this really struck me -
High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.”
With stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”
Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”