Only a crisis can produce real change

While not all analogies with the Second World War are appropriate, the mood in the UK has changed, in a manner not dissimilar to that which produced political change and development from 1945 to the late 1970s. It is not hard to find articles in newspapers and magazines calling for a different Britain, with quotes from noted figures who are far apart from each other on the political spectrum. They agree that “we cannot go on as we are,” and reach back into history, both recent and more distant, to make their point. From JB Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts urging us to “think differently… from property and power to creation and community,” and Milton Friedman’s 1982 comment “only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” many seem to have come to the conclusion that such a dramatic pause in our national lifetime merits something better than ultimately muddling through, and carrying on as if nothing very much had happened.

How are we to make something more concrete from this rather vague sense that “something must be done”?

During the Second World War, the thinking that led to the most enduring change was done within the existing machinery of government, delivering inter alia Beveridge’s welfare reforms, and the educational upheaval of RA Butler’s Education Act of 1944. These changes helped to lay the foundations of post-war Britain. They were not entirely consensual then, and the past should never be sugar-coated, but they created a political consensus which took us through a time of recovery until its natural end in the late 1970s. It is never too early in any crisis to be looking beyond. My advice would be that, if people were being urged to “think differently” in 1940, days much darker than our own, then government might well do the same.

Government should be pulling together new Commissions to confront the issue of how Britain will change. It will do well to consider how such Commissions might incorporate the much more democratic society we have today — the “great and the good” is a much wider mix than it was in the 1940s.

I do not suggest that this will be easy. Aside from our weekly applause for our carers on a Thursday night, I don’t think that we are agreed about much else. The Brexit debate exposed a society more polarised than many thought. There is a risk of further fracturing if we do not get this right.

Let us look at what is hurtling down the tracks to meet us. The most important people in a society facing a health crisis are the poorest paid, most diverse and many of them are not born in Britain. How are we going to translate that into policies for a new society, a test which will start with the Immigration Bill presently before Parliament? How will we balance that awareness with the need to ensure that other key talents and skills don’t get squeezed out, such as the need to ensure entrepreneurs and businesses get the space and reward to continue to make jobs for others?

How will public sector pay be handled? How long will it be before the Opposition introduces a Commons motion urging increases for health and care personnel, daring the Government to oppose?

And what of the NHS? Many close to it know that while the front line of clinicians, nursing and care staff is extraordinary and good at what they do, it’s structure, decision making and relationships within and outside are not as good as they should be. Does anyone expect a Conservative Government to be able to make such a case on its own, and reform it, in the current circumstances?

And I have not even broached the issue of social care, and how that is to be handled in the future.

Ordinarily, these issues are the proper stuff of democratic politics. But a UK already facing the challenge and opportunity of a future after Brexit has been knocked sideways, like everyone else, by a recession and a distinct change in social mood. I already see familiar foes limbering up, from right and left, barely stopping to catch their breath to adapt their arguments only slightly, and to claim vindication.

I think the PM and this Government, with an opportunity to reshape the UK beyond its original expectation, would do well to meet these and some other challenges by constructing mechanisms of widespread opinion, and extend its hand to many others. It will not avoid or seek to evade the ultimate responsibility for change, but might recognise that one of the new moods out there is increased wariness of political polarisation — and a desire for change of that, too.