Boris Johnson won a landslide promising to ‘level up’ the UK. Yet the pandemic threatens to level down the country
Inequality kills, and an unequal geography makes some places lethal. That is the stark message of a new report by a coalition of scientists from universities and other research centres across the north of England. The Northern Health Science Alliance calculates that Covid-19 has killed proportionately more people in the north than in the rest of England, mainly because of deprivation. People in poor health are more susceptible to serious illnesses. Low-paid employees unable to do their jobs from home and taking the bus to crowded workplaces are more likely to catch it, as are families pushed into housing with insufficient space. What has made this worse are the spending cuts imposed by George Osborne and successive Conservative chancellors over the past decade, which have shredded local government, including public health budgets, and public services. One of the architects of those cuts was Matt Hancock, who is today health secretary, and thus charged with calling on the very public services that he helped starve of cash.
These findings come at a particularly sensitive time. The UK passed a grim milestone on Wednesday, becoming the first country in Europe to register more than 50,000 coronavirus deaths. From early on in this pandemic, it was clear that this dreadful virus was exposing many of the social, economic and political pathologies of our society. The government’s own reports say that a person living in one of the richest parts of England can expect to live in good health for almost 20 years longer than their counterpart in one of the poorest parts. Such huge health inequalities are among the largest in Europe.
