Tory Cuts Killed A Quarter of a Million

Austerity has killed a quarter of a million people, so why do politicians and the media seem so unconcerned?


Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), London, Britain, June 23, 2020. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), London, Britain, June 23, 2020. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo
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WESTMINISTER (LabourBuzz) - As I write this, around 60,000 people are thought to have died from COVID 19. The response has been unprecedented. We’ve shut down our entire economy and the Government has exploded the national debt to protect thousands of people’s income. 

However, for the last ten years, we’ve been in the midst of another pandemic, one which has killed more people, wrecked many more lives and is also setting itself up for a second wave. Unlike COVID 19, though, politicians and the media have hardly given it a second glance. 

According to a report from the London Economic, the Government’s austerity program has killed more than 250,000 people. The study found that more than 100,000 people died following cuts to social security, while 120,000 had died due to cuts in health and social care spending. 

Social security deaths 

Between March 2014 and February 2017, the report finds, Government reforms denied unprecedented numbers of people access to social security. During that time, the Department for Work and Pensions recorded 119,500 deaths. 

These deceased people had recently been ‘flowed off’ incapacity benefit, severe disablement allowance and/or Employment Support Allowance. Many died as a result of heart attacks, seizures and strokes triggered by stress. At least 69 suicides have been linked to denied DWP claims and anxiety pushed terminally ill people towards an early grave.

The report details shocking stories of neglect, such as Mark Wood from Oxfordshire who was found dead weighing just five stone. Meanwhile, 57-year-old Errol Graham died in his flat without gas or electricity weighing a negligible four and a half stone.

Other cases were less direct. David Smith, the brother of 49-year-old James Oliver from Hastings who died from liver disease brought on by alcoholism, says his condition was accelerated by stress as a result of the DWP’s refusal to award social security. Speaking to the BBC, David talked about how his brother spiralled into despair, “He just downed more or less anything he could lay his hands on.” 

61-year-old Moira Drury’s daughter, meanwhile, claimed the stress of delayed benefits claims expedited her death from cancer. “She told me the day before she died that the stress of having her benefits removed contributed to her decline,” she said. 

Healthcare crisis 

On health and social care, it’s a similarly depressing story. Under Brown and Blair, spending increased by 3.8% per year resulting in a decrease of deaths by 0.77%. Between 2010 and 2015, under the coalition, spending rose by just 0.7% and the result was almost inevitable: mortality increased by 0.87%. There were 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014, most of which occurred in care homes. 

Social care has borne the brunt of Tory cuts. Since 2010 the budget for social care has decreased by 9% per person. A report from Age UK found that, by 2019, 1.3 million pensioners, including people who could afford to pay, were waiting for care home vacancies. Between 2017 and 2019, 74,000 elderly people died in England alone without receiving the social care they needed. 

Again, the stories detailed in this report are shocking. Take Donald Driver (84) who fell from his trolley following a six-hour wait. His distraught daughter told the BBC: “had my father been prioritised … (he) would still be here.” Joseph Edge (74) of Denbighshire, died of a heart attack after waiting 16 hours for an ambulance. 

Every stat about the NHS has been negative. Ambulance times have decreased, appointment waiting times have increased by 50 percent and preventable deaths increased by a quarter. A report from the Health Foundation found that social care cuts had led to an increase in people requiring admission to A&E. Healthcare bosses have warned that an inability to afford the latest equipment is affecting the quality of care. 

COVID 19 Crisis 

In the midst of this crisis, COVID 19 arrived like a bull in the China shop, and after a decade of cuts, the health and social security system was ill-equipped to cope. Even so, the Government greeted it with something of a shrug. Johnson raved about how he had shaken hands with people with the virus and urged everyone else to do the same. 

While the rest of the world dived into lockdown, our Prime Minister took a different path determined to carry on with life as normal. 

“When there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational,” Boris Johnson told businesses in February, “humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange.”

Dominic Cummings put the case rather more bluntly. “Protect the economy,” he said at an event, “and if some pensioners die, too bad.”

It took pressure from opposition parties, experts, unions, and the media to force them to recognise reality, abandon herd immunity and follow the rest of the world into locking down and supporting their economy. 

Without that pressure, it’s likely that tens of thousands of more people would die. As it was, the picture is still grim. We have the second-highest death toll per capita in the world and we’re set to have a deeper economic recession than most of the rest of Europe.

COVID 19 showed in a microcosm what happens when this Government is allowed to do what it likes, as well as the importance of holding them to account. Their attitude to the pandemic is the same as to the economic crisis: protect the economy, push through your agenda and if that means a few hundred thousand people die, too bad.

Warning from history

This should serve as a warning for everyone because all the signs suggest the Government is about to make the same mistakes all over again. The Prime Minister is channelling the spirit of Larry Vaughan, the Mayor from the film Jaws who kept the beaches open despite the presence of a killer shark. 

Johnson’s professed admiration for Vaughan tells us everything about what he has planned next. Vaughan, he said, kept the beaches open and let swimmers back into the water. It doesn’t seem to worry him that many of those swimmers were almost immediately eaten. 

As the UK tries to recover from COVID 19, we’ll see a Government revert to type. Despite claims to the contrary, the Government will do its best to revert to austerity 2.0. The London Economic report gives us a glimpse at what will happen if they succeed. 

Media silence

At this time, we need a media who is prepared to hold the Government’s feet to the fire and expose the human impact of the Government’s lethal policies. But that seems like wishful thinking. The media has greeted this report in the same way it has all the other studies highlighting the lethal impact of Tory austerity: with a great big shrug.

This is a press that has shown the ability to whip itself into a rage over the angle of Jeremy Corbyn’s bow, the straightness of his tie, when Diane Abbot sneaks a gin onto the train or when Megan Markle says or does anything at all. But when it comes to hundreds of thousands of people dying from the Government’s policies, they have nothing to say. Their silence is deafening and, in itself, costs lives.  

(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Klaudia Fior) 

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