There is a report in todays 'The Times' headlined 'Life Expectancy in the UK is worst in western Europe' Now we know that there are a host of factors which underlie life expectancy some of them being genetic. But he greatest cluster of factors are environmental and are composed of factors such as climate, diet, exercise, income distribution, social security benefits, efficiency of the health services an so on. But according to the OECD report, although life expectancy is just 81 years, this puts the UK behind the 81.5 average for the 27 countries of the European Unions and last in western Europe. Life expectancy improvements in Britain stagnated in the decade leading up the pandemic and have fallen since. The British data shows the life expectancy. for men at 79 and for women at 83 in the period from2021 to 2013.This is about six months and three months shorter, respectively, than the ages measured between 2017 and 2019 which were the highest on record. The significance of all of this s that tis type of demographic data really does show the cumulative impact of government policy, whichever political party happens to be in power. As f to underline this point dramatically, there is also a report in the same edition of the newspaper that indicates that cutting winter fuel payments is going to push 100,000 into poverty and this fact is acknowledged by government ministers. Official estimates of the decision to strip more than 10 million pensioners of the winter fuel payments have concluded that it will result in about 50,000 older people being in poverty at any one time. To make matters even worse, Labour did not carry out a formal impact assessment of the policy before making the decision. Some Labour MPs are ver upset but the risks associated with rebellion are high, such as deselection. Meanwhile Scottish Labour have threatened to restore these payments were they to be returned to power. One does get the feeing that of the £1.5 bullion that cutting winter fuel payments is meant to save, by the time various factors have been costed out, the savings might be very much less and (hints of the farmers' dispute) be not worth the political pain that the policy causes.
There is a report this evening that Mohamed al Fayed may have assaulted 290 women pursuing Harrods compensation over alleged assaults and one suggested figure is 420 individuals who have contacted the 'Justice for Harrods Survivors' group regarding allegations against Fayed. If this scale of abuse is confirmed, then this may approach the figure of 500 which is said to be the total number of period abused by Jimmy Saville before his death. When abuse on this scale emerges, then it almost defies imagination that one individual can commit abuse on this scale without significant others being aware at least dimly aware of the scale of the abuse. In the case of al Fayed, then there must have been security guards who protected his premises from the ingress and ext of young women and therefore they must share a degree of culpability. There are some lawyers who argue that such individuals as security guards could themselves be charged with assisting a rape but of course obtaining proof and then a conviction probably means that these individuals het away with things scot free, as it were. To my knowledge, the police are busy pursuing the cases of those actually assaulted by al Fayed and have not yet turned their attention to his accomplices of which circumstantial evidence that there must be some. The wider question, of course, is how the rich and powerful have the attitude that the fforce of law is to be applied to the 'little people' and they themselves feel free to be immune from the legal processes that seem to apply to the rest of he population.