Dr Andy Knox is a GP and Associate Medical Director at the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board. He has spent decades listening to people at the sharp end of British society. He is also a committed Christian. Sick Society – reimagining how we live well together is his exploration of why things are going so wrong for communities across the UK and what we might do to bring about change. NOW’s Director, Roger Higman looks inside.
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“If you are not outraged then you are not paying attention” says the frontispiece of Dr. Andy Knox’s Sick Society. It’s a cliche but an appropriate one for the tales that Dr Knox tells are truly shocking. From the young man killed by a rubbish truck, while sleeping rough, through the teacher on the verge of suicide, to the trucker suffering chronic heart disease, the lives of millions of people are blighted and curtailed as a result of growing inequalities in an economic and political system that is failing to meet their needs.

As Dr. Knox says himself: “however painful it might be, we need to sit, to pause and to allow ourselves to feel the pain of what is really going on in our communities and across the globe … From this place, we can uncover some of the reasons why we find ourselves where we are… Only then might we find a way forward into a future that is good for everyone”.

Our society is sick and it is individualism that is killing us. Specifically, Dr. Knox argues that we are “love sick”. His hope is “to be part of a growing call to realign and reorientate our life together both now and for the future generations; towards a future of wellbeing for all people and the planet, built on love”.

Through nearly 500 pages, he explores and explains what that means.  “Social injustice is hard baked into the way our society is set up” he argues, quoting Sir Michael Marmot and others who have shown how even life expectancy varies between communities within a few miles of each other, based on social class. The NHS is on its knees, he notes, “because we continue to focus on responding to ill-health, rather than creating a society of wellbeing”.

He draws on his skills as a diagnostician, his experience as a campaigning professional and above all, as an empathetic human being, to discuss how conventional economic dogmas are failing to make us happy and reducing millions to misery. At times, it’s hard reading. The personal tragedies that he recounts are particularly harrowing.

Yet Dr Knox is a compassionate guide. He breaks up the narrative into bite-sized chunks, considering topics such as schools, workplaces and dignity. The typeface is large, so the pages fly by, and he ends each chapter with suggestions for reflection.

What I loved most were the pithy conclusions written in bold, each of which could be a maxim for social change:

“It is time to let love rule”

“Listening is an art form” 

“Loving societies care about the environment people are living in”

“Loving societies prioritise children”

“Loving societies welcome strangers”.

At almost two inches thick, the hardback version of Sick Society is a chunky book to carry around. Its size and its sombre black cover reminded of the Bibles my parents kept in every room of our house.

It is the sort of book that could inspire a movement. Let’s hope it does.

 

Sick Society: reimagining how we live well together by Dr Andy Knox is available from Boz Publications and all good booksellers.