You might have been reading the same articles as me this week. The terrible news that poorer people are dying younger, that cuts to local services have been more severe in the areas where health inequalities were already the worst, and all with the knowledge that there may be more to come. More political rhetoric from that ruthless, mirthless, heartless group of politicians we call our government, as they continually blame the most vulnerable people in our society for problems they haven’t caused, and alongside this, more cuts.
There are so many things they could choose to cut; their own lavish spending on private jets, perhaps, or the enormous donations that they take from the powerful to bolster their coffers and buy the social media ads to push more nonsense upon the public. They won’t be cutting these things though. No, instead they want to cut the benefits for vulnerable people, who already have too little, and too little opportunity to speak up about it.
When we think about the things that are taken by the powerful from the vulnerable, we often think about the material things; the money in their bank account, new clothes, a warm house, food on the table. But we don’t often talk about the grinding exertion of being poor; the effort and the energy expended in getting through the days, and the lack of energy for anything else, including pushing back. I think about this a lot because of a job I did early in my career; it’s a job that changed who I was as a doctor, and probably as a person, in a run-down in-patient psychiatric ward in East London. It was dingy, and overcrowded, and the piles of paperwork on old NHS desks had that very specific smell that we don’t smell much any more; musty and excoriating in equal measure. It was dingy and overcrowded and humane and extraordinary, and I’m thinking a lot at the moment about the things I learnt there.