Austerity and Brexit down to 'hacks'

N Cohen in the Observer is back on form but still with a little backsliding. His main focus is the Marmot Report which showed appalling declines in life expectancy in the UK, obviously the result of austerity. 

Amid the alarm and despondency, a few oddities though:

The Conservatives have already taken decisions that will have monstrous consequences. The hard Brexit they favour will hit the poorest regions hardest, and they show no signs of caring. 

The whole piece shows the damage from remaining in the EU, though, which at the least failed to stop the austerity that is killing people now. For me, it has no option but to continue austerity to prop up the Euro. Tories have shown signs of 'caring', in so far as Tories ever do, because they want to save their northern seats after northern voters showed their rightful impatience over Brexit. Cohen needs a bit of a tactical sidestep:

Ever since the Brexit referendum I’ve written about the folly of allowing journalists to run a country [odd point for a journalist]. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are not merely journalists but the worst type of hacks [ah!]: crowd-pleasing, dilettante opinionators, performing bullshitters, who do not see wilful stupidity as a source of shame but as a smart career move. It’s not just that they can picture the ignorant attacks from the right that a policy of improving the national health would bring: they’ve written them themselves....suppose that the government considered curbing alcoholism with minimum prices, health warnings and an advertising ban. Johnson and Gove would know their own words on the nanny state would be thrown in their faces.

But is the hostility to the nanny state as deep as it once was? Do Johnson and Gove particularly care about having their old journalism thrown back at them? I admit that the decision to continue rolling out the awful Universal Credit stuff would suggest so -- but Javid has been binned, apparently for resisting more spending?

 At least Cohen has no time for npb gesturalism:

there has been no great pressure from Labour to relieve the health crisis. It may have shouted loudly about food banks and passed its conscience round for the public to applaud. But over the protests of Ashworth and others, Corbynism remained a thoroughly bourgeois movement. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted, at the last election Labour preferred to spend “considerably more” on making up the pensions of “relatively well off” Waspi women than on alleviating the all too genuine despair of the working poor.