There is no escaping the stark facts. Death knocks seven years sooner at the door of dustmen than dukes, of security guards sooner than solicitors. And new figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that that gap is refusing to close. The rich get richer and the poor get sicker, sooner.

What’s going on here? Why aren’t the proles behaving like the healthier middle classes keep instructing them? It’s got to stop. It makes us middle-class people feel bad.

We try so hard to teach them – you know, them, those vague, pale shadows we sometimes see falling out of pubs and pushing prams fatly with fags in their mouths – sobriety, self-discipline and abstinence from nicotine and narcotics. We urge them to exercise and eat up their greens. And then the lazy, intemperate ingrates go and drop dead on us before their time, giving us yet another burden of guilt to take to our obsessively deferred graves.

It will inevitably be mooted that more education, more urging, flashing-light warnings on fag packets, cider bottles that give you electric shocks when you drink more than two units and a free bicycle for every fat kid on a council estate will do the trick. Furthermore, a punitive tax on chips and Wispa bars will help the peasants to mend their ways and be more, well, like us.

Possibly. On the other hand, maybe not every road sweeper wants to live his life like a lawyer. Perhaps an infrastructure hygiene operative thinks that his grim life of humping up and down the road picking up dog turds every day requires all the willpower he has got, all the spirit he possesses and all the civic duty he can muster. And perhaps at the end of that day he would like to get smashed out of his face and eat a doner kebab or three, and don’t hold the trans fats.

In other words, perhaps he doesn’t want to live like a lawyer because the rewards are just too damn deferred. An exercise plan will pay off in a lifetime. A diet regime will work over roughly the same period. But a fag and a beer are for now. And now, when you’re poor, is all you’ve really got.

Now this is the part of the soul that legislation cannot reach, and that is why the wealth gap when it comes to health will never be closed, however much we judge and goad and hector and snoot. Class difference is not primarily about money or resources, or even power relations. It’s about a way of looking at the world – though whether the outlook of the working class is a cause or effect of being poor can never be established.

Although the poor have a fairly miserable time, and die early because of it, I also suspect they have something in their mindset that the future-obsessed bourgeoisie can never quite grasp in their endless search for a healthier, brighter, longer-lasting tomorrow. And that something is the simple delight of cheap, instant guilt-free pleasures without thought of consequence – a life lived in the present tense.

Having been both poor and middle-class, I can assert that being middle-class is far preferable. But I also know enough of those comfortable chaps and chapesses to know that for all their superior genes (yes, that’s what they secretly do believe) and lifestyle, not all is right with the middle-class head.

The thing is, they worry – terribly. They worry about their children’s education and how much it is going to cost. They worry about the maintenance of their status, however high on an absolute scale it happens to be. They worry about their blood pressure, about the up-to-dateness of their kitchens, about their pension plans, about property prices. They worry, in short, about the future.

Now, as in the past, and as for ever will be, the poor cannot risk that luxury. Alfred P. Doolittle informed the appalled Henry Higgins that he could not afford a conscience. He might equally have said that he couldn’t afford a future.

The idea of the future is essentially a middle-class fantasy, and a middle-class burden. People with a good degree may live seven years longer – but are they ever present in their own lives, or always situated somewhere six months, five years, twenty years ahead? Even on their deferred deathbeds, are they worrying that they’ve got the inheritance parcelled up fairly, that they’ve dodged death taxes efficiently, that the life insurance will cover the school fees? Material insecurity is the great working-class burden, psychological insecurity may be the great middle-class one. Each has consequences.

To live your life in an eternal future means you come out well in all the visible lifestyle indicators – longevity, health, income etc. To live your life in an eternal present is to fall short on all those indicators.

But it is, perhaps, to give your life a certain vitality that the bourgeoisie lack. This vitality is clear to anyone who has been to countries in the developing world where the populations have even less hope of longevity than our suffering proles.

Who cannot have asked themselves why the poor often appear so damn cheerful when their lives really, really suck? Could it be that they live and they die, but don’t worry too much one way or the other? You could call it ignorance, but you could equally call it wisdom born of suffering.

The middle classes live for tomorrow, but they die all the same. And who is to say who has made the better life? Well, the same middle class, obviously, since they compile the reports and compose the newspapers.

But the truth is that seven extra years may cost more than a PPP health plan, a yearly gym membership and a lifelong abstinence from anything that looks like fun. It may cost you a long life that you never really lived in the first place.

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