Danny Dorling in The Correspondent:
The numbers of people dying, week in, week out, tell us more about the four countries of the UK than we could ever hope to learn from the attention given to Brexit. This is a kingdom falling apart.
I’m a geographer who has been studying mortality records in the UK for the past 30 years. The data I review both yearly and weekly has given me a perspective on British society often missed when following the political circus.
In early 2014, I published an article in New Statesman magazine trying to highlight that the fact that something very unusual was happening: the life expectancy of elderly people in the UK – notably women – had begun to fall.
The following year, there was a huge rise in deaths. The numbers were released the day after the Brexit referendum result was announced.
More here.