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Good morning.

If you’re looking for cheery light reading, let me recommend that you don’t pick up Public Health England’s just-published 2021 Health Profile for England. It’s a weighty report, strewn with tables and charts, in which good news is hard to find. Life expectancy has fallen – perhaps there is no surprise there, since the fall is partly caused by excess deaths from COVID. But in addition inequalities in life expectancy - and perhaps more importantly, inequalities in expectation of healthy life – have increased. Men and women in the most privileged areas of the country can reckon on enjoying a rather startling 19 more years of healthy life than those in the most deprived. The Prime Minister’s levelling up agenda may be more challenging than we all imagined.

The author of the New Testament Book of Acts, Luke, tells us that the members of the first Christian community in Jerusalem held ‘all things in common, and sold their possessions and parted with them as any had need’ and – in a nice additional detail in one evocative translation – ‘they shared all their meals with unaffected joy.’ ‘Yeah, right’ might be the pithy response to that description. Just about every small or large scale utopian experiment founded on radical equality has ended in tears – usually within a generation at most. So surely Luke is looking back, through rose tinted spectacles, at the heady days of the newly founded church, knowing only too well, as the rest of his book shows, that what began with ‘unaffected joy’ would pretty soon have its fair share of quarrels and contention.

Maybe so. But even if that description of the first Christian community is somewhat idealized, it has functioned and can still function exactly as that, as an ideal. That ideal is preserved in a word we perhaps don’t use as much as we once did – the word ‘commonwealth’. And one particular usage of the word has totally gone by the board, I think. A company of actors who joined together as a partnership sharing in the proceeds of their performances used to be referred to as a ‘commonwealth’ – and if this has none of the heady fervour of celebrated utopian communities, it kept alive an ideal of fair shares for all those engaged in a common enterprise.

Of all the things that we might want to share fairly, life itself is about the most fundamental. Perfect equality in life expectancy, and more importantly, in healthy life expectancy, is probably not a realistic or sensible goal – but a disparity of almost twenty years surely mocks any sense that we’re in this together. We may not aspire to live as a nation with the fervent sense of community Luke attributed to the early church; but if we don’t do something to address these inequalities, we will surely be divided between those who have reason to be resentful on one side, and those who are, or ought to be, deeply troubled on the other.

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