The bad news is we’re dying early in Britain – and it’s all down to ‘shit-life syndrome’
Life expectancy figures are going into reverse. But abandoning Brexit could save us
The article summarises a recent study in the British Medical Journal on the decline in the increase of life-expectancy in Britain and America. There is also an actual increase in death rates among the elderly. The trends are summarised as showing that:
The malaises that have plagued the black population are extending to the non-Hispanic, midlife white population. As the report states: “All cause mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Why? “Drug overdoses were the leading cause of increased mortality in midlife, but mortality also increased for alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).
Hutton elaborates this no doubt carefully-evidenced review with some further comments, but the evidence for these are much less clear. 'US doctors' for example are cited for this passage:
Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. ["shit life syndrome" -- source unclear].They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.
So we have progressed from a study in the BMJ to Hutton's summary of 'US doctors', supplemented (at least) by a bit of his own 'common-sense' commentary about poor people in America. Further inferential sliding is soon apparent:
[The poor] have a lot to be depressed about. They, and tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition, constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base, easily tempted by rhetoric [a dark art] that pins the blame on dark foreigners, while castigating countries such as Finland or Denmark, where the trends are so much better, as communist [where did this come from?]. In Britain, they were heavily represented [poor people or people with these attitudes specifically?] among the swing voters [i.e. last-minute ones, easily swayed] who delivered Brexit.
At last we get to the main point:
What our citizens are experiencing is criminal, even if it has nothing to do with the EU, the great lie so brilliantly told [dark art] by Brexiters and the malevolent political genius that is Nigel Farage [blimey!]. [Not entirely a lie, surely? The EU has at least something to do with austerity and poverty in the UK?]. Instead of blaming Brussels and impoverishing ourselves with Brexit, Britain should be launching a multipronged assault on shit-life syndrome [which has lost its quotation marks and thus has become established] and the conditions that cause so many to die prematurely. Acknowledging the crisis, together with measures to address it, will be crucial to winning any second people’s vote on Brexit.
The piece concludes with a plea for a major reformist agenda for British politics that will remove the conditions that made Brexit happen (and thus validate a People's Vote making a promise of such reforms, perhaps on the side of a bus). Experts have suggested such an agenda -- himself and Andrew Adonis! Only by adopting this agenda would things improve -- hardly what the subheading asserts so confidently. What if the campaign for a People's Vote does not embrace the Hutton/Adonis agenda? It doesn't seem to place much emphasis on economic reforms so far.
The whole strategy is summarised thus: 'The life expectancy numbers [somehow ignoring the substantial spin Hutton puts on them] tell a dramatic story. It is time to act on their [sic] message.' The authors of the BMJ study support a People's Vote? I tire of pointing out how such transparent special pleading will only induce scepticism. Throughout the Classical World, Odysseus (originator of the Trojan Horse plot) was soon known as a cunning untrustworthy bastard.
No comments:
Post a Comment