Inequality: How Politics Divides and Rules Us

Abstract

Why care about inequality? Within the small local authority area of Stockton-on-Tees (population 192,000), the difference in male life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas in 2014 was 16 years — the highest in England (Public Health England, 2014) and comparable to the difference in national average male life expectancy between the UK and Russia, according to the most recent available World Bank data (World Bank, 2014). A famous map of London’s Jubilee underground line shows a decline in life expectancy of more than one year for every two stops as one travels eastward from Westminster (London Health Observatory, 2010). Marmot noted in 2004 that male life expectancy rises ‘about a year and a half’ for each mile travelled along the Washington, DC metro from the poor (and predominantly black) south east of the city to wealthy, and overwhelmingly white, suburban Maryland. The gap in this case was 20 years, comparable at the time to the difference between Kazakhstan and Japan (Marmot, 2004). A review of health inequalities in England led by Marmot, as one of the follow-ups to the report of his WHO Commission (see Chapter 1), pointed out that in 1999–2003 the difference in life expectancy between people living in the most income-deprived neighbourhoods was seven years — and we must keep in mind that the difference within small areas like Stockton-on-Tees is considerably greater — and that the national difference in disability-free life expectancy was much larger, at 17 years.