Cathy: ‘I became really depressed because no matter how much I loved my children or tried to take care of them, I could neither keep the doctor at bay, or the fungus that was destroying everything that it came into contact with . . . I was continually having to throw out mouldy furniture, clothes, and toys and found myself having to choose between feeding my hungry children or hungry fuel meters which kept demanding more and more money. My doctor offered me a course of anti-depressants and it occurred to me that he was only employed to treat the symptoms of our health problems in the same way as our landlord . . . I asked him for a prescription for a warm, dry home and he laughed. I refused the tablets and I joined the city wide anti-dampness campaign instead.’
The more visible aspects of socio-structural violence are to be found embedded in the economic and social policies pursued by the UK government. The rejection of the Black Report recommendations in the 1980s, such as increasing the maternity grant and child benefit as a means to reduce inequalities in health, signalled the start of a harsher, uncompromising government who were determined to cut public expenditure (see Chapters 1 and 2). In a defining moment, seven years later, Margaret Thatcher deregulated the City of London in an enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism: ‘it was, in every sense a revolution. It was messy and there was blood all over the place. Unlike most revolutions, it was imposed top down’ (Agius 2011).
The tsunami of neoliberalism that began to wreck working-class communities was even more messy and cruel (see also Chapter 9). It was clear that integral to the policies that began to flow from this government was a blatant disregard for the suffering of the poorest section of society. It was our first realization that in order to fulfil her government’s election pledges to reduce taxation, Thatcher was going to be snatching more than milk from children (the policy described as ‘the meanest and most unworthy thing he had seen in twenty years in parliament’, by Edward Short, the Labour education spokesman at the time).
Instead of examining the root causes of health inequality, the increasing emphasis on individual behaviour and personal responsibility shifted the public discourse around social and economic conditions.
Housing was not the only battleground. On the broader front, neoliberal orthodoxy became increasingly influential (see Chapter 9). Unemployment became acceptable as a deliberate tool of the market economy, breaking from the post-war consensus that it was ‘a scourge’ and should be minimized through government intervention. As unemployment rose to 3 million across the UK in the (p.241) 1990s, it became clear that there would be no intervention to soften the impact of this on people’s lives: ‘rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying’ (Norman Lamont, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1991).
The ‘acceptable price’ that was, apparently, ‘well worth paying’ was the damaging health and social effects of unemployment on individuals, their families, and communities—well documented by research (Fryer 1995; Platt 1984, 1986). The thinking behind the government’s education and economic policies was exemplified by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, in a speech to the IMF in Washington in 1984 when he warned Britain’s workforce that many of the jobs of the future would not be ‘high-tech’ or even ‘low-tech’, but ‘no-tech’. The move towards a low-wage, no-wage economy had begun—with deliberate policies to ensure that profits would rise faster than wages.
Drawing from international and historical data, Stuckler and Basu (2013) conclude that the decisions governments make during financial crises have a critical impact on the poor when policy can become a matter of life and death. Examining case studies from the 1930s Depression in the USA, to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s, to present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, and the USA, they show how different policies produce vastly different consequences for the population. For example, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, deaths actually plummeted in the USA due to interventions like the New Deal. In recent times, Iceland’s decision not to cripple their welfare state by bailing out private banks, but instead to put money into their social health care systems and increase social (p.242) welfare payments to its poorest citizens, has resulted in a healthy economy and healthy citizens. There has been no rise in suicides or depressive disorders, and today it is ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world. In contrast, the UK government’s programme is (literally) having deadly side effects, with Stuckler citing the UK as ‘one of the clearest expressions of how austerity kills’ (Henley 2013).
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