A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid

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If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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. 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). The literature of grief grows with every month that passes, a publishing trend that preceded the pandemic. World War 2 lasted for more than 5years, longer (so far) than the pandemic and was far more disruptive, nationally and internationally.

A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid Peter Hennessy, A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid

Blair and Brown receive due credit for improving health and education funding, for Sure Start, introducing the minimum wage, reducing unemployment and increasing economic growth, until overtaken by the international financial crisis in 2008. It is impossible not to share Hennessy’s hope that recent disasters will lead to better times, and his uncertainty about how or in what form this can be achieved. Hennessy rightly questions Johnson’s handling of the pandemic but curiously fails to mention the billions of public revenue wasted on funding incompetent private businesses with links to Ministers to fail to run an effective test and trace system, provide adequate protective equipment or to help children catch up with work missed due to school closures, among other failures.

However, he does very well to produce a very focused analysis of post war Britain when measured against the 5 wants. We are currently grappling with the shocks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the massive problem of energy costs and "costs of living". And at times his new book A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid, in which he attempts to chart the impact of the Beveridge reforms over eight decades and transpose their lessons on to the post-pandemic era, falters under the weight of its ambition. By the time we get to the “After Covid” section, there’s been such an information overload that it’s hard to remember this is supposedly a book about the pandemic.

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

The succession of studies of inequalities in Britain led by Marmot—described by Hennessy as “today’s equivalent of William Beveridge” (p. From 1992 to 2000, Hennessey was professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Exceptional numbers were driven by poverty into homelessness and resort to food banks, which were almost unheard of in Britain before 2010, when poverty began its sharp rise. He looks back to Sir William Beveridge's classic identification of the 'five giants' against which society had to battle - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - and laid the foundations for the modern welfare state in his wartime report.

I don’t want to join this long and constantly growing queue to slag off the prime minister, but I’ve watched prime ministers for a long time now. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer ‘Our system rests on decencies and without them it doesn’t work’: Peter Hennessy. The election result suggested that, however united Britain might have been by the war, it was now deeply divided, mainly by class. Hennessy describes Beveridge as supporting full employment because it was essential to cover the costs of his social security proposals, but his commitment to it went deeper.

A Duty of Care by Peter Hennessy — building a better post

Occasionally, evidence is mentioned, almost in passing, that seems to contradict the sweeping assertions of the main argument.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. A bestseller in the US, this urgent, deeply interesting book will be followed by Three Mothers (William Collins, February), in which Anna Malaika Tubbs looks at how the women who raised Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and (again) James Baldwin helped to shape America; Raceless, by Georgina Lawton (Sphere, February), a memoir of growing up black in a white Anglo-Irish family; and Musa Okwonga’s One of Them (Unbound, April), an account of the author’s experiences as a black boy at Eton. At the heart of the author's thesis is his contention that the British people during the pandemic have shown themselves to be much better than their rulers; that we must find means to mobilise our true national spirit through a nobler politics . Just above my computer there’s a picture of him in his study, in brown tweeds of a thickness you can’t imagine, smoking a pipe and writing a draft of an economic history article!