Health, Status, Wealth & Income. by Les May

I HAVE little doubt that various groups will pounce on aspects of the recent report by UCL Institute of Health Equity and commissioned by the Health Foundation to investigate how the pandemic has affected health inequalities in England, in order to promote their own agenda. Calling yourself a ‘community’ isn’t a particularly good fig leaf for hiding naked self interest.

But as Professor Kate Pickett, co-author of the book ‘The Spirit Level’ pointed out in a recent BBC interview, it tells us nothing new. Health inequalities arising from differences in social status, wealth and income were reported on in detail by Sir Michael Marmot in 2008 and again in 2020. A Covid-19 mortality 25% higher in Greater Manchester than in England as a whole is just a further example of how these inequalities affect longevity and years of life without disability.

In my N.V. article ‘Levelling The Gradient’ of 16 June 2020 I drew attention to the fact that there is little appetite in the UK for recognising the effects of our very unequal society on the lives of our citizens, irrespective of their skin colour. When the 2020 Marmot review which looked at differences in health outcomes appeared it had zero impact on the campaign for Labour leader though two of the candidates felt that a Jewish pressure group and a ‘trans’ pressure group needed their public support. That review simply referred to ‘people’; not ‘black’ people, not ‘brown’ people, not ‘minority ethnic’ people, just people. So lets forget all this talk about ‘my community’ and concentrate on eliminating the disparity of a life expectancy at birth in 2016-18 for men living in the most deprived areas in England of 74 years, compared with 83 years in the least deprived areas; the corresponding figures for women are 79 and 86 years.

The full title of Pickett’s well researched book is ‘The Spirit Level; why equality is better for everyone’. It was published in 2009 and in a slightly revised edition in 2010. You can find it for about £4 at abebooks.co.uk.

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