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Literature now exists on how the media reports on health inequalities. One compelling concept as to the sources and impacts of health inequalities is “social murder” as articulated by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 volume, The Condition of the Working Class in England, whereby the capitalist economic system sent workers prematurely to the grave to serve the profit motives of the bourgeoisie. There is a reemergence of the concept in the academic literature in response to growing social and health inequalities, but is this material being reported to the public? We examine news content since the turn of the 21st century and find a significant increase since 2017 in reporting that evokes the social murder concept in relation to the Grenfell Tower Fire, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the imposition of austerity in Canada and the UK. We consider these developments in relation to journalists’ roles and their reporting on health inequalities.

Progress in reducing health inequalities through public policy action is difficult in nations identified as liberal welfare states. In Canada, as elsewhere, researchers and advocates provide governing authorities with empirical findings on the sources of health inequalities and document the lived experiences of those encountering these adverse health outcomes with the hope of provoking public policy action. However, critical analysis of the societal structures and processes that make improving the sources of health inequalities difficult—the quality and distribution of living and working conditions, that is the social determinants of health—identifies limitations in these approaches. Within this latter critical tradition, we consider—using household food insecurity in Canada as an illustration—how polemics and anger mobilization, usually absent in health inequalities research and advocacy—could force Canadian governing authorities to reduce health inequalities through public policy action. We explore the potential of using high valence terms such as structural violence, social death and social murder, which make explicit the adverse outcomes of health‐threatening public policy to force government action. We conclude by outlining the potential benefits and threats posed by polemics and anger mobilization as means of promoting health equity.

The Condition of the Working Class in England (hereafter, CWCE) by Friedrich Engels is a masterpiece of urban research not only for its explicit descriptions of the living and working conditions of members of the Victorian‐era working class and their effects on health but also its insights into the sources of these conditions through a political economy analysis. For Engels, the capitalist economic system, with the support of the state apparatus, prematurely sickened and killed men, women and children in its unrestrained pursuit of profits. Our reading of CWCE in 2023 concludes that Engels identified virtually every social determinant of health now found in contemporary discourse with his insights into how their quality and distribution shape health clearly relevant to present‐day Canada. Revisiting CWCE directs our attention to how the same economic and political forces that sickened and killed members of the English working class in 1845 now do so in present‐day Canada. Engels’s insights also suggest means of responding to these forces. We place these findings within Derrida’s concept of spectre and Rainey and Hanson’s concept of trace to show how ideas from the past can inform the present.