Populist radical versus traditional extremism

Not your father’s far right


All over Europe, the new, populist far-right parties have become part of the political scene. They’re not defined, as the old far-righters used to be, by what they want, but by what they don’t want.

by Jean-Yves Camus

Extensive research into far-right populism over the last 30 years has yet to find a precise, workable definition for this catchall term, and we need more information on the political category it covers. Since 1945 Europeans have used “far right” to mean a range of very different phenomena: xenophobic and anti-system populism, nationalist-populist political parties, and even religious fundamentalism. But the term should be used with caution because, for militant rather than objective reasons, movements labelled as far-right are often assumed to be a continuation (adapted to contemporary circumstances) of nationalist-socialist, fascist or nationalist-authoritarian ideologies, which is not the case.

German neo-Nazism — and to some extent the National Democratic Party — and Italian neo-Fascist movements (CasaPound Italia, Fiamma Tricolore and Forza Nuova, which together represent only 0.53% of voters), certainly follow their models’ ideology. So do the modern avatars of movements that emerged in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s: the League of Polish Families, the Slovak National Party and the Greater Romania Party. But in western European elections, only the now defunct Italian Social Movement, which became the National Alliance in 1995 after its leader Gianfranco Fini steered it in a more conservative direction, has managed to bring the far right out of marginality (1). In eastern Europe the far right is stagnating (see map): though the success of Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary (2) show it is not dead, it is very much a minority.

The values of this traditional far right are unsuited to an age that does not seek grand ideologies preaching a new humanity or a new world. The cult of the leader and of the single party does not satisfy the demands of fragmented, individualist societies in which public opinion is formed by televised debates and social networking. But the ideological legacy of the old-fashioned far right remains fundamental. It is primarily an ethnic view of peoples and national identity, from which stems a hatred of enemies both external (individual foreigners and foreign states) and internal (ethnic and religious minorities and all political opponents). But it is also an organic, often corporatist, social model founded on a political and economic anti-liberalism that denies the importance of individual freedoms and the existence of social antagonisms, except those between the “people” and the “elite”.

To the populist and radical right

In the 1980s another category of populisms began to have electoral success, and the media and commentators called them far-right too. Yet some sensed that comparing them with the fascist movements of the 1930s was no longer valid, and would prevent the left from developing a proper response. How were we to refer to xenophobic populism in Scandinavia, the Front National in France, Vlaams Blok in Flanders or the Freedom Party of Austria? The political scientists’ battle over terminology began: “national populism” (used by Pierre-André Taguieff) (3), “radical right”, “far right”. It would take a whole book to analyse the semantic arguments, so let us just say that these parties shifted from the far right to the populist and radical right. The difference is that formally, and usually sincerely, radical-right parties accept parliamentary democracy and elections as the only route to power. But though their institutional plans are vague, they emphasise direct democracy through popular referendum, rather than representative democracy. They all have slogans referring to a clean sweep, and to removing from power elites (meaning social democrats, liberals and the conservative right) they deem to be corrupt and out of touch with the people.

To these parties, the “people” form a trans-historical entity that includes the dead, the living and generations yet to come, linked by an unchanging, homogeneous cultural background. This leads to a distinction between “pure-bred” nationals and immigrants (especially non-European), whose right of residence and economic and social rights the parties wish to restrict. The traditional far right remains anti-Semitic and racist, but the radical right has found a new enemy, internal and external, in Islam, with which it associates all who come from countries with a Muslim culture.

Radical right parties defend the market economy because it allows individuals to exercise a spirit of enterprise, but the capitalism they promote is exclusively national, which explains their hostility to globalisation. They are national-liberal parties, believing that the state should intervene not only in areas of traditional state competence, but also to protect those left behind by a globalised economy; this is evident from the speeches of Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National.

Happy to participate

The radical right differs most from the far right in showing less hostility towards democracy. Political scientist Uwe Backes (4) has shown that German law accepts radical criticism of the existing economic and social order as legitimate, but defines extremism — which rejects the values embodied in basic law — as a threat to the state. So we could define movements that totally reject parliamentary democracy and the ideology of human rights as belonging to the far right — and those that accept them, to the radical right.

The two groups also occupy different political positions. The far right is in the position of what Italian researcher Piero Ignazi calls the “excluded third” (5). It glories in its non-participation and draws strength from it. The radical right would be happy to participate in government, either as partners in a government coalition — like the Northern League in Italy, the Democratic Union of the Centre in Switzerland or the Progress Party in Norway — or to vote with a government in which it does not participate — like Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands or the Danish People’s Party. These parties exist between marginality, which if prolonged prevents them from winning many votes at elections, and normalisation, which if too obvious can lead to a decline. Can they survive?

In Greece’s 2012 legislative elections, the neo-Nazi movement Golden Dawn won nearly 7% of the vote (6), after nearly 30 years as a tiny group. This does not mean that its esoteric Nazi racism suddenly won over 416,000 voters: those voters had initially preferred the traditional far right, the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), which had held seats in the Greek parliament since 2007. But there was a key development between the two elections in 2012: LAOS joined the national unity government led by Lucas Papademos, whose goal was to get parliament to approve the new rescue package agreed by the troika (7) in return for drastic austerity measures. Having become a radical right party (8), LAOS had lost some of its appeal compared with Golden Dawn, which had refused to make any concessions.

But in most European countries, the radical right has either supplanted its far-right rivals (Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands) or succeeded, like the True Finns (now the Finns Party), in establishing itself where the far right has failed.

Lately, the radical right has met electoral competition from parties founded on sovereignty agendas that centre on leaving the European Union, and exploit national identity, immigration and cultural decline, yet are not regarded as extremist or racist. They include the Alternative for Germany, the UK Independence Party, Team Stronach in Austria and Debout la République, led by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, in France.
Defined by dissent

The term populism is often misused, especially to discredit criticism of the neoliberal ideological consensus, questioning of the polarisation of European political debate between conservative neoliberals and social democrats, or any expression at elections of popular discontent with the failings of representative democracy. Academic Paul Taggart, despite his fairly precise definition of rightwing populism, cannot resist comparing it with the anti-capitalist left, overlooking the basic difference between it and the radical right — the right’s explicit or latent racism (9). For Taggart, as for many others, the radical right is not defined by ideology but by its position of dissent within a political system where the only legitimate choice is seen as between liberal and centre-left parties.

Giovanni Sartori’s theory is that the political game revolves around the distinction between consensus parties and protest parties. Consensus parties can exercise power and are acceptable as partners in a coalition, and they illustrate the problem of democracy by co-option in a closed system: if the source of all legitimacy is the people, and a significant proportion of the people (15-25%) vote for a populist and anti-system radical right, how can we justify protecting democracy from itself by keeping that right away from power — though without, in the long term, managing to reduce its influence?

This question is important: it also concerns the attitude of opinion leaders to the alternative and radical left, which is delegitimised because it wants to transform society rather than adjust it. The radical left is often referred to as the mirror image of the radical right. Political scientist Meindert Fennema has defined a vast category of protest parties, opposed to the political system and blaming it for all ills, while offering no specific answers. (Is there, in fact, any specific answer to the issues the social democrats and neoliberal-conservative right have failed to resolve?)

Europe’s problem may be the rise of the radical right, or it may be a change in the right’s ideological paradigm. Significantly, over the past decade, the traditional right has become less reluctant to accept radical groups as partners in government (10). This is more than electoral tactics and arithmetic. In France, voters now often move back and forth between the Front National and the Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire, and the old model of rightwing movements with different ideologies no longer gives a true picture. France will probably now have two competing right wings — one nationalist-republican (morally conservative and grounded in sovereign issues, synthesising the plebiscitary tradition and the radical right in the form of the Front National, a return to the idea of the national family); the other a federalist, pro-European, pro-free trade and socially liberal right.

All over Europe, the power struggle between rightwing movements is happening along similar lines, with local variations — nation state versus European government; “One land, one people” versus multicultural society; “total subordination of life to the logic of profit” (11) or primacy of the community. Europe’s left will have to recognise that its adversaries have changed before considering how to beat the radical right at the ballot box. And there it has a long way to go.


Jean-Yves Camus
Translated by Charles Goulden


Jean-Yves Camus is a research associate at France’s Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS). His latest book is Les Droites Extrêmes en Europe (The Far Right in Europe),Seuil, Paris (forthcoming).


(1) His current party, Future and Liberty for Italy, won 0.47% of the vote in the February 2013 election.


(2) See G M Tamas, “Hungary without safety nets”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2012.


(3) Pierre-André Taguieff, L’Illusion populiste (The Populist Illusion), Berg International, 2002.


(4) Uwe Backes, Political Extremes: a Conceptual History from Antiquity to the Present, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011.


(5) Piero Ignazi, Il Polo Escluso: Profilo del Movimento Sociale Italiano (The Excluded Pole: a Profile of the Italian Social Movement),Il Mulino, Bologna, 1989.


(6) The May 2012 legislative election failed to produce a majority capable of forming a new government and a further election was held a month later.


(7) The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.


(8) Its leader, Georgios Karatzaferis, was formerly a member of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party.


(9) Paul Taggart, The New Populism and the New Politics:New Protest Parties in Sweden in a Comparative Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1996.


(10) The Northern League in Italy, the Freedom Party of Austria, the League of Polish Families, the Greater Romania Party, the Slovak National Party and the Progress Party in Norway.


(11) Robert de Herte, Eléments, no 150, Paris, January-March 2014.

 How Washington controls its backyard

The ministry of American colonies

The re-election in March of Luís Almagro, the Organisation of American States’ secretary general, will prolong the cold war climate that has settled over Latin America these past few years. Since his rise to the top of the organisation in 2015, the former Uruguayan foreign minister has worked hard to rebuild American hegemony in the region.

by Guillaume Long

 

Thomas James Delbridge, ‘Lower Manhattan’, 1934.

Founded in 1948 during the standoff between the US and the USSR, the Organisation of American States (OAS) is one of the instruments through which Washington projects geopolitical power over Latin America and the Caribbean states, which one by one joined the organisation as they won independence between 1960 and 1980. Canada only joined the OAS in 1990 and is mostly happy with putting forward a moderate version of the White House line.

If, like Fidel Castro, the left sees the OAS as ‘the ministry of United States colonies’ (1), elites treat it as something approaching the sacred. A Latin American or Caribbean ambassador at the OAS is one of the most important diplomats in his country. As to the secretary general, he weighs heavy in the member states’ political debates, apart from in the United States where he is as unknown as the organisation itself, even among political elites.

If, like Fidel Castro, the left sees the OAS as ‘the ministry of United States colonies', elites treat it as something approaching the sacred.

Yet it is in an imposing marble building once given to the Pan-American Union (an ancestor of the OAS) by the great steel baron Andrew Carnegie and located several hundreds of metres from the White House that the permanent council of the OAS is based. At the end of the 1940s, the United States redrew the global multilateral system: the United Nations therefore headquartered itself in New York, the OAS in Washington. The United States wished to suggest a diffuse hegemony, but so diffuse as to abandon the headquarters to a peripheral country.

‘Don’t be stupid’

The OAS first played a secondary role, on the sidelines of security instruments true and blue, such as the Inter-American Defence Board (IADB) created in 1942, and the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (also known as the Rio Treaty) of 1947. The latter was a message to the Soviet Union: it established that any attack against a state on the continent would be considered an attack against all signatory countries.

Little by little, nevertheless, the focus became the deployment of ‘inter-American multilateralism’. The time had come to show the world the consensus between Washington and Latin American elites in their common rejection of communism. Cuba was expelled from the OAS in 1962 using a resolution that specified that ‘the adherence by any member (...) to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system’ (2). On the other hand, no Latin American military dictatorship was ever distanced from the organisation, despite the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)’s documentation of atrocities committed by several governments in the 1970s.

Even so, there have been times that Latin American and Caribbean countries have made up a majority of the permanent council and risen up against the United States’ positions — such as during maritime conflicts between the United States and Peru, or Ecuador at the end of the 1960s, during the Falklands war in 1982 or during the US invasion of Panama in 1989-1990. But even in these circumstances, the United States ignored the resolutions of the member states and acted unilaterally.

The end of the cold war plunged the OAS into existential crisis. The wave of democratisation in the 1980s freed the organisation from the obligation, imposed by US tutelage, to keep silent regarding dictatorships. As the Soviet bloc crumbled, the OAS devoted itself to defending the norms and values of liberal democracy. It reinvented itself to concentrate, among other things, on observing electoral processes to ensure their credibility. This mission, which it embarked upon in Costa Rica in 1962, became one of the pillars of the new institution. But this roadmap was not enough to place the OAS centre stage. At the time, Washington was mostly preoccupied with imposing its consensus and the resultant structural adjustment programmes. In this area, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) monopolised Latin Americans’ attention.

Nor was OAS able to establish itself as the arbiter of conflicts between countries in the region, notably concerning leftover postcolonial border rivalries. The OAS’s voice did not count during the resolution of the Beagle conflict between Chile and Argentina in 1984, or during the peace deal signed between Ecuador and Peru in 1998.

With the 2000s and the rise to power of the left in several Latin American countries, the US lost some of its grip on the inter-American system. In 2005, for the first time in the history of the organisation, a secretary general was elected, then re-elected in 2010, without Washington’s support. In 2009, a resolution from the general assembly of the ministry of foreign affairs declared Cuba’s exclusion null and void. Havana acknowledged the gesture, but refused to return to the organisation.

As the Soviet bloc crumbled, the OAS devoted itself to defending the norms and values of liberal democracy.

The same year, the coup against Honduran president of Manuel Zelaya was punished by the country’s suspension from the OAS — a first. Only an agreement ensuring Zalaya’s return to Tegucigalpa in 2011 allowed for Honduras to rejoin into the organisation. The progressive governments of Latin America made the most of their relative cohesion and freed themselves from certain aspects of the inter-American system. After Mexico denounced the Rio Treaty in 2001, it was followed by Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Keen to prevent the OAS remaining a tool of the United States in its struggle against anti-imperialist governments, the left in the region chose to cooperate with the Caribbean. In particular Venezuela lent its support by selling the Caribbean states cheap oil when prices flared up. Most of the votes of the fourteen countries in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) belonging to the OEA helped to counter attacks from the United States against Venezuela and the left-wing governments of Latin America.

But, despite these successes, suspicion of the OAS has never disappeared among Latin American progressives, who know that the shifts in the balance of power at the heart of the permanent council did cannot fundamentally change the organisation’s structure and subservience to Washington. Mostly funded by the United States, from which it retains up to 60% of its yearly budget — and the entire budget of some of its branches — the OAS’s bureaucrats are predominantly Latin American, though they live in Washington and show staunch loyalty toward the institution—which, for its part, rewards its employees by endowing them with professional prestige.

Left-wing governments therefore decided to encourage a new form of regionalism. This exceptional moment led to the founding of the Union of South American States (Unasur), in 2008. Unasur was a risky bet. It was based on cooperation along political, economic, and defence lines, among others, and its objectives went beyond those of other South American cooperation mechanisms, showing more ambition than the OAS’s mandate, especially — but not only — in its economic and developmental dimensions. Notably, Unasur intervened in interior political crises in 2008 in Bolivia, in 2010 in Ecuador, then in 2012 in Paraguay, as well as in international conflicts like that between Venezuela and Colombia in 2010. For its part, the OAS was excluded from all these mediations and interventions.

Under the leadership of Almagro, the OAS has once again become synonymous with the ‘Monroe Doctrine’.

Then came the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), ie the countries of the Western hemisphere including Cuba and excluding the United States and Canada. This forum, albeit less institutionalised than Unasur and lacking a constitutive treaty, was nevertheless dedicated to political cooperation between the region’s states, and to international discussions. Indeed, several Celac meetings took place — with the European Union, Celac-China, Celac-Russia, Celac-India, and so on.

In 2015, Luís Almagro, who was close to the Uruguayan president José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, a figure of the Latin American left, was elected to the role of secretary general of the OAS. Nominated by Mujica and supported by the region’s left-wing governments, the former Uruguayan foreign minister promised to pursue the path of independence set out by his predecessor José Miguel Insulza. But the progressive wave was running out of momentum. And Almagro adapted: he swiftly recast himself as the games master of a consolidating right and orchestrated the OAS’s return under the auspices of a United States soon to be led by a certain Donald Trump.

Amalgro quickly became interested in Venezuela. He provided military support to the opposition and was against every attempt at negotiation. When the former president of the Spanish government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero argued for a negotiated political solution in Venezuela, Almagro retorted, ‘Don’t be stupid’ (3). Almagro — like Washington — had decided that the only possible solution involved regime change. He praised the US’s coercive economic measures. As Donald Trump’s administration explained that ‘all options were on the table’, suggesting the possibility of a military option, Almagro backed the threat and brandished the argument of a humanitarian intervention, which caused concern even among of the Latin American governments of the Lima group, despite it being an alliance built with the aim of isolating Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Nevertheless the secretary general’s enthusiasm for the defence of ‘democracy’ does not extend all the way to Brazil. The impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff did not move him any more than the imprisonment, without evidence, of former president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, which removed him from the 2018 presidential campaign. The human rights violations committed by Jovenel Moïse’s government in Haïti, during the 2018-19 protests, did not evince a stronger reaction. When Almagro visited Ecuador at the end of October 2019, after the country’s largest protests in modern history and a wave of unprecedented repression, he congratulated president Lenín Moreno on the way he had managed the crisis, without mentioning the fact his repression had resulted in several deaths. In Almagro’s eyes, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera — himself the architect of violent repression against social movements — ‘efficiently defended public order, all the while taking special measures to guarantee human rights’ (4). As to Colombia, Almagro said nothing of the daily disappearances of trade unionists or the government’s abandonment of the peace process: he expressed concern about the violence of protesters who rejected the neoliberal policies of president Iván Duque.

Return to the 1950s

It was in Bolivia that Almagro performed his masterstroke. In October 2019, a general election was held. The incumbent president Evo Morales won the election in the first round, with 47.08% of the votes, against his main rival Carlos Mesa, who was behind by more than 10% of votes (36.51%). According to the Bolivian constitution, when a candidate wins more than 40% of votes in the first round with a majority of at least 10% over the candidate that comes second, they are elected in the first round. But the OAS’s electoral observation mission planted uncertainty right from the announcement of the first results, by mentioning an ‘explicable change in trend’ (5) in the vote count. As several statistical studies have since demonstrated, this ‘change in trend’ was in fact the result of the late count of several geographical regions favourable to Morales.

Still the mainstream media cried fraud; the opposition became radicalised; Morales went into exile under threat from the army. The OAS never managed to prove its accusations of fraud, as Washington’s Center of Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) (6), among others, revealed. Several weeks after these events, Jeanine Añez’s de facto government announced its support for the re-election of Almagro, a man who, according to the new minister of foreign affairs Karen Longarec, ‘played a fundamental role in the defence of democracy in the region’ (7).

The re-election of Almagro marks the unequivocal return to an OAS favourable to the United States. If the organisation was seeking to reinvent itself and win legitimacy as a defender of democracy, its bet failed. Under the leadership of Almagro, the OAS has once again become synonymous with the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ — a reference to president James Monroe at the beginning of the 19th century, according to whom Latin America constituted a ‘backyard’ where the United States would tolerate no foreign interference. This is the principle that US secretary of state Mike Pompeo celebrated, in January 2020, as ‘a return to the spirit of the OAS in the 1950s and 1960s’ (8).

Guillaume Long

Former foreign minister of Ecuador, and an analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC

Translated by Lucie Elven

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(1) Speech on 4 February 1962.

(2) Sixth resolution of the eighth consultation meeting of the foreign ministers of the OAS, in Punta del Este (Uruguay), 22-31 January, 1962.

(3) EFE, Washington, DC, 21 September 2018.

(4) EFE, Santiago de Chili, 9 January 2020

(5) Press release, 21 October 2019

(6) Jake Johnston and David Rosnick, ‘Observing the observers : The OAS in the 2019 Bolivian elections’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, 10 March 2020.

(7) Alejandra Arredondo, ‘Bolivia apoya reelección de Almagro en la OEA’, VOA Noticias, 23 January 2020.

(8) Speech to the permanent council of the OEA, 17 January 2020.

monday
5 october 2020

At his speech to the Conservative Party Conference, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak spoke of the nation’s ‘sacred responsibility’ to ‘balance the books’, adding that ‘hard choices’ would have to be made. (See our new ebook, ‘Public debt: embracing the new reality’.) Next April, Sunak plans to cut Universal Credit benefit payments back down to the level they were at before being increased because of Covid-19. This move will cost 6 million households £1040 a year. Ten years ago, the Marmot review warned that cutbacks to the welfare state would lead to a chasm in life expectancy between rich and poor. And that’s exactly what happened. (Also read ‘The road beyond Wigan Pier’.)

In Britain, life expectancy dropped in a decade

Austerity is the killer

Ten years ago the Marmot review warned that policies of public austerity after the 2008 financial crash would lead to a chasm in life expectancy between rich and poor. And that’s exactly what happened.

by Michael Marmot 

Growing poverty: more people in the UK are resorting to food banks

Ian Forsyth · Bloomberg · Getty

Even before the arrival of a pandemic to threaten Britain’s health and economy, the UK had lost a decade and the results were showing. Health, as measured by life expectancy, had improved annually for more than a century, but the rate of increase had slowed dramatically, and health inequalities were growing. Bad as the situation was in England, the damage to health in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was even worse.

If health has stopped improving, so has society. Global evidence shows that health is a good measure of social and economic progress. When a society flourishes, so does health; when a society has large social and economic inequalities, it has serious health inequalities.

People’s health is not just about how well the health service is funded and functions, important as that is, but about the conditions in which they are born, grow, live, work and age, and inequities in power, money and resources. Together, these are the social determinants of health.

UK life expectancy had improved since the end of the 19th century, but the rate of increase started slowing dramatically in 2011. In 1981-2010 it increased by about one year every five and a half years among women, and every four years among men. In 2011-18 it slowed to one year every 28 years among women, and every 15 years among men.

I contend that the real causes of the failure of health to improve are social; this is supported by growing inequalities in health according to deprivation and region

This slowing down is real, but the explanations have been disputed. We have considered more prosaic explanations: perhaps we have reached peak life expectancy and it has to slow? Other European countries with longer life expectancies than the UK have continued to increase; we have some way to go before we hit peak expectancy. Perhaps we had bad winters and bad flu outbreaks? Our analyses showed that improvements in mortality slowed in winter and non-winter months. At most, winter could account for between one sixth and one eighth of the slowdown.

Lower life expectancy

I contend the real causes of the failure of health to improve are social; this is supported by the growing inequalities in health according to deprivation and region. The more deprived the area, the lower the life expectancy. In 2016-18 men in the least deprived 10% of England had a life expectancy 9.5 years longer than men in the most deprived; for women the gap was 7.7 years. In 2010-12 the gap was 9.1 years for men and 6.8 years for women. In the most deprived 20% of areas there was no improvement at all for women, in sharp contrast to continued improvement for the most fortunate 20%.

There are well known regional differences in mortality and life expectancy: people in the north of England are sicker. Deprivation and geography come together in important ways. For people in the least deprived 10% of districts, there is little regional difference in life expectancy; it doesn’t much matter where you live, your subgroup will have improved its life expectancy. The more deprived your district, the greater the disadvantage of living in the north compared with London and the southeast.

The social gradient in healthy life expectancy is even steeper: years in poor health increased between 2009-11 and 2015-17, from 15.8 years to 16.2 in men and from 18.7 years to 19.4 years in women. There are no routine figures produced for life expectancy based on race or ethnicity, but those we have suggest half of minority ethnic groups — mostly black, Asian and mixed — have significantly lower disability-free life expectancy than white British men and women.

This damage to the nation’s health need not have happened. After 2008 both the Labour government under Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led coalition were concerned that health inequalities in England were too wide and I was commissioned to review what could be done to reduce them. With colleagues at what became the UCL Institute of Health Equity, I convened nine task groups of more than 80 experts to review the evidence and assembled a commission to deliberate on it.

The result was the Marmot review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, published in 2010 (1). Though commissioned by the Labour party, it was welcomed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in a public health white paper.

The poor get poorer

A report by the Royal Society for Public Health, based on a survey that asked experts and its members their views, classed it as a major 21st-century UK public health achievement, along with the ban on public smoking and the soft drinks industry levy. However, its central recommendation that ambitious public policies, targeting all age groups, could act on the social determinants of health to reduce inequalities was largely ignored.

The governments elected in Britain in 2010 and 2015 made austerity central to policy. Public expenditure was cut from 42% of GNP in 2009-10 to 35% in 2018-19, to restore the economy to growth by restricting public expenditure. By one measure, at least, it didn’t work: wage growth. International comparisons of this between 2007 and 2018 show that Britain, with minus 2%, was the third worst, above only Greece and Mexico, of 35 rich (OECD) countries.

This damage to the nation's health need not have happened. After 2008, both the Labour government under Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led coalition were concerned that health inequalities in England were too wide and I was commissioned to review what could be done to reduce them

The governments would probably have denied that the real purpose was to make the poor poorer and allow the top 1% to resume the trajectory, briefly interrupted by the global financial crisis, of garnering wealth. But that was the effect. Spending on family welfare was cut by 40%; local government expenditure by 31% for the most deprived 20%, compared with 16% for the least deprived 20%; and funding for sixth-form and further education by 12% per pupil (2).

If the architects of these policies imagined all that money had been wasted hitherto, the evidence indicates they were wrong. Our new report, Health Equity in England: the Marmot Review 10 Years On (3), examines impacts in five of the six areas of recommendations we made in 2010: give every child the best start in life; ensure access to education and lifelong learning; improve employment and working conditions; ensure people have enough money to lead a healthy life; promote sustainable places and communities. We show that austerity has taken a toll on almost all social determinants of health, worsening inequalities.

Yet we know early childhood is a crucial life stage, not just for health but for development — cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and behavioural. Good early child development predicts good school performance, which predicts better educational and occupational opportunities and living conditions in adulthood.

The signs are not good

The signs are not good. As a result of cuts to local government spending, 1,000 children’s centres involved in Sure Start (a government programme to support pre-school children and parents) are estimated to have had to close. The welcome support for childcare for older pre-school children does not make up for this.

A much-used measure of child poverty is how many children live in households with less than 60% of the median income. In 2009-12 the figure was 18%, rising to 20% in 2015-18. The cost of housing can drive people into poverty, and after housing costs are taken into account, the figure rose from 28% in 2009-12 to 31% in 2015-18.

The housing crisis has led to a rise in homelessness and increased costs: the proportion of people spending more than a third of their income on housing follows the social gradient, but has risen in all income groups. In the lowest 10% of income in 2016-7, 38% of families were spending more than a third of income on housing: the figure had been 28% a decade earlier.

More people do not have enough money and now resort to food banks. There are more left-behind communities living in poor conditions with little reason for hope of improvement.

All these factors are interrelated, so it is hard to say which affect health inequalities most. In 2010 we wrote, ‘Health inequalities are not inevitable and can be significantly reduced. They stem from avoidable inequalities in society.’ That hasn’t changed.

Michael Marmot

Michael Marmot is director of the University College London Institute of Health Equity. An earlier version of this article appeared in the British Medical Journal on 25 February 2020.

Original text in English