The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Britain’s thirst for a fresh Beveridge…
The post-war social consensus is gone. Can Covid bring a divided nation together to build a new one?
A DUTY OF CARE by Peter Hennessy
256pp, Allen Lane, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99
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Speaking (via Zoom, of course) to Her Majesty the Queen at the height of the pandemic, Derek Grieve, a linchpin 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?”
Peter Hennessy, the academic and crossbench peer, quotes this 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. It is a valuable and exceptionally well-reasoned guide to how we might now turn round a country battered not by war, as in 1945, but by a wave of disease unknown in living memory. Hennessy avoids drifting into idealwas ism thanks to his 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, with living standards (even before the pandemic) slow to recover from the 2008 crash.
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 ruinously expensive measures enacted by the Attlee administration to slay those giants – the alternative being social unrest.
After that, the story is familiar: Britain becoming more prosperous throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but far less so than its defeated rival Germany or, eventually, Japan. Investment in unproductive sectors of the economy took precedence over innovation. Politicians took decades to realise that incomes policies and other such state interventions do not work in a country that believes (as some people did then, 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 why Blair sought to undo so little of what she had done.
Yet giants, old and new, are still with us. Hennessy 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. It is hard to disagree with any of these, and social care is clearly the most pressing, given the ageing population. Here a lesson can be learnt not merely from Beveridge in 1942, but from Beveridge as a young civil servant, when he helped advise Lloyd George on the 1911 act that introduced National Insurance and a contributory principle: that everyone must be made to contribute to the care of those elderly who cannot help themselves. Hennessy gives credit to the current government for the reforms it is trying to make, with a lifetime cap on the costs of care, even though it cannot make them consensually.
In social housing, Hennessy talks of a common obligation to ensure shelter for everyone: and in a civilised and prosperous society, it is indeed shameful to see people sleeping on the streets. He also, quite rightly, cites the catastrophe of Grenfell Tower; proof that, sadly, too many incompetent and corrupt people get elected to local councils. The future of ageing tower blocks, moreover, is too important a question for councils, and requires serious leadership at government level.
Technical education seems to be Hennessy’s euphemism for apprenticeships, and what society does with young people who are not academically gifted. That is utterly necessary, but this is one area in which I disagree to an extent with the author. We need to ensure we teach the humanities better as well, with a de-politicised curriculum, and give disadvantaged young people the chance of an education that will change their lives. That, however much consensualists object, means grammar schools, with a safety net for late developers.
AI threatens to put countless people out of work, and new sectors of the economy will have to be developed to employ them, and the state will need to use the tax system to incentivise that – perhaps to a degree no one is yet prepared to imagine. As for climate change, the present net zero policy is being implemented in such a bulldozing and un-strategic fashion that it, too, could bring economic ruin. It is a policy that requires deep deliberation and, as Hennessy argues, consensus. That consensus will not be built by the current energy policy, which is ruinous for the poorer members of society.
The question Duty of Care leaves us asking is this: is consensus ever really possible, or does it, as the lessons of 1945 to 1979 suggest, simply require a large group of people to put up with policies that are either actively damaging, or perceived to be damaging, until at some point the dam breaks? Hennessy makes a plea at the end of this book to avoid the policies of pessimism, but sadly, history tells us that pessimism usually turns out to be the safest bet.
Set in 1980s Paris, amid a turf war between Vietnamese and Algerian outfits, this blistering sequel to Nguyen’s The Sympathiser is an audacious marriage of gangland thriller and novel of ideas.
MY MESS IS A BIT OF A LIFE by Georgia Pritchett 304pp, Faber, £9.99
Pritchett, writer of TV hits such as Succession, Veep and The Thick of It, turns her anxiety into comic gold in a hilarious memoir. “Feelings are like pickled eggs,” she writes, “best left unopened, no matter how drunk you are.”
LAW IN A TIME OF CRISIS by Jonathan Sumption 256pp, Profile, £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
The retired Supreme Court judge and former Oxford history don offers sharp essays on freedom of information and diversity in the judiciary, but loses his way on Covid and Brexit.