With the chancellor apparently committed to a future balancing of the books, this chapter looks at what this means for future fiscal policy. It details the pressing future spending needs as we build back from the pandemic, address the much discussed ‘levelling up’ of our country and face up finally to the costs of an ageing population. It shows that there is a clear appetite for spending more on public investment and services, even if this means higher taxation. This has been apparent in survey data for decades, although receives precious little media coverage. While tax rises are not appropriate during the COVID-19 recovery phase, there nevertheless needs to be a conversation about how to support a future more active public sphere. Measures already announced to freeze public sector pay and increase income tax thresholds affect ordinary workers. The case is put that there should instead be a radically revised approach to wealth taxation, addressing anomalies in how capital gains and income are taxed and tapping into the enormous rise in household wealth during the neoliberal years, now widely seen as unfair. Newly published research shows this can raise money just as effectively as increases in income tax or VAT.

The chapter begins by detailing the massive economic support packages announced as the first COVID-19 lockdown was imposed and the accompanying promise to provide the NHS with ‘whatever it takes’. It shows how Conservative small-state ideology was jettisoned and a ‘magic money tree’ found that pushed up the annual budget deficit from £55 to £355 billion, 17 per cent of GDP. It will suggest that, in the light of this, people might question how necessary the preceding years of austerity had been, arguing that austerity in fact lowered economic growth, failed to pay down any of the massive debt from the financial crash and was based on flawed analysis.It will strongly refute the idea that the unprecedented costs of the lockdown must now be ‘paid for’ and the reckoning must come soon. Using detailed historical comparisons and arguments about the peculiar opportunity that negative real interest rates provide, it shows that we can accommodate a rise in the national debt without yet more austerity cuts to public services. The costs of the pandemic response can and should be treated in the same way that the one-off costs of war were in the past – paid off over the long term.

This chapter sets out how Elizabeth I’s extraordinary Poor Laws brought into being the world’s first collectivist-individualist society, a unique English political and moral achievement that mandated community support for orphans, widows, the infirm and sick, the old, the involuntary unemployed and single mothers and their children. It will show how this nurturing welfare system protected England from the scourge of famine – that other devastator of populations after plague – such that the English were free of large-scale famine more than 150 years earlier than the rest of Europe. It also helped power England’s exceptional economic growth, supporting a mobile workforce to develop secure in the knowledge that they would be supported if times were hard.

It details how these Poor Law provisions were misguidedly overturned in 1834 by the new, more exclusively individualist economics and utilitarianism of the nineteenth century before returning, over a century later, with the founding of the post-war Beveridge welfare state. This saw a collectivist-individualist balance restored in full all across society, a Golden Age of growth with a comprehensive welfare system funded by progressive taxation and leaders of enterprise incentivised to consider long-term returns alongside the welfare of their workforces and communities.

This final chapter argues that there is a far greater crisis heading our way. What is far worse than nature ‘biting back’ with a deadly virus is that we now live with the disturbing knowledge that the natural world that sustains us all is liable to collapse. COVID-19 is not a ‘once in a hundred years’ event that we can soon confine to folklore. It is a warning shot across our bows, alerting us to the seriousness of the imminent challenges of climate change and the escalating crises of nature and social inequality. These cannot be addressed unless we discard the neoliberal straightjacket and revitalise a nurturing society.

It is often considered that the industrial revolution was Britain’s most unique contribution to world history. However, that achievement emerged from a society and economy that had enjoyed unprecedented success due to its adoption since c.1600 of the policies, principles and practices of collectivist individualism, a more valuable British legacy to the world than the unbalanced individualism adopted in the subsequent industrial revolution. It is a legacy that urgently needs to be rediscovered to enable us all to find the commitment to each other needed to meet our imminent challenges. Coexistence, anti-exploitation and nurturing are the moral codes of the collectivist-individualist ethics, a morality of giving, not taking.

This chapter challenges the idea that there is a natural human condition of selfishness, as personified by the figure that has dominated economic theory for so long – ‘rational economic man’. It shows how the calculations and trade-offs that this sort of thinking promotes jar with our socially produced instincts and are entirely inappropriate morally. It presents evidence that refutes any such easy correspondence between this abstract Homo economicus and our actual motivations and behaviours.

It then looks back at our history to show that it has been moral narratives about who we are and want to be that have driven past transformational change. It uses the examples of the post-war welfare state and the revolution in local government in many of Britain’s major provincial cities during the period 1870–1900 (termed ‘gas and water socialism’ by its detractors) to illustrate this. In each case change was effected because the power elite was, firstly, persuaded of the moral case for action and, secondly, formulated the practical means to resource the major changes envisaged. It draws contemporary parallels with voices highlighting the dangers of escalating inequality and calling for a radical reset of corporate capitalism while questioning our favouring of growth over well-being.

This chapter shows that COVID-19 death rates were more than twice as high in areas of high deprivation as in less deprived areas. This is due, firstly, to a greater likelihood of contracting COVID-19 and then, secondly, to a greater vulnerability to its effects. Those with lower incomes are more likely to be key workers and to use public transport, exposing them to greater risk. This is compounded by a greater vulnerability to serious illness as underlying health conditions linked to deprivation – cardio-vascular disease, obesity and diabetes – interact with the virus. These co-morbidities often affect whole families, including those living in multi-generational households, increasing disease transmission. The higher death rates of the BAME population are discussed, alongside the structural discrimination and potentially direct racism that may have played into this.

The chapter continues with an analysis of the inadequacies of the benefit system as an insurance against hard times, and the likely long-term consequences of the poverty and destitution that will follow, especially in more deprived northern regions. It then focuses on the ‘COVID generation’ scarred by the loss of education and work, by unequal access to home learning, and carrying a mental health burden into the future.

This chapter provides a historic survey of pandemic responses over the last 650 years from when the plague first became endemic in Europe after 1347. It will show how the role of the state – initially Italian city-states and then the British and other nation-states – changed radically in response. Superseding the appeal to divine intervention for help, governments became involved in protecting and controlling their citizens at the most minute level. Across Europe and elsewhere the full range of tools of pandemic control from surveillance, tracking, quarantine, border patrols and economic support for those unable to work have in fact existed for hundreds of years.

It will argue that it is commerce, trade and war that historically have enabled pandemics to spread – they are not random events, but substantially man-made occurrences. By 2020, we had, in our quest for ever-expanding global markets and trade, created the perfect breeding ground for a new pandemic disease to emerge as we increasingly disturbed the habitats of other species. And we had also provided it with the perfect conditions to spread with our increasingly connected world. COVID-19 was always a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

Chapter 6 argues that businesses, especially large companies receiving government funding, should expect there to be conditionality attached to this. Other European countries have, unlike the UK, built in to their COVID-19 support packages requirements for environmental targets, protections for jobs and put caps on the interest rates banks can charge on government-backed loans. It will discuss the missed opportunity to secure a payback after the 2008 banking crisis and the moral hazard that the large-scale bailouts engendered. It will suggest that the loosening of monetary policy, both then and now, will, if not managed properly, continue to funnel money to the rich.

It will look at proposals to learn from past mistakes to secure a ‘pandemic payback’, for instance if the government were to take advantage of historically low interest rates to purchase equity stakes in businesses that face challenges but are fundamentally sound. It will look at international voices calling for a fundamental change in how companies are governed so that they serve a broad group of stakeholders, and proposals for changes to the law to make it the duty of directors to promote the long-term success of a company in place of short-term shareholder interest.

The historic perspective of Chapter 1 will inform a critique of the comparable responses to COVID-19, questioning why, with the clear warnings of SARS, MERS and Ebola, the UK was so unprepared for an event that had been anticipated for so long. It will explore the deficiencies of leadership in the lead-in to and especially during the response to COVID-19. It will look at whether decisions over lockdown in the UK were dangerously delayed and examine failures ranging from the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the inadequate track and trace infrastructure. It will reveal the U-turns, loss of authority over the stay safe messaging and panicked decisions that contributed to further misery and confusion.

It will end by reviewing the astonishing achievement of the scientists who developed new vaccines against COVID-19 in just a few short months. By 15 February 2021 the UK had met its target to vaccinate 15 million of its most vulnerable citizens, thanks to the efficiency of the NHS and supportive community volunteers. It will show the desperate race against time as the vaccination roll out coincided with escalating infections, a third national lockdown and one of the highest death tolls in the world.