 Welcome to the fourth edition of my ignored news blog, coming hard on the heels of the last one, as the media seem to be overwhelmed right now keeping up with more important trivia. Recently, a new study mapped the effects of high fuel prices in Europe over the winter of 2022-23 and the effects this had on the rate of excess death. However, this short-term effect, generically blamed on Putin's war in Ukraine, is a distraction from the data also emerging right now in the crisis of life expectancy in Britain as our national economy collapses. A rising out of the economic crisis high fuel prices created, the government is, again, threatening to raise the retirement age without any discussion of how multi-dimensional poverty in Britain is affected by this decision. As a geriatric genexer, it's fairly noticeable that the boomers, five or 10 years older than me, are getting their pensions while the rest of us get further and further delayed. This is a political choice based not upon evidence for how this affects different demographics in society, but seemingly upon ensuring the security of one largely right-voting generation over the others. So, just like Little Orphan Oliver, we have to ask. Please, sir, I want some more. What? As wealth becomes more concentrated, the problems of global inequality are increasingly mirrored within the affluent European nations and Britain especially. The media debate focuses on a difference between the middle class and the elite 1%. For that reason, they miss the growing divide between the middle class and the poorest 10%. An article popped up recently in The Economist. Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than COVID-19 last winter. Last November, The Economist's article, Russia is using energy as a weapon, had caught my attention. It projected that rising energy prices would lead to a corresponding increase in excess winter deaths. Despite the exceptionally mild winter across much of Europe, they seem to have been correct. Are these the civilian casualties of the quite literal new Cold War? Across Europe, the price of energy and the level of non-COVID excess winter deaths correlate. That's unsurprising. With high energy prices, people don't heat their homes as much and the lower temperatures can exacerbate many pre-existing health conditions as well as making it difficult to recover from seasonal diseases like flu. What this data doesn't encompass is the role of endemic poverty within this process as that pattern is buried within the national data sets. Do these excess deaths spread across the population evenly or is it one small section of the population, the poor, providing the majority of these cases? And if so, rather than just energy prices alone, do high energy prices build upon poor health, poor diet and poor housing to increase the likelihood of excess death? These more exacting questions were not answered by the Economist's article. These are critical distinctions though, because if this is the case, then Russia didn't weaponize energy prices. Any global disruption to energy supply would have caused a similar response as energy prices rose higher. In Britain, the picture is even more complicated due to our national economic woes. It was already known that excess deaths were still 6% above the five-year average after the end of the pandemic and that this was related to problems with the NHS. A recent study in the British Medical Journal noted that an additional 1 in 82 of those experiencing delays in medical treatment died. After the pandemic, it might be assumed with the weakest eliminated by COVID that the excess death rate should have fallen. Instead, excess deaths are running at almost 1,000 per week above the five-year average and many people are dying at home rather than in hospitals. The problems in the NHS are a function of a failing national economy driven by over a decade of near-liberal austerity. That's even begun to attract the attention of international news agencies who are running articles on Britain as a failing state. In the meantime, as Labour and the Tories both desperately try to differentiate themselves from one another while pursuing much the same economic policy, our domestic political dialogue continues to fiddle the figures on targets or spending rather than looking at the underlying structural problems driving the crisis. In particular, the role of Britain as the preeminent Western state in acting near-liberal economic policies and how this has progressively asset-stripped the nation. A few weeks ago, to seemingly little response, the World Compensions Minister let it be known that after the next election, the pension age in Britain would have to rise to 68. Of course, people in Britain don't react in the same way as our French neighbours. Well, except perhaps for a vague Gallic shrug. Again, coming back to who makes up the excess death figure for both rising energy prices and NHS failings, the Office for National Statistics data paints a very clear picture of where the burden lies. In England, men living in the most deprived areas die almost 10 years earlier than those in the most affluent areas. For women, the difference is almost eight years. Currently, male life expectancy at birth in the most deprived areas of England is 73.5 years, compared with 83.2 years in the least deprived areas. For women, the equivalent estimates were 78.3 years and 86.3 years, respectively. Life expectancy is an absolute endpoint. What's more interesting is healthy life expectancy, the time people live before chronic health conditions worsen their quality of life. Those living in the most deprived areas can expect to have a healthy lifespan around 18 years less than those in the most affluent areas. This creates a significant disparity when we look at setting the retirement age. Currently, the retirement age in Britain is 66. That will increase to 67 after April 2026. The government had ruled out any further changes before 2044, but it's noted that's already back on the table after the next election. This means those living in the bottom half of the affluent spectrum can expect to continue to work while experiencing chronic ill health. With those in the poorest 10% work in an average 14 years with chronic health conditions before retirement. If the pension age increases to 68, then the least affluent 70% of the population can expect to work to retirement with some form of chronic health condition. Of course, these figures are averages. While a few living in deprived areas will get to retirement age without any health issues, others will experience chronic ill health well before the age stated in these statistics. This is where we hit another element of Britain's poverty trap. Just as depicted in the 2016 Ken Lutch film I, Daniel Blake, which was ridiculed by Tory MPs at the time, thousands of people who replied for ill health benefits and were judged fit to work by the government's work capability assessment died soon after. A fifth of disabled people whose deaths were reviewed found that benefits sanctions contributed to their death. For a number of years after this, the Department of Work and Pensions tried to suppress information about the operation of the scheme. While being forced to disclose some details by the Information Commissioner, government reports showing how benefits sanctions and cuts which allegedly led to hundreds of deaths are still being suppressed. And recently, the harsh work assessment from the early 2010s, known to have caused many deaths, was reimposed in late 2022 despite the cost of living crisis. Last year I made a video focusing on fuel poverty and the historic economic inequalities in my hometown, applying the data on chronic ill health. People in the most deprived parts of my town can expect to work the last 10 years before retirement with poor health. While a short distance away, in the affluent villages on the edge of the town, they can expect to reach retirement age and good health. This demonstrates how economic decline does not affect everyone equally, even across small areas like my hometown. As economic decline hits health services, while that affects everyone across society, it hits the poorest of the worst health conditions the hardest. At the same time, the poor hit harder by higher food prices because they spend the great proportion of their income on food, so they eat a less nutritious diet, exacerbating their health problems. Finally, higher fuel prices preferentially push those with chronic health conditions into less healthy housing conditions, which are more likely to trigger a decline in their health. We have to stop treating this as a Russia or energy prices issue. It's clearly a neoliberalism and inequality issue. The media have recently begun to explore how the COVID crisis and the cost of living crisis affect women the hardest. Yet due to the complexity these relationships create, seldom do the media explore the related effects of poverty across communities and the pre-existing trends in health within certain communities that correlate to long-term economic disadvantage and how food and energy price rises make those health issues worse. Traditional stereotypes about poverty based on the establishment's 400-year-old principle of the deserving and undeserving poor cannot encompass these complex relationships. Therein lies a deeper truth. A recently published study evaluated how real wages had changed since the 16th century, demonstrating that not only did most people become relatively poorer as wealth inequality increased under capitalism and especially colonialism, but that health and life expectancy and inequalities increased in parallel. Poverty in Britain arose as a national issue at the turn of the 17th century in response to changes in agricultural land practices which arose in parallel to mercantilism, in turn creating the social punishment which informally continues to this day of the workhouse. Another study published early in 2023 found that the pursuit of economic growth which all political parties seem fixated upon at present does not affect multidimensional poverty in the same way as income poverty. Clearly, growth creates more work and more pay but that only filters through to those who are capable of work. Those for whom structural multidimensional inequalities limit their ability to access or perform work are not able to access the benefits of growth to the same extent, meaning they benefit between five and eight times less compared to income poverty. And as countries get richer, those benefits flow further as the nature of those inequalities become more entrenched. Poverty is intersectional. It's impacts compounded by an individual's age, gender, affluence, education, ethnicity and health status. Poverty is not monolithic. It represents a diversity of experiences very little of which gets any serious coverage in the national media beyond the generic stereotypes and certainly not within the discussions regarding the retirement age. That's why we have to have regard to the complexity of increasing the retirement age and how that measures with benefits for those deemed unfit to work. Otherwise, current policies will just further immiserate those already subject to the harshest, most unequal quality of life in Britain today.