A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid

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But let’s move on from these (strange) times, to other times (and places). I could not be more excited about Fall by John Preston (Viking, February), an account of the life and death of the tycoon Robert Maxwell by the author of A Very English Scandal (though I still think it should be called Splash!). In biography, I wonder whether Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury, May) will make me feel any differently about my least favourite writer (if anyone can do this, it’s Wilson); The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (Weidenfeld, March) by Jennifer Higgie, the former editor of Frieze, is set to be sumptuous as well as fascinating; and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (Virago, February) sounds weird and un-categorisable (in a good way). Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography (Cape, April) is bound to be rich, complicated – and very long. (Bailey, the biographer of John Cheever and Richard Yates, was appointed by Roth, and had full access to his archives.) Almost as soon as the pandemic began, it became a cliché to compare the UK’s response to Covid to its experience of the Second World War, but if anyone has earned the right to do so, it is Peter Hennessy. The historian, broadcaster and cross-bench peer is renowned for his books on postwar Britain, so familiar with his subject matter that he treats his “characters” – Churchill, Bevin, Wilson – as though he is writing about old friends. But just because Hennessy is able to draw such parallels does not mean he should. 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. I write this as a long-term admirer of Lord Peter Hennessy. He is a fine historian of modern British politics and constitutional affairs; an expert commentator and communicator; and appears to be a charming and decent person. These attributes come through strongly in this short book.

A Duty of Care - Penguin Books UK A Duty of Care - Penguin Books UK

Similarly superficial surveys of the Major and New Labour governments follow. 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. Hennessy rightly points out their reluctance to tax the rich: low incomes rose but the inequality gap remained substantial. Also, their preference for maintaining and extending mean-tested benefits over restoring universalism. But they were more successful in reducing child poverty than he suggests: according to the IFS by one-third rather than one quarter between 1999 and 2010.

Hennessy’s great skill is flattery. He flatters those that he writes about but he also flatters those who read him. He writes about Britain in the first-person plural and is much concerned to emphasise the virtues that ‘we’ display. He states banal opinions with a confidence that will give anyone who holds such opinions the impression that they must be very clever. Everyone gets to bathe in the warm glow of their own virtue. At times, this book reminded me of those television programmes from the 1970s in which some established star – say Val Doonican – would present a line-up of his friends. There would be an exchange of mutual admiration and the performers would sing a well-known song together. Peter Hennessy is an English historian and academic specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London. New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, Craig Taylor’s follow-up to his wondrous oral contemporary history, Londoners, is long awaited (John Murray, March), and it will be interesting to see how this book reads at a point when our urban centres feel so hollowed out. At the other extreme, The Foghorn’s Lament by Jennifer Lucy Allan (White Rabbit, May) is about – yes – foghorns, and promises to sit on the wobbly line (and, in this case, noisy, mournful line) between nature writing and music writing.

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

He was born in Edmonton, the youngest child of William G. Hennessy by his marriage to Edith (Wood-Johnson) Hennessy Beveridge was deeply disappointed by Labour’s response to his proposals and because the government did not consult him as he hoped, as Jose Harris points out in her excellent biography of Beveridge which, strangely, Hennessy does not reference. 1 Following this missed opportunity, British state pensions have never provided enough to live on without a means-tested supplement (now Pension Credit) and are currently among the lowest in the high-income world. Beveridge’s report did influence real improvements, but full implementation would have achieved still more.He concludes with the hope that the experience will lead to “a new consensus” and an agreed programme of reform, a “new Beveridge”. He suggests “five tasks” necessary for “a more equal, socially just nation funded by levels of productivity that can only come from sustained scientific and technological prowess, with a set of effective democratic and governing institutions” (p. 131). The five “tasks” (not “giants” though they are quite giant) are, firstly, much improved social care. Hennessy rightly describes how its inadequacies, in particular that it has always been charged for and means-tested unlike health care though many frail people need both, have been repeatedly criticized by official committees and others over many decades, and repeatedly neglected by successive governments including that currently in power. However, he does not discuss how already poor conditions in the care system were worsened by cuts to local funding and “outsourcing” to profit-making private companies under Thatcher and since 2010. The financial crisis put an end to New Labour despite Brown’s successful attempts to alleviate it. The “austerity” policies of the Conservative-led coalition, continued by Conservative governments that followed, completed Thatcher’s destruction of the post-1945 reforms, including through the introduction of Universal Credit, the “bedroom tax” and severe reductions to legal aid, all summarized adequately by Hennessy. In consequence, as he points out, in 2020 the “5 Giants” were very much alive, as indicated above, though he provides little detail of pre-Covid poverty. He rightly describes the attempts of the Scottish and Welsh governments, following devolution in 1999, to retain a more caring system so far as their limited powers allowed, raising the possibility of the break-up of the UK, soon reinforced by divisions over Brexit. Relatedly, expect a slew of books about mental health – though not all of them will toe the line that we’re experiencing an epidemic of mental illness: Losing Our Minds by Lucy Foulkes (Bodley Head, April), for instance, seeks to overturn this notion, especially as applied to the young. On this terrain, one memoir stands out, having already been garlanded with praise from Robert Macfarlane: Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare (Chatto & Windus, March). Those feeling more than usually apprehensive right now might like to turn to Relax: A User’s Guide to Life in the Age of Anxiety by Timothy Caulfield (Faber, January), a handbook that is informed as well as wise (Caulfield is a Canadian public health expert). You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Covid has highlighted the fact that the most severe inequalities are those found on a global rather than a national level. This raises questions about the implicit nationalism of the British welfare state. 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’. In any case, are the architects of the postwar settlement people we would want to imitate now? What would Keynes have said about contemporary Britain? A eugenicist, he might have made some sinister remarks about the effect of Covid on the ‘unfit’. Had he witnessed British politics over the last few years, his scepticism about democracy would hardly have been attenuated. He might well have pointed out how different things would be now had graduates possessed two votes in 2016, as they did in 1945.

A Duty Of Care: Britain Before And After Covid | Stanfords A Duty Of Care: Britain Before And After Covid | Stanfords

The thought that during a pandemic a doctor might also have time to write is astonishing. But this is, it seems, what some have been doing. Gavin Francis, a doctor best known for his travel writing, is first out of the traps with Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and Covid-19 (Profile, January). Hard on his heels is Jim Down, with Life Support (Viking, March), the Covid diary of an ICU doctor at one of London’s leading hospitals. A slightly different approach to the crisis will come in the form of A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Corona by the distinguished historian Peter Hennessy (Allen Lane, August). Hennessy's analysis of post-war Britain, 'Never Again: Britain 1945–1951', won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1992 and the NCR Book Award in 1993. John Preston’s Fall is an account of the life and death of Robert Maxwell, pictured in 1964. Photograph: Hulton Getty How relevant to present problems is the comparison of the war and the pandemic? World War 2 lasted for more than 5years, longer (so far) than the pandemic and was far more disruptive, nationally and internationally. Another difference is that, although it was preceded by 20 years of high unemployment and poverty, war needs brought about unprecedented full employment, rising living standards for many on low incomes and shrinking inequalities, raising expectations for the future and leading to many proposals for post-war improvement in social and economic conditions. From 1992 to 2000, Hennessey was professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. From 1994 to 1997, he gave public lectures as Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. From 2001, he has been Attlee professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary.

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Peter Hennessy's A Duty of Care is a call from the deep for civility, compromise and cooperation. Coming from one of our most distinguished political historians, it can hardly be ignored. But A Duty of Care is much more than just an appeal for a politics of sanity and mutual respect. It is also, no less importantly, and more interestingly, a Confucian appeal for a politics of benevolence. Oliver Letwin, The Tablet You also quote RH Tawney, who said that the mark of civilisation was to aim to eliminate inequalities. Can we move towards a more egalitarian future with a monarchy? 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. He is mainly interested in the centre and centre left of politics, a spectrum that extends from Denis Healey to Iain Macleod. The challenge to the consensus formed by such figures is seen as coming mainly from the Thatcherite right, with the left of the Labour Party not getting much attention. Now Hennessy has turned his focus to the impact of Covid-19. Like many who seek out ‘lessons from history’, Hennessy’s main conclusion is ‘I was right all along.’ 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. He describes a postwar period in which Keynesian economics dominated, the welfare state flourished and a Bevin-esque variety of patriotic Atlanticism prevailed. It turns out that what we need is the same again and that the right response to the effects of the pandemic is a ‘new consensus’ and a ‘new Beveridge’. These conclusions will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Hennessy’s previous work or, for that matter, to anyone who has read virtually any journalistic commentary on Britain in the last few years. As a constitutional expert, do you think “partygate” is a storm in a teacup or a fundamental breach of the contract between government and citizens? Hennessy attended the nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, and on Sundays he went to St Mary Magdalene church, where he was an altar boy. He was educated at St Benedict's School, an independent school in Ealing, West London. When his father's job led the family to move to the Cotswolds, he attended Marling School, a grammar school in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He went on to study at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a BA in 1969 and a PhD in 1990. Hennessy was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard University from 1971 to 1972.

Details for: Duty of care : Britain before and after Covid

Arifa Akbar’s Consumed: A Sister’s Story is about the death of her sibling from tuberculosis. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian It needs both. In our long history, the NHS is the closest we’ve come to institutionalising altruism. That’s why it has a special place in people’s hearts. I admire Nigel and regard him as a friend, but I must say if you’re going to turn anything into a secular religion, it might as well be the NHS… there are certainly a lot worse candidates. The potential fragility of the intensive care systems in this wretched pandemic was what was surprising. The people who staff it did surpassing wonders, but they are still worn out by it. So it survived the test but it needs long and sustained investment, plus an overhaul. The detailed prescriptions for a better future advanced in this book deserve to be read by anyone actively engaged in politics today. Nobody knows more about the world of high politics in the United Kingdom than Peter Hennessy. Richard Evans, Times Literary Supplement One of our most celebrated historians shows how we can use the lessons of the past to build a new post-covid society in BritainFor cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Hennessy is moderately optimistic that the nation’s shared Covid experience could be what R.H. Tawney termed “a source of social energy”, increasing awareness of the need for the state to care for its people, breathing life into reform debates that have existed for some time. Prominent among these is introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), as trialled in Finland and elsewhere. Or of Universal Basic Services (UBS), including housing, transport, childcare, social care, healthcare education, legal services, access to digital information and communications and a basic income. Both are designed to bring about social equality, social justice and, as Hennessy puts it, “serenity”. The problem remains of finding a government willing and able to introduce such costly measures, though we might reasonably ask why a government that can afford very expensive failed private services could not afford public services that bring real public benefits. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.