There’s something fishy going on. In the last 10 days we’ve heard that life expectancy has stalled, crime rates have increased, fast-food takeaways are multiplying in deprived areas and household debt has risen sharply. What’s the connection? I hate to sound apocalyptic about it, but taken together they suggest Britain has reached – if not surpassed – a tipping point.

Fast food England: how many takeaways are near you? Read more

A tipping point, in the social context, is the moment at which small incidents accumulate such that they give rise to a more general and significant societal shift. If the string of recent indicators across public health and crime are indeed the sign of a tipping point, they raise the need for intervention from amber to red. They tell us that a number of things are going wrong and interacting to create a potentially devastating vicious circle.

Thousands of academic papers and reports have joined the dots between poverty and inequality with crime or health outcomes. The Marmot review back in 2010 found that there is a strong social gradient in health: the lower a person’s social position, the worse their health. This means that health outcomes, including life expectancy, are highly sensitive to poverty. For example, a baby boy from the most deprived area in Kensington and Chelsea is expected to live for 14 to 15 fewer years than one from the most affluent part of the borough.

This is what statisticians like to think of as causation rather than correlation: it’s not just that outcomes are moving in the same direction, but that one is influencing the other. In other words, there are social determinants of headline health outcomes – as there are for other outcomes including crime and education.

On the issue of more fast-food takeaways in deprived areas, one might argue that this is just a middle-class obsession with poor people not cooking. Such a view, however, overlooks the explanatory power of this metric. The study found that of the 30 council areas where takeaways are the predominant kind of food outlet, 25 are in economically deprived areas of the north, with notable clusters in the north-west. This clear correlation between deprivation and fast food again raises questions of causation. In my experience, stressed individuals and parents, who are both time- and income-poor, turn to fast food at times where life has become too much.

Research has found that the diets of low-income groups are linked to economies of scale and fear of potential waste. Low income pushes people into less healthy and cheaper diets. The causal link goes the other way too – academic studies have also stressed the effect of a concentration of fast food outlets as well as the poor availability of fresh produce as key factors in determining diet.

A former adviser to David Cameron told me last week that the above is a lazy argument. Crime rates can go up and down, regardless of how many police there are, he claimed, and linking life expectancy to public services or poverty is a huge leap. Of course, these things aren’t easy to pin to one policy, but cuts to youth, health and police services, growing levels of poverty and more people in insecure work have to be linked. This is one of those times where research only confirms common sense. One has to question why it is that some people want to put their hands over the ears.

Levels of household debt – now at £1.83 trillion with a debt-to-income level of 143% – are yet another reminder of how difficult people are finding it to make ends meet, as well as the prevalence of a consumption culture. But this is about more than individual levels of income and a defunct economy. Cuts to services, rising crime and increasing inequality are all combining to create a feeding ground for stress, crime and ill-health.

Large rise in takeaway shops highlights dominance of fast food in deprived areas Read more

And then there is the role of inequality. For years we had a “runaway rich” type of inequality – a strong welfare state and redistribution meant that inequality looked like the top 1% pulling away from the rest of us. Given the damage done to the welfare state, those at the bottom are now falling behind at an alarming rate. This type of inequality – where the rubber band is being pulled at both ends – creates a number of different and more pronounced strains on society and the people that live in it.

It would be dangerous to ignore these signs. Maybe I’m wrong – maybe we reached the tipping point a while back when we voted for more austerity in 2015. Or, perhaps, things are already starting to take a turn for the better – with recent polling showing dwindling support for austerity. Whether or not this is the case, what we need to do now is wise up before things snowball and the life experiences of the rich and poor diverge further. When used in climate change literature, tipping points are seen as points of no return. Society is not the same as the ecosystem. We are still in control – if we choose to be.