Speaking (via Zoom, of course) to Her Majesty the Queen at the height of the pandemic, Derek Grieve, a lynchpin of the Scottish vaccination programme, told the Monarch: “If I could bottle this community spirit and use it not just for the vaccination programme, but for other things, the job would be done,” to which the Queen replied: “Wouldn’t it be nice?” Professor Lord Hennessy quotes the exchange at the end of his deeply thoughtful new book about the duty of care that the people of this country, either by their own actions or channelled through the state, owe to each other.
Dividing time into “BC” (before Covid) and “AC” (after Covid), the book is testament to Hennessy’s own deep humanity as well as his expertise in the history of Britain since 1945, the era of the post-war consensus, about which he writes with such conviction. It is a valuable and exceptionally well-reasoned guide to how we might turn round a country battered not by war, as in 1945, but by a wave of disease unknown in living memory. It avoids drifting into idealism thanks to Hennessy’s awareness of how difficult it is, in a democracy, to secure agreement on any policy at all, let alone one requiring mass social consensus. He paints a Britain divided politically, as Brexit has shown and as Scotland may yet show further, and implies what an obstacle this division is to securing a decent standard of living for our people.
He begins with a short but brilliant primer on the history of welfarism, taking his lead from Beveridge and the five “giants” of his 1942 report: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Hennessy lists the extensive, and ruinously expensive, measures that the Attlee administration enacted in pursuit of this aim – the alternative being social unrest. After that, the story is familiar: Britain steadily became more prosperous throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but far less so than its defeated rival Germany, or, eventually Japan.
Investment in the unproductive sectors of the British economy took precedence over investment in the unproductive sectors; by the 1970s, management had lost the right to manage and had to act in concert with blinkered, and often deeply ignorant, trades unionists, who insisted on an avoidance of change. The period from 1973 to 1979 seems, in retrospect, a disaster film. It took a long time for politicians (of all parties) to realise that incomes policies and other such state interventions do not work in a country that believes (as to an extent some people did then believe, in a triumph of hope over experience) that we were a free market and not a command economy. The denouement came with the Winter of Discontent, and the only answer was Mrs Thatcher.
She not only broke the consensus but shifted the centre of gravity, which was why, when Tony Blair became prime minister after 18 years of Tory government, he sought to undo very little that she had done. Yet new giants, or rather demons, had surfaced, and it is mainly these that Hennessy feels it is essential to tackle now: not only in a post-Covid world, but in a world where our most fundamental international relationship has changed (thanks to Brexit) and in which, even before the pandemic, our living standards had been slow to recover after the credit crunch of 2008. Hennessy lists his new giants – though he prefers to call them tasks: social care, social housing, technical education, preparing our economy and our society for artificial intelligence and combating and mitigating climate change.
