The link here takes you to an article in the Times. It was on the front page of the electronic version today for a very short while before it was substituted by a story about Gwyneth Paltrow being sued for a hit and run accident on a ski slope in 2016.
I turned again to the Times some months ago after listening to Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and the benefits of going deep into the news instead of superficially skimming garbage all the time.
I went deep into this article.
I live in Rushcliffe, the election constituency to the south of Nottingham which is 60th in the list of life expectancy out of approximately 600.
The life expectancy of a baby born in Rushcliffe at the present time is 85.
My parents, my brother and my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew live in Inverclyde.
Why not click the link to the article and go onto the interactive map and find Rushcliffe in the middle and see how the stats match up to Inverclyde's on the west of Scotland?
If your baby is born in Inverclyde today, they’ll have a life expectancy that’s eight years less than that of one born in Rushcliffe and 10 years less of one born in Hampstead.
This isn't because it's Inverclyde or the west of Scotland or where I come from (although I guess that must have a bearing on this) It's because this is totally, totally wrong.
And so, the rich (we) continue to get wealthier and wealthier and the poorer parts of the country and the poorer people in those parts of the country continue to die faster and faster and faster.
We might congratulate ourselves that we're good at this or that but until we start to realise that rich people have to give more money to poor people otherwise society doesn't work, we will have problem after problem and degenerate towards darkness.
I was brought up in the red belt. Surrounded by labour and socialism and communism and all of those things to the left of politics.
I live in the blue belt where everything is conservative, and everything is right wing and every man for himself and to hell with regulation.
I subscribed to neither.
Neither are fair and neither are the right thing to do.
The right thing to do is for humans to try to look after humans, perhaps the best place to start to do that is at home.
Blog Post Number - 3391