Social Murder?

Life expectancy had been steadily improving across high-income countries for decades, but this all changed around 2012. Since then, life expectancy trends have stalled in many countries including the UK, USA and Germany, with little or no improvement in average life expectancy, and rapidly decreasing life expectancy in our poorest communities; this decline means, in effect, that people have been dying younger, and in greater numbers. These appalling trends predate the Covid-19 pandemic and the impacts of recent inflation have been made worse as a result. Despite the vast number of additional deaths, estimated at 335,000 in the UK between 2012 and 2019, public health agencies and governments have been almost silent about the trends, and in particular on what has caused them. This book will show that the life expectancy changes are largely due to the austerity policies implemented across many high-income countries, and how the particular form of austerity implemented in the UK has led to untold suffering for those with the least power in society. Governments, public health agencies and medical officers that should have acted did not do so, and people died as a result. This book tells the horrific, evidence-based, story of the population health impacts of austerity which continue to unfold today.