Most readers will now be aware of the release on 25 February of the ten-year followup to the 2010 ‘Marmot review’ of health inequalities in England.  To say that the report makes depressing reading is putting it mildly.  Despite the epidemiologist’s caution expressed in Sir Michael Marmot’s foreword – ‘We were reluctant to attribute the slowdown in health improvement to years of austerity because of difficulty in establishing cause and effect – we cannot repeat years without austerity just to test a hypothesis’ – the report as a whole offers a devastating portfolio of evidence of the human damage done by a decade of austerity.  Its accumulation of graphs and charts makes a compelling case for the point I try to bring home to postgraduate students at every opportunity: public finance is a public health issue.  An especially bitter irony, of course, is the emerging recognition across much of the political spectrum, and of the economics profession, that the decade was not only unnecessary but even counterproductive in macroeconomic terms.

Unfortunately, that kind of evidence is not relevant to the broader post-2010 project of redistributing income, wealth, and opportunity upward within British society.  (The brilliant and iconoclastic economist Branko Milanovic has pointed out that the rich have much more to gain from such upward redistribution than from stimulating growth across an entire national economy; their ready access to tax avoidance opportunities unavailable to the rest of us further distorts the incentive structure.)  Neither does evidence of macroeconomic (in)effectivess bear on what might be called the micro-level attack on the poor, marginalised and precarious.  The day after the release of Marmot +10, The Independent reported that the Department of Work and Pensions had shredded ‘up to 49’ internal reviews of suicides that occurred after people’s benefits had been cut off.  This followed an earlier report of 69 suicides among benefit claimants in the past five years, which is almost certainly a low figure. 

Just a few items from the report deserve flagging.  Fewer than 200,000 workers in the UK were on zero hours contracts in 2010; by late 2018 the figure was close to 900,000.  For the poorest tenth of English households, eating healthily would require three-quarters of all their disposable income after housing costs.  And the targeted financial destruction of local government has led (for example) to an England-wide reduction of 42 percent in local spending on transport and a 52 percent cut in housing.  As the report points out, ‘councils have used reserves, sold assets and reduced spending on the non-statutory services they are not legally required to deliver’.

None of this matters to Mr. and Mrs. Range Rover, of course.  An Arizonan interviewed by US journalist Ken Silverstein captured the underlying political economy a decade ago: ‘People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government.’  And The Times recently reported that residents in some of London’s ultra-wealthy boroughs pay less than £1 in council tax for every £1,000 of property value, whilst those in ten poor local authorities in the Midlands and the North such as Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Gateshead and Stockton-on-Tees pay between ten and fourteen times as much (unfortunately behind a paywall; contact me if you would like the figures.)

 It is hard to know how to respond to such situations, beyond despair and resignation.  These responses are heightened by the fact that many of the new report’s ‘case studies,’ seemingly intended as success stories, are at best sticking plasters, doing little to address the critical upstream drivers of inequality – the ‘toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics’ correctly targeted by the 2008 Commission on Social Determinants of Health.  I have to remind myself more and more often that the last word in Albert Camus’ famous essay on suicide is hope.  One hope is that public health researchers and practitioners might disengage themselves from producing yet more systematic reviews of the evidence, organised around impossibly and inappropriately high epidemiological standards of proof, and turn attention, energy and pedagogy to more practical questions such as what to do when government adopts homicidal social policies and then destroys the evidence.