If 2,700 people were killed in a single transport or industrial disaster, Britain would be placed on an emergency footing. Ministers would be summoned to answer questions. Inquiries would be announced. Demands for action would dominate public life.
Yet more than 2,700 people can die prematurely during two heatwaves and the political system treats it as another weather story. Alerts are issued, advice is repeated and the country carries on.
A rapid analysis by researchers at Imperial College London, the Met Office and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimates that about 550 heat-related deaths occurred during the May heatwave and a further 2,200 during June. At the three-day peak of the June heatwave, the estimated heat-related death rate reached around 440 people a day.
The researchers calculate that about 42 per cent of the deaths were attributable to the additional heat caused by human-induced climate change. It added an estimated 3–4°C to maximum temperatures across England and Wales.
Of course these are modelled estimates, not a final count of observed deaths or a list of death certificates bearing the word ‘heat’. The researchers applied established, peer-reviewed evidence about the relationship between temperature and daily mortality to historical records. An official UK Health Security Agency analysis based on observed mortality is still to follow.
Heat often kills by triggering heart attacks, strokes or respiratory failure—often several days after the exposure—which are then recorded as the immediate medical cause of death. Counting only certificates that explicitly mention heat would conceal most of the toll.
The victims die separately, in bedrooms, hospital wards and care homes. Their deaths enter the records as individual medical events, not a collective disaster. That dispersal makes an enormous death toll easier to disguise and responsibility easier to evade.
There was nothing natural or unavoidable about its scale. Fossil-fuel capitalism is making extreme heat more frequent and more severe. But whether high temperatures lead to mass deaths also depends on the society they hit.
The heat passed through badly designed housing, privatised energy priced beyond many households’ means, understaffed hospitals and care services, workplaces with no legal maximum temperature, and cities without enough trees, shade or public cooling spaces. Workers can still lose income if they stop because conditions are unsafe.
Those with money can cool their homes, work remotely or leave an overheated city. Those most exposed include elderly people living alone, tenants in heat-trapping flats, people with chronic illnesses, care-home residents, hospital patients and workers required to remain in dangerously hot workplaces. Sunshine is shared; protection from its deadly effects is rationed by class.
The government points to alerts and public advice while leaving individuals, councils, employers and an underfunded NHS to cope. But a warning system is not a protection system. A red alert doesn’t cool down homes, give workers the right to stop unsafe work on full pay or put more staff into hospitals and care homes. It tells people they are in danger while denying many of them the means to escape it.
The deaths expose two political failures. Successive governments have refused to cut emissions at the necessary speed because energy policy remains subordinate to oil and gas companies, investors and the demands of profit. They have also refused to adapt society: retrofitting and cooling homes, rebuilding hospitals and schools, protecting workers and reinforcing public infrastructure are treated as costs to be contained rather than necessities.
That retreat is already visible around Andy Burnham. Reports suggest he may pass over Ed Miliband for chancellor after pressure from Unite and GMB over his limited net-zero programme, and from City interests hostile to even modest change. Miliband’s programme remains market-bound and unequal to the crisis. But sacrificing even that shows that neither Labour’s cautious reforms nor union leaders’ sectional defence of existing fossil-fuel jobs offers a way forward. Workers must not be made to choose between secure jobs and a habitable climate. We need an independent working-class programme based on guaranteed unionised jobs with no loss of pay, public ownership and democratic planning.
Responsibility cannot be spread evenly across an abstract ‘humanity’. The working class did not choose an energy system dominated by fossil-fuel companies, speculative property development, privatised utilities or decades of austerity. The same class that profited from producing the crisis has the resources to shield itself from its worst effects.
The labour movement must fight for:
- a statutory maximum workplace temperature and the collective right to stop unsafe work on full pay;
- publicly funded retrofitting, ventilation, shading and cooling for homes, schools, hospitals and care facilities;
- free public cooling centres whenever extreme heat strikes;
- affordable electricity as an essential service, so its use is not rationed according to income;
- public ownership of energy and a rapid transition away from fossil fuels under workers’ and community control.
These 2,700 deaths are not merely a warning of a future climate catastrophe. They are evidence that the catastrophe has begun and that refusing to prepare for it is a political choice.
A society capable of mobilising billions to protect profit, property and military power can protect people from extreme heat. Its failure to do so tells us whose lives it values—and whose deaths it is prepared to ignore.
