Why is Healthy Life Expectancy in decline?
Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE), according to a report published last month (April 2026) by the Health Foundation, demonstrates a stark and accelerating trend: healthy life expectancy across the United Kingdom has fallen by two years over the last decade. Healthy...
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Wellbeing Influencers and The Skewing of Public Health Discourse
Why Capitalism, Not Seed Oil, is the Problem It’s a familiar format on TikTok and other social media platforms. An earnest young man enters a supermarket. He walks down a deserted aisle (they’re always deserted; you never see another shopper)....
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Why is work bad for you?
Work forms a major part of our lives. It provides so much and simultaneously so little. It pays the bills, provides some form of structure to the day or night depending on the type of work, and can form a...
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The NHS in Late Soviet Britain
We are now at the unprecedented point where private hospitals are doing one in ten planned NHS operations in England. This marks a 50% increase in elective procedures outsourced to private providers since 2019 (before COVID), leading some to claim...
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The two child benefit cap and the power of the financial markets
The two child benefit cap affects an estimated 1.5 million children across the country. Recent research suggests that as many as one in four children in some of England and Wales’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3,000...
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Disease
If a person died from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century, this might not only be expected but might also be considered unavoidable. But if a person dies from tuberculosis today, is that either expected or unavoidable? We have the means...
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After the Pandemic: what’s next?
What happens next, once the COVID-19 pandemic is over? All pandemics subside at some point. Either the virus mutates into a less harmful form, or mass vaccination raises overall immunity and so on. They do come to an end. But...
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Participatory Ideology: From exclusion to involvement
This is not a trick question. What is the link between recruiting a photographer at significant taxpayers’ expense to take cuddly, self-glorifying photos of a pet dog and a high level of successful appeals without precedent by disabled people against...
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Why no talk of an inequality emergency?
We hear much talk now of a climate emergency. As I was revising a talk I frequently give on ‘global health in an unequal world’, I realised that there is no talk of an inequality emergency, either globally or close...
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Simple Solutions for Complex Needs
Magical thinking and multiple, complex needs in the UK In the UK at present, we appear to have an epidemic of magical thinking about the lives of the unhoused victims of universal credit (UC), the ‘20%’ with multiple and complex...
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Making a virtue of variation? The fragmentation of the English NHS
Geographic reform of the NHS is not new: region, district, area, and locality are all familiar terms in NHS history, and notions of “place” as an organising principle retain an intrinsic appeal for policy-makers. Recently, the English NHS has now...
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Weight stigma, neoliberalism and questions of blame