WESTMINSTER (Labour Buzz) – The recently released Marmot report told us something most of us already knew: austerity is killing people in their droves.

Austerity is deadly. That’s the takeaway from an explosive new report from Lord Marmot into the carnage wrought by ten years of Tory misrule. Life expectancy has stalled and, in some cases, it’s going into reverse. The right wing press may desperately try to look the other way, but it’s increasingly difficult to avoid the horrifying truth. The Tory Government has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and now they have five years, more will certainly needlessly die.

This claim is nothing new. Since 2014, when a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) linked austerity to 120,000 deaths, debate has been raging between left wingers who see it as an inevitable result of cutting support for the most vulnerable people in society, i.e. Tory austerity and right wingers who claim the whole thing is “coincidence”.

Like the thousands of people who died shortly after being declared fit for work: “coincidence?”

The UN report into UK poverty was equally scathing. 14 million people live in poverty which according to the report is systemic, tragic and a political choice. “much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War,” said the report “has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos.”

However, the Marmot report is even more damning. The headlines are shocking, but the more you go into the detail, the worse it gets.

After ten years of austerity, health in the UK is faltering. Life expectancy has stalled and in the case of women on lower incomes has even gone into reverse, especially in the North. Inequality has risen, men and women are less healthy, and their children are more at risk.

Worse still. This needn’t have happened. The impacts of austerity were ‘predictable and predicted.’ Child poverty is rising, housing is becoming unaffordable, work is becoming less stable with a boom in zero hours contracts, food bank use is surging, and communities continue to be ignored.

Outcomes are, if anything, even worse for minority ethnic populations or people with disabilities and to put the cherry on the top, there’s worse to come. The damage wrought by 10 years of Tory rule such as the increase in child poverty will have ripple effects for the next generation.

Poverty, says the report, has a cumulative effect throughout life. So, if you’re among the 47% of children in lone parent households born into poverty in this country you can expect poorer outcomes throughout the rest of your life. Benefits cuts have pushed people into persistent poverty which may prove heredity.

The study, which is a review of the original report in 2010, also finds that not only has government spending declined, but the poorest have been the most heavily targeted.

“The data presented in this report show that Government spending has not only declined in key social determinants of health, but that it is now also allocated in a less equitable way – meaning that spending allocations are less weighted towards deprived areas and communities than previously.”

Health inequality is rising, and this is having a devastating impact on the country. In some age groups, mortality is rising and if you’re a woman on a low income in the North of England, you can expect to die considerably earlier than your parents.

Probably the most blatant impact is in rough sleepers whose numbers are thought to have trebled since 2010. They can expect to die on average 30 years sooner than the general population!

The reaction to these figures from the right wing varies. For some it’s a case of surprise, such as Rory Stewart who says he was horrified to see dozens of rough sleepers in one shopping mall in Stratford. Rory, for the record, voted with austerity every step of the way.

Pitching to be mayor he claimed that London can halve rough sleeping. It had been done in Manchester, and it can be done in the capital. Manchester’s success in cutting rough sleeping is, of course, in no small part down to the fact that it has Labour’s Andy Burnham as mayor.

The other is denial such as Iain Dale’s when he claimed that because a similar trend could be seen elsewhere in Europe austerity couldn’t be to blame. Dale forgot to mention that most countries in Europe have also pursued austerity, but even in this group, the UK’s performance is worrying. Britain currently has the worst life expectancy trends of any Western European Country.

When all else fails you can claim bias. Rod Liddle claimed that because he’s spent decades arguing about the impact of social inequality on health this somehow meant he had ‘skin in the game’. Or, if you are really desperate, you could simply do what Guido Fawkes always does and claim he’s a ‘hard left extremist’.

Unfortunately for the right, the evidence of the last ten years is increasingly difficult to ignore and they’re having to work incredibly hard not to see what’s staring them in the face. We now have a host of reports detailing the damage wrought by the Tories.

They were warned it would happen, but they didn’t listen or perhaps care. And when presented with clear evidence about the impact they caused, they effectively stuck their fingers in their ears and started humming the national anthem as loud as they could.

None of that can distract from the true conclusion of the Marmot report. Conservatism, in its current form is a threat to our health, civilisation and democracy. What is really scary is that we are at least five years from a cure, let’s hope that’s not the case with other epidemics.

(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Michael O’Sullivan)