Health inequalities and New Labour: how the promises compare with real progress

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7498.1016

BMJ 2005;330:1016-1021 (30 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7498.1016

Education and debate

Health inequalities and New Labour: how the promises compare with real progress

Mary Shaw, reader in medical sociology¹, George Davey Smith, professor of clinical epidemiology², Danny Dorling, professor of human geography²

¹ Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2PR, ² Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN

Correspondence to: M Shaw Mary.Shaw@bristol.ac.uk

Inequalities in health between rich and poor areas of Britainwidened in the 1980s and 1990s, and the current government hasrepeatedly expressed its intention to reduce these inequalities.In this article, however, the authors report that inequalitiesin life expectancy have continued to widen, alongside wideninginequalities in income and wealth, and argue that more potentand redistributive policies are needed

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Introduction

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the World Health Organization'sGlobal Strategy for Health for All by the Year 2000, which proposed38 targets to reduce inequalities in health.¹ These targetswere taken up by the governments of many countries, includingMargaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the United Kingdom,which, just like Tony Blair's current administration, wishedthat inequalities in health would fall (see box).

In Britain the observation of and preoccupation with healthinequalities has a much longer history than the last two administrations,³and many recent studies have documented a social and spatialpolarisation of life chances continuing into the 1980s and late1990s from a possible lull in the 1970s.^4-7 Clearly then, theHealth for All aim of reducing inequalities between groups ofthe population had not been reached by the end of the 1990s—infact, the opposite had occurred even though the fourth goalof . . . [Full text of this article]

Tracking progress towards (sensible) targets

Taking poverty into account

What does all this show?

What do recent changes suggest for inequalities in the future?

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