“Austerity has killed 100,000s people. And it will continue to do so under this Government’s plans.”
By Sian Errington, Labour Outlook
In January 2017 the Kings College Professor Anand Menon related an anecdote from when at an event in Newcastle in the run-up to the Brexit referendum he invited the audience to consider the damaging impact on our GDP. A woman shouted in reply “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours”. These years later it is a remark that has sadly stood the test of time, and could be a direct reply to Starmer, Reeves et al as they pursue their economic objective of ‘growth’ through cuts.
There is plentiful evidence that you cannot cut your way to growth, both from the actions of governments here since 2010 and those elsewhere. But putting that to one side for today, ‘growth’ is held up as an objective without reference to how wealth and resources should be distributed across society and placed as competing with social and environmental concerns – all of which it should trump.
There is a lot to unpack in how wrongheaded and ill-conceived this all is. Right now, let’s focus on a particular impact of cuts to benefits, public spending and investment – and linked to this, what is invested in – that is often lost after the initial publicity of reports being published. That is deaths. Austerity has killed 100,000s people. And it will continue to do so under this Government’s plans.
The University of Glasgow and Glasgow Centre for Population Health published research in 2022 attributing 334,327 excess deaths in Britain between 2012 and 2019 to austerity, with the increase in people dying prematurely after experiencing reduced income, ill health, poor nutrition and housing and social isolation. It found that the death rates among women living in the fifth most deprived areas of England increased by 3% – after they had declined by 14% over the previous decade. In Scotland the figures are worse, with an increase of between 6 to 7% after a decline of between 10 and 20%.
In January 2024 the Institute of Health Equity at University College London published a report led by Sir Michael Marmot directly attributed 148,000 deaths to austerity in 2011 and 2019 and found that premature deaths were recorded among people living outside of the wealthiest top 10 areas in England.
Specifically on benefit cuts and sanctions, Disability News Service has done sterling work over a number of years on reporting on the numbers of claimants who have died or come to serious harm because of sanctions and how the system works. Remedying this – not further cuts – should surely be the priority.
Different methodologies apart, both the Glasgow and UCL studies into the impact of austerity point in a clear direction. That the cutting of public spending and investment on our services and benefits also cuts lives short – and as you go down the wealth and income ladder the impact is felt more acutely.
None of the above stark headline figures touch on the many millions more who experience years extra of poorer and deteriorating health than they should, those who over years lose the money, time and energy to take part in social and cultural activities they used to do, the lost bus routes and higher transport costs that put barriers in the way to see family and friends, lost income and unpredictable working hours that make nights out and holidays harder to come by.
In the technical discussion about whether GDP is a fraction of a percentage above or below 0% the impact on people of the structure of our economy, who it serves and how it is felt and experienced is not heard. GDP is not a measure of these things.
The tragedy is that better benefits, increased public spending and services, and investment in socially and beneficial projects that justly transition and adapt us in response to climate breakdown, tend to have higher economic multipliers and would be more successful on their own terms. But these projects also take us into questions of not just investment levels but also questions of ownership and the expansion of public services, rather than their privatisation. They are therefore pushed off the agenda – the Left’s job is to put them back on the agenda.
The purpose of a government’s economic policy should be to improve the living standards of the overwhelming majority of the population. The objective of economic policy should be to achieve this – for people, planet and peace to be prioritised. And these should be what the success or not of an economic policy should be measured against. It is not to continue to pursue economic policies that mean those with less are more likely to die younger than they should, regardless of whether GDP growth is above 0% or not.
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