A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid

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Build Back Fairer discusses inequalities before and during Covid in health, life expectancy, employment and pay, education, housing, poverty, childcare, the impact of “austerity” cuts to public funding, and ethnic inequalities—another topic surprisingly overlooked by Hennessy though its significance has been much discussed during the pandemic. Pretty much the only name not dropped by Hennessy is that of his former student Simon Case, who is, at the time of writing, head of the British civil service.

A duty of care : Britain before and after Corona A duty of care : Britain before and after Corona

The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote that socialists ‘proclaim as a duty towards the fellow members of the existing states, [what] they are not prepared to grant to the foreigner’. The greater part of the book is a survey of postwar history that repeats much of what Hennessy has said before: he quotes generously from his own series of radio interviews with politicians.But in 1956 it praised the NHS as the most cost-effective system in the world and recommended building the hospitals Labour had been unable to afford. He describes a postwar period in which Keynesian economics dominated, the welfare state flourished and a Bevin-esque variety of patriotic Atlanticism prevailed. Whether we’re talking about Black Lives Matter or Covid-19, a lot of the new nonfiction coming our way will speak insistently to the present moment – to the point where some readers, fighting unease, may welcome the relative tranquillity of a fat life of the artist Francis Bacon, in the form of Revelations, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s 880-page biography (William Collins, January); or, rather more genteel, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne (William Collins, April). Peter Hennessy, a crossbench peer, starts with the observation that government has a duty of care to the people, a conviction that emerged in the aftermath of the war and underpinned the creation of the welfare state.

A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After COVID (Audio A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After COVID (Audio

He is mainly interested in the centre and centre left of politics, a spectrum that extends from Denis Healey to Iain Macleod.Like many others, Hennessy presents the report as the blueprint which guided Labour’s post-war social and economic policies. Most of Hennessy’s previous publications have focused on the period from 1945 to 1979, which he presents as the golden age of the good chap. On this ground, two memoirs in particular promise both to move and console: The Madness of Grief by the Rev Richard Coles (Weidenfeld, April), on losing his partner; and Consumed: A Sister’s Story by Arifa Akbar (Sceptre, June), about the death of her beloved sibling from tuberculosis. One chapter begins: ‘It was plain from the moment we saw the electoral map of Brexit that Leave areas very largely coincided with areas of relative deprivation. I’d scarcely finished the first page and the World at One producer rang and asked me to talk about the historic significance of what I thought might be coming.