'We’re starving on a diet of austerity... and it works for absolutely no one'

13 July 2023 , 18:06

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In the 12 months to April, 10,896 NHS patients suffering from malnutrition, including 312 children, were taken into hospital care (Image: PA)

...and this is England in the 21st century? Almost 11,000 people were admitted to hospital with malnutrition last year.

That’s not having enough to eat. Going without food. In a word, starvation.

Incomprehensible, but true. This isn’t Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s sub-standard, sub-human Sunak country. Our nation, reduced to Victorian illnesses such as rickets and scurvy.

Look at the facts: in the 12 months to April, 10,896 NHS patients suffering from malnutrition, including 312 children, were taken into hospital care.

Cases of this utterly preventable illness have more than doubled in a decade of Tory rule, and quadrupled since the bankers’ recession of 2008.

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And scurvy, once the scourge of 19th-century sailors deprived of vitamin C, is back, with 171 cases reported in 2020-21. Rickets, supposed to have disappeared in the 1960s, is also reappearing: 482 patients, mostly children.

These illnesses are not acts of God. They’re associated with poverty, homelessness and deprivation. The government policy link is inescapable.

Dr Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, says: “This is about the social determinants of ill health, indicative of the last 15 years of austerity.” She blames the poor “tea and toast” diet of some elderly people for the rise in scurvy.

George Orwell called this “bread and scrape”. Looks like we’re back on The Road to Wigan Pier, his bleak report on Britain in the 30s.

Paul Routledge