Covid-19 and a state in crisis: what can the UK learn from its own history?

In this commentary we argue that after the crisis of Covid-19, and what it exposed about how vulnerable our society had become, the UK must now reinvent an empowering state, drawing inspiration from two extraordinary periods of history beginning over four hundred years ago. In late March 2020, as global stock markets teetered on a precipice, Rishi Sunak, the UK’s Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced an unprecedented package of financial support for workers and businesses, drawn up in concert with their representative bodies. Bolstered by higher welfare benefits, it was agreed just hours before a national lockdown was imposed to curtail the spread of Covid-19, with the resulting mass business suspension seeing the economy shrink by nearly a quarter. Sunak had declared “this is not a time for ideology and orthodoxy” as the government stepped in with its furlough and Covid loan schemes to effectively socialise a large part of the costs of the economic shutdown. This was for the simple reason that it needed there to be an economy and workforce still standing at the end of the crisis.