Life expectancy is down... but just think of the savings
If the duty of any responsible government is to control inflation, tip your hat to the Conservatives for this. After a century of steady growth in human life expectancy, it took them (with the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats) less than a decade to slam on the brakes at best, and engage reverse at worst.
It flatters the architects of the cruelties euphemised as “austerity” and their capacity for strategic thinking to imagine this was their intent. And that intent (as always after an economic calamity like that of 2008-9)
would be to fit up the vulnerable poor for the crimes of the privileged rich. If starving NHS funding, cutting disabled benefits and desecrating mental health services caused some (disproportionately women) to die young, who could possibly have seen such a side effect coming?
There are other reasons for this stagnation, and in some demographics decline, of longevity. A fierce winter flu season a few years ago contributed. Other nations, even developed ones such as Germany, have seen a similar if less dramatic pattern. And yet in Scandinavia, where they stubbornly cleave to the fuddy-duddy nonsense about investing heavily in health and social care, longevity continued its ascent.
It is with the potential remedies that we wave goodbye to reality and enter the realm of fantasy. None of the ensuing suggestions will be enacted by this government for various reasons, the most compelling being that it couldn’t care less about increasing the spans of net losers to the exchequer.
Whether parts of the administration actively welcome the prospect of the needy popping their clogs early, who can say? While professional pride dictates that I pore obsessively over Dominic Cummings’ blog entries, this is one of those activities for which life – even longer in Denmark or Finland – feels immeasurably too short. So I cannot say how far his summa cum laude studies in the social Darwinism of Ayn extends. But it seems probable that our “government of the people” contains minds that dwell lovingly on the savings in pensions and medical costs to be had from thinning the herd.
On the Tory benches and in the ranks of shady Spads like that eugenicist dummy may be people who regard a pandemic virus as less public health crisis than potential fiscal windfall. So far as extending life span, NHS spending is clearly the primary factor. Invariably, money is the strongest driver, as a glance at the Korean peninsula confirms.
However chasmic the north-south divide here, it is more so there. South Koreans of both genders survive about a decade longer than brethren across the border. But it isn’t solely about spending. Although Bernie Sanders is under mock-friendly fire from Democrat rivals over this, he is correct to cite health care in defiance of the lazy consensus that Fidel Castro was a uniform disaster for his people.
Doubtless the elitist likes of Dominic Cummings and his former boss Michael Gove rate memorising Victorian poetry above sidestepping juvenile diabetes
While Cuba’s spending on health is a minuscule fraction of the United States’, life expectancy is virtually identical. This is partly because Cuba has a remarkably high ratio of doctors per capita, and partly thanks to education. So in the certainty that Boris Johnson and the health secretary Matt Hancock, a sock puppet in desperate need of self-isolation if ever one was, have no genuine desire to plug the shortfall in GPs, nurses, radiologists, etc, here’s an idea.
Make nutritional and general fitness studies a mandatory core curriculum subject from five to 16. Teach children up to GCSE level the importance of avoiding obesity in much the way they are taught the value of not picking up sexually transmitted infections. The eventual savings in diabetes and heart disease treatment would massively dwarf the price of juicing machines and treadmills. The nightmare of finessing marginal taxation on fizzy drinks past the refined sugar lobby would evaporate if kids appreciated the life-limiting dangers of a daily litre of original Coke.
Doubtless the elitist likes of Cummings and his former boss Michael Gove rate memorising Victorian poetry above sidestepping juvenile diabetes. But outstanding party piece though the ability to parrot A Shropshire Lad plainly is, it offers dubious long term protection against renal failure and blindness.
The odds against this or any Tory government embracing the next proposal are, by a factor of infinity, longer still. But in the dreamy nexus between wishful thinking and latent megalomania where I choose to reside, an early edict on becoming your lifelong dictator would be this.
Anyone taking a job in government – as a minister at any rank or an adviser in the scrummy Cummings mould – would sign this statement, on pain of lifelong exile to the roughest council estate in a former Labour “red wall” seat for defying it.
“Henceforth, and for a minimum of 20 years after leaving government, neither I, my partner, nor any dependent child will have access to any form of private medicine (including dentistry).
“I pledge that all medical care required during this period will be administered at whatever is statistically the worst GP practise and/or hospital within a 15-mile radius of our home.
“Additionally, I make a binding promise on no account to use my position to queue jump, and will gift a kidney to a transplant patient should I break it.”
Within another decade, the life spans of Her Majesty’s subjects would be back on an upward trajectory towards her own. Whether anyone on glancing terms with sanity would want to survive deep into their nineties in the Cummings-Johnson Brexit wasteland ahead, is an intriguing philosophical question for another day.