Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
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LearningTranscript
00:00I want you to welcome up here a man who I've actually interviewed previously, who I find very inspirational.
00:06This is Professor Michael Marmot, author of the Marmot Review on Health and Equality.
00:12CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
00:14And that's before I've said anything.
00:30Beveridge's Five Giants are alive and thriving.
00:36I think of sickness, one of the five, as the outcome of the other four.
00:44And it's rather important, I think, because there is an argument, well, all we've got to do is get rid of that sickness and then everything will be fine.
00:57And so a bit of technology will get rid of the sickness and then everything will be fine.
01:05That is not my view.
01:07My view is that the health of the population tells us a great deal about how well that society is doing.
01:16And what we know is that we're doing really badly.
01:28I'm going to give you some figures, forgive me, but I'm a nerd.
01:32What can I do?
01:34And the problem with giving you figures is that Mark Thomas will then make fun of me for you.
01:44LAUGHTER
01:45Life expectancy in the UK had risen for 100 years, about one year every four years.
01:58Wow.
01:59Six hours every 24 hours.
02:02Can you imagine?
02:02If you came here at nine this morning, you left at three in the afternoon,
02:07your life expectancy would be as long at the end of that period as it was.
02:11In fact, it might even be longer because of what happened here enriched you and empowered you.
02:17It could even be longer.
02:19And in 2010, that slowed down dramatically.
02:25And in fact, for a 14-year period from 2009 to 2023,
02:33life expectancy did not improve at all.
02:36I do not know of another period in peacetime where we had 14 years of life expectancy not improving.
02:48That means society did not improve.
02:50That means the degree to which people's fundamental needs were being met was eroded.
02:57Second, the inequalities got bigger.
03:03If you classify people by where they live, classify where they live by level of deprivation,
03:11the greater the deprivation, the shorter the life expectancy, the higher the mortality,
03:17that gradient got steeper.
03:20And it's worse in the northeast of the country and the northwest of the country than it is in London.
03:29Over the period of austerity from 2010 on, life expectancy improved a bit in London.
03:37What the data show, and all my arguments are based on the evidence,
03:45what the data shows, if you're rich, it doesn't much matter where in the country you live.
03:53The poorer you are, the bigger the disadvantage of living in the northeast or the northwest
04:00or near Grenfell in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
04:10And even worse, health got worse.
04:15Life expectancy declined for the poorest people outside London.
04:20So this is where we were pre-pandemic, and it was made worse by the pandemic.
04:26Health had stopped improving.
04:29Inequalities in health were getting bigger.
04:32And health for the poorest people was getting worse.
04:37So when I say that beverage is five giants, so that's the sickness giant that I've talked about.
04:44But then we think about squalor.
04:46How many children does it take to die of black mold?
04:54Before we say we haven't solved this problem.
04:59Want?
05:04You're still here.
05:06You're thriving.
05:07You're thriving.
05:08I published figures that child poverty had, after housing costs, had gone up from 27% to 30%.
05:2030% of children.
05:24And the government's response was, oh, no, no, no, no.
05:27You're measuring relative poverty.
05:30Children living in households at less than 60% median income.
05:34If you measure absolute poverty, then we're doing brilliantly.
05:41There's a technical term for that.
05:43Bonner.
05:44Yeah.
05:52That's marginally more acceptable than the one I was going to use.
05:56The Joseph Rountree Foundation looks at deprivation doing without two or more of six basics.
06:13Housing, heat, light, food, clothing, and toiletries.
06:22One million children in 2022 living in a state of destitution.
06:31A 2.5-fold increase in five years.
06:37Children being admitted to hospital with rickets.
06:41While the rickets are getting richer.
06:43Scurvy.
06:43I wondered what the Chancellor at the time of the pandemic, who remembers who the Chancellor
06:57was at the time of the pandemic?
06:59It's a bit difficult because we had seven Chancellors in seven years.
07:03They're all using the same script anyway.
07:05Only five Prime Ministers in seven years.
07:08Seven Secretaries of State for Health.
07:11Out of chaos.
07:11People who'd actually stopped trying to govern.
07:16Out of chaos.
07:17And you remember when universal credit was uprated by £20 a week?
07:25And then overnight it was taken away.
07:29And we estimated that would put a further 200,000 children into poverty.
07:34I wonder what the Chancellor said to himself when he went to sleep that night.
07:40What a good day this was.
07:42How powerful could I be?
07:44200,000 more children into poverty overnight.
07:49And if you ask, could we do anything about child poverty?
07:52Well, if we could increase the number by 200,000 in 24 hours, couldn't we reduce the number?
08:05And I said, I like that sign.
08:08Why is there always money for war but not for education?
08:12The reason it resonates with me is not that I think we shouldn't spend money on defence.
08:22I think we should.
08:24But if I go to people in government and say, I want to spend more money on early child development,
08:32they say, where's your cost-benefit analysis?
08:35For whose benefit?
08:37When they want to spend money on war, they don't ask for a cost-benefit analysis.
08:44Should we defend Ukraine or not defend Ukraine?
08:48They don't say, where's the cost-benefit analysis?
08:50They only say it when you want to do something that they don't otherwise want to do.
08:56Now, you said that we are the sixth richest economy.
09:03That's true.
09:04But if you look at our national income per person, we're the 29th richest.
09:14Then if you look at the inequalities in income, we are near the top in Europe.
09:26And forgive me quoting that left-wing pink journal, the Financial Times.
09:32But it is pink in appearance, if not politics.
09:41John Byrne Murdoch looked at region in the UK.
09:47And he asked the question, if you took out the richest region of the UK, London, what
09:57would it do to national income?
10:00It would reduce national income by about 14%.
10:05If you take the richest region of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, out, it reduces income by about 2%.
10:14Take the richest region of Germany, out, Munich, Bavaria, about 2%.
10:21Even in the US, it doesn't reduce by much because it's bigger up.
10:26If you take London, out of the UK, the UK is as poor as Mississippi, the poorest American state.
10:41We are a poor country with a few rich people.
10:45And we have to do something about that.
10:55When the Economist newspaper points out that the council tax on Buckingham Palace is less than you'd pay for a flat in Newcastle, there's something wrong.
11:09Why wasn't that the number one priority of reforming?
11:13Reformers the monarchy!
11:15Well, if you like.
11:17But I mean...
11:18I'd rather...
11:22I'd rather do something about a fairer taxation system.
11:27That's what?
11:27As we know, spending on early childhood, and your point about school meals, it's an investment.
11:42It's an investment.
11:44It's not a cost.
11:46I mean, how do we do our sums that we think it's okay?
11:50I was saying to Mark earlier, I wrote, before the last election, I wrote an op-ed piece in the newspaper.
12:02This is so awful.
12:04If you look at the height of five-year-old children, in the 1980s, we ranked 60th out of 200 countries.
12:15Now, in 2015, the height of five-year-old children started to go down.
12:45What happened in 2015?
12:49Well, that was about five years after austerity began.
12:53And I said, I can hear that the opposition, the Labour opposition, is talking about growth, growth, growth.
13:01I'd like them to make growth of children the priority.
13:05I'd like to think.
13:18I remain doggedly hopeful.
13:22Doggedly hopeful.
13:24I was, I've been asked many times, are you optimistic?
13:28And it was pointed out to me that optimism and pessimism imply certainty.
13:38It means you know what's going to happen.
13:42Hope is the opposite of fear.
13:44And the difference is quite important, because if you know things are going to hell, well, why do anything?
13:55If you know they're going to get better, why do anything?
13:59But if you fear things are going really badly, but you hope we can make a difference, wow.
14:07And we've got now, in Britain, 50 Marmot communities.
14:15We've been working with communities all around the country.
14:19And, forgive me, Mark, I'm going to cite one more statistic.
14:25You know how badly local government's been hit.
14:33We plotted life expectancy for every local authority in England in 2010-12,
14:42and then the subsequent reduction in local government spending power.
14:48So you've got that, got this graph.
14:50Life expectancy in 2010-12, and then the subsequent reduction in local government spending power.
15:00The shorter the life expectancy, the steeper the reduction in local government spending power.
15:11And I look at this graph, and I think the kindest explanation I can give for this is absent-mindedness.
15:20Because they didn't know what they were doing.
15:23That's the kindest explanation.
15:26But I look at it, I look at it, and it's very systematic.
15:32The shorter the life expectancy, the steeper the subsequent reduction in local government spending.
15:38And I ask myself, in what moral universe could that be the right thing to do?
15:50It's a policy designed to make poor people sicker.
15:58What else could you conclude from that?
16:02So how can I hope?
16:05Well, it's these 50 communities that give me hope.
16:08I went to Northern Ireland recently, and I don't distinguish by Irish poets,
16:17but I looked up Seamus Heaney to say something Irish on the island of Ireland.
16:25And he's got a lovely poem, which I won't recite for you now.
16:30But there's a lovely phrase where he says,
16:34There are moments where hope and history rhyme.
16:41We have to make this a moment where hope and history rhyme.
16:47Sophie, have you got a question here?
17:05But you're right, it really is the hope that keeps us here.
17:10Do you think Beveridge's plan could be possible today?
17:14Not just possible today, but necessary, vital today.
17:20We have to address, I talk about the causes of the causes.
17:25The causes of ill health, we all know about, you know,
17:28not getting to see your doctor smoking, bad diet, and so on and so forth.
17:33But we need to look at the causes of the causes.
17:36And they reside in those four giants of beverage.
17:41So we need social action.
17:43We need to rediscover the public good.
17:49We forgot him.
17:51We thought that markets would do everything.
17:57And we just leave everything to the market and it'll all be fine.
18:01We need to rediscover the public good.
18:03So beverage is not just possible, it's essential.