It takes more than just a hard winter to explain why children are getting weaker and life expectancy has ‘Stopped'.

Party conference season is, to borrow a phrase, a good time to bury bad news. The focus of the media is on the soap opera struggles amongst the respective party elites and what kind of a fist the leaders make of their keynote speech.

While we’ve all been wondering how you mix an ‘exotic sprizm' two stories limped out into the world that deserve more attention than they've received. They shed light on the troubles we face now and suggest a worrying future ahead.

Children in the UK are physically weaker than they were sixteen years ago and life expectancy has stopped improving for the first time since 1982.

A report published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport by academics from the University of Essex examined the strength and fitness levels of 1200 children from Chelmsford in Essex over twenty years, finding that today’s children are taller and heavier than they were sixteen years ago, they also scored lower in strength tests.

The researchers also found that the decline in strength is accelerating, from 0.6% over the decade between 1998 and 2008, between then and 2014 strength levels declined by 1.6%.

Over the period covered levels of obesity have barely changed, 80% of the children tested had a normal BMI yet were found to be unfit, in contrast 70% of the children deemed to be obese were physically fit.

Dr Gavin Sandercock who led the programme told the BBC that the idea of a ‘healthy weight' was misleading and that the findings suggested children were less active now, he said ‘inactive lifestyles are a health risk,’ adding that physical fitness is ‘the single best measure of health in childhood and into adulthood'.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that life expectancy has stopped rising and in some parts of the country it is going into reverse, currently men can expect to live for 79 years and women for 82.
A spokes person for the ONS told the BBC that a higher than expected number of deaths between 2015/17 was down to a bad flu season and that there was an ‘ongoing debate’ over other potential causes.

Some academics have linked the stalling of life expectancy to government austerity policies, Dr Kingsley Purdem of Manchester University told the BBC that ‘poverty, austerity and cuts to public services are impacting on how long people live'.

Others have suggests a wider range of causes, also speaking to the BBC Professor Stephen Evans of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said ‘ we still do not know how much of this is a result of direct health effects such as flu epidemics, how much is a result of social and economic factors and how much is a failure to go on improving smoking cessation and other preventive measures’.

What is clear is that the UK lags behind other developed nations including France, the Netherlands and Japan when it comes to life expectancy.

The story here isn’t, mostly, about bad parents feeding their children burgers and using the TV as a childminder whilst they smoke and drink themselves into an early grave; however much health campaigners might wish that to be the case. There is something else happening that goes to the troubled roots of our society.

At the heart of our bright, busy world is a black knot of feat. If children are less active now than they were just sixteen years ago it is because their parents are fearful about letting them play outside. The schools they go to are run by adults who because fear falling down the Ofstead league tables squeeze any activity that can’t be quantified through testing out of the curriculum.

Life expectancy is stalling because our lives are becoming a toxic cycle of work, stress and worry. Poverty is exhausting, the endless effort needed to get through the day grinds people down, fear is here too, in the shape of a growing dread amongst the working and middle classes that one bit of bad luck could see them joining the line outside the food bank.

For years, maybe decades, we have been able to ignore the elephant in our national drawing room, we can do so no longer. The rising numbers of people sinking like stones because they can no longer swim in the choppy waters of modern life show how badly things have gone wrong.

If we are going to stop the decline in life expectancy and give the next generation any chance of living healthy lives. We have to stop chasing the impossible goal of endless growth and look again at our priorities, swapping those tied to brutal individualism and the demands of business for ones that respond to our needs as human beings instead.