Reflections on the development of health inequalities policy in the United Kingdom

Abstracts are written to summarise documents and to whet the reader’s interest. Alas, many readers just use them as a substitute for reading the whole paper, which given the brevity of abstracts can give a somewhat distorted impression. I hope that having read this abstract, you will read on. If you do, you will find that I offer a little personal history and a little impersonal history on the development of interest in the issue of health inequalities in the United Kingdom. I then summarise the policy response of recent Labour governments, briefly detail the effects of this response, and finally offer my own three-pronged policy attack on our thus far really quite stubborn inequalities in health.