories took power and imposed austerity, this improvement ground to a halt.
As academics earlier this year noted as they demanded a public inquiry, it represents one of the worst slowdowns in life expectancy improvements in around 120 years. Last October, the ONS revised down life expectancy by 2041 by nearly a year less than their estimates in 2015. As Professor Danny Dorling and Stuart Gietel-Basten note, that means one million projected earlier deaths over the next four decades.
Quick GuideWhat is austerity?
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What is austerity?
Austerity is how governments across Europe – from the UK to Greece – tried to clear the overdrafts, or deficits, they racked up in the wake of the great financial crisis.
How did governments try to achieve this?
Their strategy was two-fold. First, cut spending on the public sector, on wages, for instance, or on social security. Second, raise revenue through higher taxes and selling state assets. Greece, for instance, has sold its airports in Corfu and Santorini, among others, to a German company.
What was their reasoning?
Proponents made a variety of arguments for this strategy. It was said that governments had spent too much money, that everyone needed to tighten their belts. The UK’s then-chancellor, George Osborne, claimed that the public sector was "crowding out" the private sector, taking resources and workers away from businesses. Particularly influential was a paper by two US-based economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, arguing that once a country’s total public borrowing rose above 90% of its national income, or GDP, growth would slow sharply.
Did austerity get unanimous backing?
Critics argued that austerity would stop economies recovering from the shock of the banking meltdown and would make teachers and nurses and people with disabilities pay for the excesses of bankers and chief executives. In his book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, political economist Mark Blyth showed that austerity had been tried before in the 20th century – everywhere from Weimar Germany to 1930s America – and failed, often with politically disastrous consequences.
Tragically, we do not have to wait for those unnecessary early deaths. According to a bombshell report in the British Medical Journal last year, austerity has been linked to 120,000 extra deaths since 2010. In practice, it suggested, that could lead to 100 early deaths every single day in the coming years. The impact is, predictably enough, felt by the poorest.
Remember when Theresa May stood on the steps of Downing Street in July 2016 and delivered her first speech as prime minister, promising to correct Britain’s “burning injustices”? One of these injustices was that those born poor die nine years earlier. And yet according to David Buck – an expert in health inequalities at the King’s Fund – the gap in health outcomes and life expectancy between the most affluent and the least well-off is only widening under her abysmal premiership.
What could possibly be causing this national disaster? Rule out alcohol use: it has been steadily falling, with the ONS finding in 2016 that alcohol consumption had fallen to its lowest rate since the survey began in 2005. There are fewer smokers in England than ever. As Dorling notes, there has not been a major influenza outbreak since the increase in life expectancy ground to a halt. Neither is it credible to suggest Britain has simply reached a plateau – that life expectancy cannot keep increasing for ever. “We are a long way off that,” as Professor Martin McKee has put it, observing that life expectancy in Japan and Scandinavian nations is higher.
Given the government is refusing a national inquiry into the great standstill in life expectancy, experts are left without a credible explanation other than austerity. Consider specific policies. The NHS has suffered the longest squeeze in its funding as a share of the economy since it was founded after the war. Its annual increase in funding in the first four years of Tory-led rule was 1.3%, despite growing patient demand and increasing healthcare costs. Then there’s social care for the elderly: a devastating £6bn less spent since David Cameron entered Downing Street. As Dorling and Basten note, since 2010, many care homes – all too often a privately run racket – have closed; and cuts to social security, not least disability benefits, have undoubtedly played a role. There are other chilling factors at play, too. Until the financial crash, Britain’s suicide rate had been falling. Since then, experts believe there could have been an extra 1,000 deaths from suicide and an additional 30 to 40,000 attempts, with austerity playing a role.
This country and its people will be paying for the Tories’ ideologically driven disaster for years to come. Those children driven into poverty will have worse health and lowered educational opportunities as a consequence, undermining their potential, and with it the potential of the whole country. As living standards stagnate, a consumer debt bubble beckons, with potentially disastrous economic consequences. Public services and infrastructure will creak. But there is far more at stake.
Austerity is literally a matter of life and death. Unless it is stopped, lives will continue to be unnecessarily shortened. That Cameron and Osborne crow over a project that has caused so much misery is grotesque. Among the many injustices they have perpetrated, history must surely record the robbing of human life for ideological means.