Being a Brit can damage your health
The two 'developed' countries in the world where life expectancy is not improving but has stalled or - in some cases - is going backwards, are the UK and the USA.
Let's try to work out why this would be. Could it have to do with steps taken after the economic crash of 2008? Austerity measures maybe? In the UK, it might have to do with cuts to the social security budget. This is now renamed 'welfare' - like people hadn't paid into the social security budget all their working lives so they would be protected in the event of a sudden bout of illness or even long term bad health. It's as if the wages we all paid in to the tax system mean nothing any more.
Or is it to do with the sudden precariousness of working life in the UK? Suddenly, we find ourselves in the era of the gig economy, zero hours contracts (which, it seems, some Tory MPs approve of - not that they will ever have to face such a situation themselves) and the steady collapse of the service sector, leaving us looking at deserted high streets, empty precincts, and malls that may just have been built but already look like a disastrous investment by some speculator.
One academic describes it like this: "There is a real human cost behind these statistics and we urgently need to understand more about why this is happening."
This, I think, is where the shit of capitalism hits the fan: capitalism needs investors; investors need to get a return on their investments; for that, they need consumers, people like you and me with cash to spend and a willingness to go out there and invest our wages in goods - things - stuff. If we stop buying, for whatever reason, capitalism is dead in the water.
No money. No jobs. No stuff. No sales. No future.
But a few questions:
How come this decline in life expectancy hasn't been more widely reported?
What happens to the people in the gig economy, on zero hours contracts, when the economy 'contracts' and they can no longer pay the taxes the Exchequer needs?
How long will the UK government go on tying itself to the coat tails of the USA (and heaven help us, Trump's USA) before it realises there's no future in it?
Just how stupid are the population of the UK?
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