Universal credit plunges kids into poverty and 120,000 have died because of austerity – but Jacob Rees-Mogg wants more cuts

Rees-Mogg advocates slashing taxes, which would mean still more cuts to social care and social support, and thus more dead bodies. Where is the compassion?

Poverty in Britain? Pah! Have you seen the flat screens and satellite dishes in the homes of the people broadcasters feature when they do documentaries about it? Go to Africa if you want to see real poverty.

There’s no real poverty in the UK. We have a welfare state (which we want to dismantle, but let’s not mention that because it might frighten the children).

You regularly see this sort of argument doing the rounds in Conservative circles. The psychopathic trolls among the party’s supporters are particularly fond of it.

The reality is rather different, and it’s so bleak that it rarely features on TV screens. Producers tend to be chary about screening dying people.

Yes, that’s right: dying people. Poverty kills. And it kills here just as it does in Africa and other less apparently wealthy parts of the world. We do have a welfare state in this country, but the Conservative Party’s beloved austerity has chipped away at it over the course of seven years, to the detriment of the old, the disabled, the infirm and the poor.

The consequences of that have led to an accusation of “economic murder” in a paper that has just been published in the journal BMJ Open. Among its co-authors are academics from University College London, Cambridge University and Oxford University, three of the top academic institutions not just in Britain but in the world.

The drily titled “Effects of health and social care spending constraints on mortality in England: a time trend analysis” calculates that there have been 120,000 excess deaths since 2010, when the Conservatives took power via the coalition and started swinging the axe.

The study says the over-sixties - and in particular care home residents – have borne the brunt. The critical factors it identifies as leading to so many of them dying needlessly early are cuts to social care spending and a reduction in the number of nurses. It’s worth bearing the latter in mind because Brexit, of course, is squeezing the supply of nurses as EU nationals resident in these islands understandably vote with their feet.

By 2020 the “mortality gap” – one of those bland terms that are frequently used to describe brutal truths – could have hit 200,000, even with the extra funding that has recently been allocated to social care.

Every day there are 100 needless deaths in England, and they come as a result of government policy. Just think about that figure for a moment. It’s positively chilling. Just writing about it leaves me feeling in need of a valium. I’d imagine that would be true of anyone to whom empathy is not an alien concept.

If the gap is to be closed, the academics say, £6.3bn a year more is needed.

And the response of Jeremy Hunt’s Department of Health to that?

It described the figures as “speculative” and argued that “firm conclusions” couldn’t be drawn from the work. That’s like a kid in the schoolyard whose answer to everything is “but you stink, nyah, nyah”.

Now open up your Twitter feeds, trolls, while the more erudite variety are trotted out by journals such as The Spectator to argue that the study just goes to show how academics are all a bunch of woolly liberals, without making any attempt to address the points they make on the back of the painstakingly constructed research they have conducted.

Attack the messenger because you can’t come up with anything approaching a decent argument to counter the message. There’s a lot of that about at the moment.

Meanwhile the dying goes on. And on, and on. And it isn’t just in care homes where the suffering is brutal. Today sees a vote on the Government’s universal credit, another calculated act of political savagery that will probably squeeze through thanks to the £1bn magic money tree Theresa May found for the Democratic Unionist Party so she could stay in No 10.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that by 2022 low-income families will be worse off through cuts to it, despite the Tories palliatives: tax changes and a higher minimum wage. That’s before we even get to the train wreck of its implementation.

Flat-screen TVs? As inflation continues to bite as a result of the Brexit driven fall in the pound, Britain’s poor are increasingly struggling simply to afford food. It’s why the food banks that the execrable Jacob Rees-Mogg described as “rather uplifting” won’t be short of business anytime soon.

The hard Brexit fanboy advocates slashing taxes, which would mean still more cuts to social care and social support, and thus more dead bodies. A genuine question for you, Mr Rees-Mogg: you advocate pride in Britain? Please could you tell me why I should feel proud of being part of a country whose Government is complicit in 120,000 needless deaths and counting?

I doubt I’ll get an answer from the pumped up latter-day Lord Brideshead, whom a lot of people think should be the next prime minister, and whose wing of the party wants to burn the welfare state and turn Britain into a foggy Singapore, regardless of how many people die in the process. They’re little people, after all, and who cares about them?

Turns out there might just be enough people in these isles who do care to make life difficult for his party.

Robert Halfon, the former skills minister, recognised this when he said that the Conservatives were on “death row” in the wake of the last general election and would remain there unless they could offer a “positive vision” that contrasted with their perception as the party of austerity. He (laughably) suggested they try a rebranding exercise to create the Conservative Workers Party.

It’s going to take more than a rebrand. There are real people on death row thanks to Conservative policies, and their numbers are growing. It is time we took Mr Halfon at his word and substituted his benighted party for them.