Poverty costs lives – and the left should not be afraid to say it

theguardian.com:

No excuses for the Tories, no place to hide: that poverty and economic insecurity kill is an incontrovertible fact. Some may flinch when they hear that the government’s failure to address a worsening cost of living crisis will tip many of its citizens into premature graves, but the macabre nature of a fact does not make it less true.

New research published by the Office for National Statistics is merely the latest addition to what has been understood by anyone with a sufficient interest in matters of life and death for centuries. The ONS figures show that avoidable deaths account for four in 10 male deaths in England’s poorest communities: in the least deprived, that figure is less than half, at 17.8%. For women, the figures are lower, but the gap barely less acute: 26.7% and 11.9% respectively. Covid, meanwhile, was almost four times more likely to kill in England’s most deprived areas, according to the ONS, a finding that accords with previous research.

Viruses are not sentient, of course, and Covid did not consciously seek out the poorest. But it is a heat-seeking missile for health conditions that are directly linked to poverty – from hypertension to diabetes, from heart disease to cancer. The pandemic disproportionately robbed the poor – who, in turn, disproportionately come from minority communities – of their lives, but it merely heightened the deadly consequences of our entire economic system.

This reality was labelled “social murder” by Friedrich Engels in 1845 in The Condition of the Working-Class in England. If an individual injures a fellow human being and causes death, he noted, that was manslaughter; “when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder”. So why was it