Austerity kills. That’s the message of new research in the BMJ:

Spending constraints between 2010 and 2014 were associated with an estimated 45 368 (95% CI 34 530 to 56 206) higher than expected number of deaths compared with pre-2010 trends…. Projections to 2020 based on 2009-2014 trend was cumulatively linked to an estimated 152 141 (95% CI 134 597 and 169 685) additional deaths.

This is consistent with a point made recently by Danny Dorling:

For the first time in well over a century the health of people in England and Wales as measured by the most basic feature – life – has stopped improving…The most plausible explanation would blame the politics of austerity, which has had an excessive impact on the poor and the elderly; the withdrawal of care support to half a million elderly people that had taken place by 2013; the effect of a million fewer social care visits being carried out every year; the cuts to NHS budgets and its reorganisation as a result of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act; increased rates of bankruptcy and general decline in the quality of care homes; the rise in fuel poverty among the old; cuts to or removal of disability benefits. The stalling of life expectancy was the result of political choice.

It's also consistent with international evidence gathered by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu; with Sarah O’Connor’s report of a “quietly unfolding health crisis” in deprived seaside towns such as Blackpool, and with the fact that benefit sanctions have driven people to suicide.

It’s obvious what the left’s reaction to this should be. But what about the right and centre’s?

There is an intelligent response. You could argue that all this is only part of the story. Christopher Ruhm, for example, has shown that austerity can improve health in other ways. If we’re not building houses, for example, fewer men die in accidents on building sites. Hard-up people can’t afford to smoke or drink themselves to death. And if we’re under-employed we’re less likely to suffer stress-related illnesses.

Alternatively, you could invoke the trolley problem. Maybe deaths from austerity are the lesser of two evils. If the alternative to austerity is higher taxes or higher debt, it could lead to lower future growth and hence less heath spending and more death in the long run. (I don’t believe this, but some Tories sincerely do).

Neither response, though, is what we get. Instead, when Aditya Chakrabortty said on Question Time last week that the government is “send[ing] disabled people to their deaths” the reaction was as if he’d spat in the church’s collection plate (9 mins in).

Which in a sense he had. Aditya had the bad manners to point out that politics is a matter of life and death - at least for the poor - thereby puncturing his audience’s illusion that it is just a cosy little debating game in which the only costs are that a few MPs move down the career ladder. I had hoped that the Grenfell disaster would destroy this illusion, but it seems the imbecilities of posh folk don’t die as quickly as do the poor.

Here, though, is the thing. The supposedly impartial BBC is complicit in this. Its politics coverage too often carries a matey undertone broken only when confronted by someone who has the temerity to challenge the privilege of the rich or to enter politics without being posh. And it gives disproportionate weight to inconsequential tittle-tattle. Priti Patel’s flight from Uganda last week was given the sort of coverage due to Churchill’s return from Yalta. I very much doubt if the BMJ’s report will get so much attention.

What we have here are two competing conceptions of politics: one which sees it as a serious matter of life and death, the other as a game among careerists. The BBC is not impartial between these, and therefore not impartial at all.