Democide

As reported in The Guardian in 2019, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) said more than "130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts". More conservatively, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said that in 2017, austerity was linked to 120,000 extra deaths in England (just in England, not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). In 2018, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed a fall in life expectancy for poorer socioeconomic groups and those living in more impoverished areas.

So, it's not like we've not known the Tories have had an appalling impact on our population, but, on top of these utterly shocking figures, we're now presented with yet more. The Independent reported today (05/10/2022), "The UK government's economic policies are 'likely' to have caused a 'great many more deaths' than the Covid Pandemic, an academic has claimed". The Independent used an article from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (JECH) titled "Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women?" by Walsh, Dundas, McCartney, Gibson and Seaman. Walsh et al. looked at previous statistics, compared actual figures with predicted figures, and came up with the eye-watering figure of 335,000 deaths between 2012 and 2019. Hang about, though; those figures don't include those deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic.

According to the Government's own website today (05/10/2022), there have been 177,977 "deaths within 28 days of being identified as a COVID-19 case by a positive test, reported up to Friday, 20 May 2022". Is anyone else confused by that date? 20 May 2022? Maybe I'm being paranoid; maybe it's not been updated in a while. Perhaps we don't know how many actual deaths from COVID-19 there have been since the start of the Pandemic.

There can be little doubt that the Tories cost lives during the Pandemic. A joint report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee condemned severe errors, including delayed lockdowns and how a test, trace and isolate system was set up. It did praise the vaccination programme, though. Funnily enough, the Government took credit for the vaccination programme while crediting the NHS with their disastrous Test and Trace program.

I'm not sure what proportion of that 177,977 needs to be added to the 335,000 death toll of the Tories; whatever figure we'll end up with, it's fair to say that the Tories are guilty of Democide.

If we look at the percentages, the Tories have done a grand job of killing half a per cent of the population; "let the bodies pile high in their thousands", indeed!

The chart at the top, it must be noted, uses a logarithmic scale. So, while the Tories aren't guilty of Mega-murder, nor Deka-mega-murder, they are guilty of Hecto-kilo-murder - and that's us they've been killing (Thank you, Wikipedia, for the pre-fixes)!