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Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

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Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#361

Post by rcarr »

thrown_22 wrote: post #46
solar-ice wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

The left has somehow ended up as the party of the political managerial class instead of the working class, this is one of the best explanations why we're in such a weird place where the socialists are all trust fund kids who would rather have the working class arrested than talk to them.

The biggest (and, rather oddly, rarely discussed) problem for the left in the UK is actually Scotland. Before the SNP rose to power, Scotland used to be a Labour stronghold. In 1997, Tony Blair's Labour had 56 seats in Scotland. Today, Labour have just 1.

Now that all of those votes go to the SNP it makes it extremely difficult for Labour to get a majority in the Commons along traditional ideological lines. There just aren't enough swing seats elsewhere to really make up for it. 200 seats haven't changed hands since WW2.

Seats gained/lost by winning party in elections since 1966:

1966: Labour Win, 47

1970: Conservative Win: 77

1974: Labour Win: 14

1979: Conservative Win: 62

1983: Conservative Win: 58

1987: Conservative Win: -21

1992: Conservative Win: -40

1997: Labour Win: 145

2001: Labour Win: -6

2005: Labour Win: -48

2010: Conservative Win: 96

2015: Conservative Win: 24

2017: Conservative Win: -13

2019: Conservative Win: 48

Current Seat Breakdown:

Conservative: 357

Labour: 200

SNP: 44

Lib Dem: 14

Plaid Cymru: 3

Alba: 2

Green Party: 1

NI parties: 18 (never been held by Labour or Conservative as far as I'm aware)

Speaker: 1 (politically neutral so irrelevant)

If SNP and Alba (Scottish Parties) are taken out of the equation entirely the way Northern Ireland currently is, Labour has only 18 seats that aren't held by Tories that they could potentially win. 326 seats are needed for a majority. That means Labour, in a best case (and very unrealistic) scenario where they gain all the seats from the minority parties, would need to gain 126 seats, with 108 of them coming from Tory seats in order to form a majority government.

I don't have the data going back past 1966 but looking at what we do have, a seat gain of more than 100 has only happened once: Tony Blair's 1997 win with 145 seats gained. 7 of those gained seats were in Scotland but Labour already held 49. In 1997, Scotland had 72 Westminster MPs but today, due to the redrawing of boundaries, it now only has 59. In total, Labour had 56 seats in Scotland. This means Labour held 78% of Scottish seats, which would equate to 46 seats today.

This is the real reason why Labour has had to become more and more Tory. To make up the deficit they either need to win back seats from the completely dominant Scottish National Party or win Conservative strongholds. They see the latter as more realistic so it's become their focus. When Scotland's seats are essentially out of reach of Labour, the UK becomes a de facto 1 party Conservative state.

It is absolutely bizarre to me that Labour won't make proportional representation and cross party co-operation a key part of their platform. Unless there are some seriously major shifts I can only really see Labour gaining power again through a minority/coalition government. Even if another right wing party such as the Brexit party emerged to splinter votes from the tories, Labour is still looking at a minority government. They simply can't gain enough seats unless they win back Scotland. This is why they are so reluctant to engage with the SNP because if Scotland really does leave the union, Labour probably won't be seeing power again unless there's electoral reform, a revolution or the tories mess up something up so badly that literally millions die. But by that point, they will have probably been in power so long (and absolute power corrupts absolutely) that they'll have the elections rigged autocracy style so even that may not matter.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research...

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#362

Post by zahllos »

pasabagi wrote: post #312
zahllos wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. As I once had it explained to me, "I don't choose parties any more, I just use my best guess as to which one will mean I take home more of my salary". There's also the European angle. Those who want to work likely faced competition from EU workers and generally feel hard done by when it comes to globalisation. After all, if you worked in coal, steel, car manufacturing or your family did, quite likely you, or a…

I think the idea that working people were feeling the heat from eastern european competition is a bit simplistic. Most industries have been facing a 'skills shortage', so people are generally aware that the health of their companies, and therefore their job security and career progression, are essentially limited by the pool of skilled labour. That and, working side-by-side with people from all over europe, people te…

It is a little bit simplistic, of course, but any such statement will be.

That said, I stand by what I said. If you look at maps of brexit voting tendency, you'll see they map quite heavily onto rural communities and former industrial heartlands. My explanation for this is that they don't see or feel the benefits of the EU and globalisation. But we didn't have a referendum on who wants globalisation to end, we had one on the EU, and so they took what they could.

> The typical profile of a brexiteer is somebody retired, not somebody in employment

I find this slightly weird stated so definitively having just argued I was being simplistic. I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm British but took advantage of free movement, so I've been party to more conversations on brexit than I really care to think about both back in the UK and here. Trust me, however, this is not an accurate statement: there are plenty of people with jobs who voted for brexit and have strong opinions on it. You don't need to take my anecdata on it though, we can look at a study https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... - to put this into words:

- of every 100 18-24 year olds who voted, 29 of them voted leave. - of every 100 25-49 year olds you meet, 46 of them will be leave voters. - of every 100 people retirement age or above 36 in 100 you meet will have voted remain.

I find the 25-49 year old bracket overly broad, personally. The vote flips at 50+, but I suspect it would flip slightly younger based on my own experience.

But either way, it can't categorically be stated that all brexiteers are retired people. Actually I can lay further cards on the table: I used to do statistics as a job. So I take issue with the phrase "older people with fewer qualifications most likely to have voted brexit" used on the table I am quoting. Older people yes, but age also correlates with access to education, since my grandparents left school at 15, so there's a significant confounding factor here. I'd be interested in a more detailed breakdown, and I find the "and uneducated" part to be problematic/needing more evidence.

To come back to my point, I was offering a very qualitative interpretation of an extra factor I think encouraged previously core labour voters (in places that have returned labour MPs for about as long as there has been a labour party to choose) to switch allegiances in 2019. I agree with the fact labour does not represent them any longer. Brexit is part of, but not all of, that: I'm adding that Labour had an unclear stance on brexit, whereas these regions tended to vote more strongly for brexit.

This is obviously my opinion only, offered without guarantee or warranty.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#363

Post by usrusrusrusr »

_benedict wrote: post #358
binbinbinbin wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. No, they want cost-effective healthcare. Almost everywhere else in the world uses a mixed public-private model for healthcare, which IMHO keeps a lid on the excesses of government spending into the money pit of fully-public healthcare.

The UK spends less per capita (PPP) than most other equivalent country's health system [1,2]? I never quite understand the "cost effective" arguments against the NHS. These costs include all of our private health care expenditure, which are surprisingly significant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

The two are not mutually exclusive; you can pay less for healthcare than other countries, and still get a bad deal.

Eg: It's currently almost impossible to get routine or early-stage healthcare. If I want a routine doctor's appointment, I have to phone every day at 8am when the next batch of appointments are released, and hope I get one. Last time, it took hours on hold, and attempts over several days, to get one.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#364

Post by kranke155 »

missedthecue wrote: post #299
kranke155 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK media is an example of an oligarchy successfully controlling the entire information landscape and consistently pushing for manufactured “problems of the week” while ignoring real disturbing trends in home ownership, poverty, health and inequality between London and the abandoned “regions”. The book “Fake law” was terrifying to me - it talks about a whole number of high profile judicial cases that were pretty m…

BBC? The Guardian? The Independent? I think you're picking and choosing narratives here, not accurately representing reality.

The Guardian is ok but it doesn’t have the staff for real investigative journalism or long form. There’s a reason why the big breaks journalists got in the last decade or so were whistleblowers delivering them data dumps, not journalists following up a story - Flat Earth News talks about this - newspaper staff has been gutted to the point where that sort of thing doesn’t exist anymore.

And without that staff, The Guardian can’t do proper investigations on london real estate’s connection with major money laundering for instance.

Indepedent like someone else pointed out is owned by a Russian oligarch. BBC doesn’t have the mandate to do investigative deep journalism, they can only do reports or documentaries - but that BBC can’t break a major story or investigate anything of political importance because that would jeopardise their “apolitical” position.

This leaves the right wing media, which is the majority in the UK (opposite to the US, in the UK the right wing dominate the media) and they manufacture and manipulate the stories into seemingly-real controversies that are actually just a cover for them to get some law or change passed in Westminster. Read the book “Fake Law” - the way the Mail/Times/Telegraph have distorted even simple judicial cases into something they could use to get popular support for whatever their owners wanted is profoundly disturbing.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#365

Post by kranke155 »

mandmandam wrote: post #357
missedthecue wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBC? The Guardian? The Independent? I think you're picking and choosing narratives here, not accurately representing reality.

No, he's right. And it has been this way for a long time. The way Corbyn and Assaange were demonized and smeared ought to have made it obvious - but that's the thing about controlling the entire media landscape. Even if it ought to be obvious, there are people telling you to ignore the truth tellers, and you've nowhere to read their exposes except social media, where in fact they are likely shunted down the algorithm…

The destruction of Corbyn as an “anti semite” was an incredible act of mass psychological warfare inflicted on the British public.

An incredible feat, to all those involved, respect for their skill. I’d never seen anything quite like it before I moved to the Uk.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#366

Post by simonh »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #137
bhk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been no drop in funding that might account for the recent "soaring excess deaths". Quite the opposite. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-... You speak of massive underfunding, but NHS funding has increased in real terms almost every single year since the 1950s: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ "At the moment, UK public health spending is the equivalent of about 7%…

So they spend slightly more than double what they did in 1955, when the cost of providing healthcare has gone up nearly 4x due to the Beaumol effect. That doesn't seem good? You'd expect the service to gradually get worse in that case, wouldn't you? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...

Double in GDP terms means a massive increase in real terms because GDP is so much higher now. Our GDP in real terms has increased 5x in that period, so double funding relative to GDP is a 10x real terms increase.

The point from an affordability perspective is, has NHS funding relative to GDP actually fallen since the end of the last labour government? The answer is no, it’s about the same.

Now it’s reasonable to argue we should be spending more of our GDP on health care, but we’re in the middle of a major global inflation crisis. The recent rise in NI which partly funds health care was slated by the left. How is the country going to afford a significant increase in health spending right now?

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#367

Post by jacquesm »

daenz wrote: post #360
jacquesm wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's circular reasoning at best and conspiracy thinking at worst.

They don't want to consider the possibility of X -> if they're wrong about X it would be harmful. Where's the cycle?

In your assumption that they don't want to consider that possibility. You take your own projection as a given and then continue to argue as though it is true.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#368

Post by mandmandam »

malteof wrote: post #279
daenz wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the article does a fantastic job of claiming their hypotheses as the only possibilities, while dishonestly ignoring others that would more severely undermine confidence in the state. I'm honestly surprised they're attributing deaths to lockdowns at all! That's a huge shift in the overton window. If you remember, that was also taboo. But I assume now it's ok to talk about because it can be framed in the louder, "…

It sounds like you really want it to be vaccines even though not much seems to be pointing towards that conclusion, be careful to avoid a bias. The article mentions cancer and cardiovascular chronic diseases.

It doesn't though. It sounds like he wants the possibility acknowledged, and maybe even - gasp - explored.

You're demonstrating an aspect of the social resistance he's talking about.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#369

Post by ls612 »

roydivision wrote: post #92

Unfortunately not mentioned in the article, how do these numbers compare to other countries?

The US preliminary numbers suggest that since the end of the Omicron wave excess deaths have hovered between 0-5% (compared to 30% or more during major waves). A couple percent is likely still Covid suggesting that the underlying trend hasn’t changed much.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#370

Post by tailspin2019 »

azalemeth wrote: post #336
zimpenfish wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is to my eyes scandalous. But somehow unremarked There's a lot of remarking going on - Private Eye, for example, have been banging the "NHS privatisation" drum for a couple of decades at least. The Guardian, too, mention it not infrequently.

This is very true. The NHS has become a commissioning organisation -- it puts out a request for a service and providers bid for it. Many of these services are IT related; many of them are things like physiotherapy referral programmes. Patients may or may not know who provides their care. This is not at all how things used to be and I have noticed it get far worse of late.

As an aside, I’ve had first hand experience in a couple of those outsourced IT services and the amount of wasted money in that area alone is staggering.
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