Our Other National Debt: Overview
The essays in this collection have a number of things in common.
Firstly, each author has explored what coronavirus has revealed about our society that was perhaps less visible just a few months ago as this decade began. In every case, the author has identified at least one long-standing structural inequality which risks being deepened by the crisis. There are more inequalities (and intersections between them) than we have been able to cover in this hastily-assembled collection. The disproportionate care burden carried by women is already emerging as one enormous trend. The likelihood that furlough has changed who has access to not just pay but decision-making power in the workplace is another. And we will have to be unflinching in returning again and again to the most harrowing inequality of all – that which can be measured in the tragic tally of the number of people of colour losing their lives.
Secondly, each piece begins from a starting point of curiosity about who has made an outsized contribution – or faced outsized challenges – at this particular time. The wider social problems of our country are ones that these policy experts would work on in ordinary times but for the purposes of this collection each author has focussed narrowly on how we repay moral or social debts accrued or illuminated during coronavirus.
This is not, therefore, in any sense a ‘manifesto’ or attempt to cover every area of public policy. There is nothing in here about what should happen with the Brexit negotiations, the best recovery package for small businesses, the future of manufacturing, the right solutions to the climate emergency, the sequencing of national infrastructure projects, the next phase of devolution or the future of the Union. Likewise, the right way to deal with the actual national debt is a topic for another collection.
Instead, this is squarely concerned with which people are owed particular gratitude or deserve targeted support. In focussing on issues where a broad political consensus could be achieved, we hope to provide a starting point for joint work across parties and sectors in the months ahead.
Thirdly, it is striking the degree to which these authors point to a role for citizens and volunteers and not simply more spending or better policy. While the collection contains plenty of recommendations for government action, there is a strong sense from these authors that it is our own individual ability to empathise (or not) and our collective ability to come together (or not) that will determine what happens next.
Indeed, this sense from many of our authors that individually and collectively we have more agency than we think is perhaps the strongest flavour of all in this collection. Whether in examining our own (discriminatory or unkind) attitudes and behaviour or participating more actively in neighbourhood and civic life, many of these authors see a role for all of us in the recovery.
When commissioning these pieces, we wanted to create a collection that was one part think tank report and one part movement handbook. Like any other collection, we don’t agree with every recommendation that follows, but we have picked experts who can prompt a debate. The authors, therefore, were selected for their ability to mix the spirit of intellectual enquiry with an organiser’s instinct. We expressly asked for advice for readers about how to build the momentum for change, not just a vision of what that change should be. As a result, each author has charted a path to victory, but some are much more pessimistic than others about just how narrow that path might be.
These authors are all active in the policy arenas they have written about. They know the key players, the contours of the recent debate and the broad parameters (and constraints) of political and public opinion.
Some take great heart from the ‘viral kindness’ that has characterised everything from local mutual aid groups to national moments like #ClapForOurCarers and the BBC’s Big Night In. For those authors, the universality of this new lockdown experience might just be enough to generate the fellow feeling and national unity on which sustained and large-scale change will depend. For others, this experience might be universal but that doesn’t make it uniform and they are worried that the same divisions that polarised us before the crisis might even have been exacerbated by it.
There is certainly a risk that moments of turmoil generate distrust. On the eve of lockdown we asked what the process for reconciliation might be that would heal the rifts between those who had taken the advice to #StayHomeSaveLives and those who had not. Now, just seven weeks on, the need for healing is even greater, with greater social stress between those for whom lockdown has been an inconvenience but not a catastrophe and those whose lives are being torn apart by illness, grief or the shadow of hardships to come.
It is made clear in many of these essays, but the idea bears explicit repetition here: the marginalised and minoritised rarely have ‘good crises’. More often, emergencies pave the way for the erosion of rights.
We had, with others, already identified some of the long-term trends driving division in our national life. The imperative to depolarise and democratise remains and has, if anything, become even more urgent. If our friends at the Collective Psychology Project are right and we are about to leave the ‘honeymoon period’ that often follows an emergency and are beginning our descent into disillusionment and collective grief, then we need a plan for how we climb out of that again with a greater understanding of one another’s pain and perspective.
This is a highly fluid situation and it is too early to say with confidence what the medium-term human and economic consequences will be. All we can be certain of is that working collaboratively in the national interest will be key.
One possible mechanism for that would be some sort of national commission charged with exploring how we have a fair recovery. While we are sceptical of the value of rhetoric likening the current crisis to a war, there is a valuable lesson to be drawn from Britain’s wartime experience.
In 1941, at the height of the war, the coalition government commissioned the Beveridge Report. It was an attempt, across party divides, to forge a new social settlement for a nation in mounting grief for people gone before their time. Eighty years on, a national commission could not be dependent on the genius of a few civil servants.
Instead, it would need to centre the experiences of those to whom we owe the greatest debts and be driven by an inclusive group drawn from each of the home nations, from villages and towns as well as cities, with mixed backgrounds across the public, private and third sectors, with a good smattering of cultural, faith and community leaders who can help us make sense of this moment. They could convene, over the summer, a genuinely national debate using mass participation tools and have an interim report ready by late September, marking six months since lockdown, and a final report in March to mark the anniversary.
There is certainly a case for a public inquiry exploring what could have been done differently in response to the crisis, but this would be something different – less about accountability for the immediate past, more about co-creating the long-term future.
This collective experience has undoubtedly changed our country. Nothing can diminish the sorrow of those who are grieving or the anxieties of those economically on the brink. A series of policy recommendations and campaign strategies in a collection like this certainly won’t do anything to lessen the pain. We hope, however, that in publishing these essays we can give some expression to our profound sense of gratitude to those to whom we owe so much. This is our own small way of acknowledging the size of our other national debt.
Kirsty McNeill and Roger Harding
May 2020