Life expectancy dropping

I read a deeply worrying article today which suggested the life expectancy of British people has actually flatlined and is predicted to fall. The article suggests it climbed and climbed throughout the 20th Century in the UK but then suddenly reached a plateau during the 2010 coalition government. Things have not improved since May took over. Far from it! There are thought to be two main reasons for the problem:

The first is air pollution. The government seems to have no interest in doing anything about the shocking levels of pollution, particularly in our major cities.

The second problem is the austerity cuts which have affected people really dramatically. It is thought that the cuts are directly responsible for the deaths of 120,000 people between 2010 and 2017. And the government is trying to bury these results.

The great tragedy is that most of the other “First World” nations (apart from the US) are faring a great deal better than us. Life expectancy is still rising in EU countries, so we can’t even blame the UK’s drop on global factors beyond our control. Most of the EU is now way ahead of us; a fact I find greatly worrying as we sever ties and stop asking for their advice! Life expectancy for women in the UK is now lower than in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. It’s often much lower according to the report. They are predicting a million extra deaths in this country by the mid century. And people in their 40s and 50s at the moment will be most effected. Great!

On a vaguely related issue, I don’t know if anyone reading this blog has been watching the fascinating Christmas vignettes from Fanny Craddock on BBC iPlayer. They’re only fifteen minutes long, and they are absolutely wonderful. She’s terribly endearing in an old-school, stern sort of way, but I was really surprised to note how obsessed she is with the cost of everything. The inclusion of almost every ingredient needed to be be justified. There’s a real sense that she doesn’t want to be seen to be wasting anything. At one point she lines a tin with old butter wrappers and on another makes sure to clear every last drop of cake mixture out of the bowl, saying that if she doesn’t, she’s bound to get scores of letters of complaint and that, in the past, she’s left mixture in the bowl only because she has a director waving his arms, telling her to get on with it!

The astounding thing is that these films weren’t shot in the waste-not-want-not 1950s. The vignettes were actually made in the early 1970s. We forget what a terrible mess Britain had got itself into at this stage... just before we entered the EU as it happens. So when these ghastly Brexiteers talk about returning to the time when Britain was great, they’re actually talking about the shocking pre-1973 mess we’d made of things! How quickly we forget.

I urge you all to read this report.

https://theconversation.com/life-expectancy-in-britain-has-fallen-so-much-that-a-million-years-of-life-could-disappear-by-2058-why-88063