Time For Radical Reform

It says something when an Editorial in the FT makes it clear that things not only have to change post-pandemic, they have to get better. If we are indeed engaged in a war, and as famously stated, 'war is the locomotive of history', then now is the time for dreaming, thinking and planning for a new social contract. Lets hope that on the day we find out who the next labour leader will be, they're up to the challenge. From the FT yesterday:-  

Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract

Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will work for all

If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone. 

Today’s crisis is laying bare how far many rich societies fall short of this ideal. Much as the struggle to contain the pandemic has exposed the unpreparedness of health systems, so the brittleness of many countries’ economies has been exposed, as governments scramble to stave off mass bankruptcies and cope with mass unemployment. Despite inspirational calls for national mobilisation, we are not really all in this together. 

The economic lockdowns are imposing the greatest cost on those already worst off. Overnight millions of jobs and livelihoods have been lost in hospitality, leisure and related sectors, while better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home. Worse, those in low-wage jobs who can still work are often risking their lives — as carers and healthcare support workers, but also as shelf stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners. Governments’ extraordinary budget support for the economy, while necessary, will in some ways make matters worse. Countries that have allowed the emergence of an irregular and precarious labour market are finding it particularly hard to channel financial help to workers with such insecure employment. Meanwhile, vast monetary loosening by central banks will help the asset-rich. Behind it all, underfunded public services are creaking under the burden of applying crisis policies.

The way we wage war on the virus benefits some at the expense of others. The victims of Covid-19 are overwhelmingly the old. But the biggest victims of the lockdowns are the young and active, who are asked to suspend their education and forgo precious income. Sacrifices are inevitable, but every society must demonstrate how it will offer restitution to those who bear the heaviest burden of national efforts. 

Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix. 

The taboo-breaking measures governments are taking to sustain businesses and incomes during the lockdown are rightly compared to the sort of wartime economy western countries have not experienced for seven decades. The analogy goes still further. 

The leaders who won the war did not wait for victory to plan for what would follow. Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, setting the course for the United Nations, in 1941. The UK published the Beveridge Report, its commitment to a universal welfare state, in 1942. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference forged the postwar financial architecture. That same kind of foresight is needed today. Beyond the public health war, true leaders will mobilise now to win the peace.

--oo00oo--

This from the Guardian last weekend:-

Amid our fear, we’re rediscovering utopian hopes of a connected world

If this is the worst of times, it is also the best of times. In our anxiety we are drawing deep reserves of strength from others. In our isolation we are rediscovering community. In our confusion we are rethinking whom we trust. In our fragmentation we are rediscovering the value of institutions. To each their own narrative or metaphor. If this feels like the blitz spirit to you, all well and good. Others find it helps to imagine a world recast through virtual networks.

But what it amounts to is this: there is such a thing as society and we are all interdependent. And if it sometimes takes a grave crisis to remind ourselves of these truths, then this moment may well be historic for the possibilities of hope as well as for all the tragedy and turmoil.

Nearly 200 years ago, the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the power we have been re-experiencing over the past few weeks: “In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.” At least three forms of combination have blossomed in the present crisis: the NHS, the BBC and the internet itself.

It is difficult to see how the NHS will not emerge stronger from this pandemic, however traumatic and stressful the coming months will be. We get the service we pay for. It would take an unusually obtuse future government to be blind to the signals sent by three quarters of a million volunteers or the echoing applause of people across the nation in the past few days.

The BBC is having its moment, too. Only a month ago it seemed on the ropes – the bizarre target of the obsessional figure who sits at the prime minister’s right hand. Dominic Cummings had long nursed a loathing for the corporation, with his thinktank willing its demise more than 15 years ago. The aim was to replace it with a “Fox News equivalent”, along with talk-radio shows and bloggers “to shift the centre of gravity”.

Today such aspirations look like lunacy, as they did even then. Fox News has shown its true colours during the Covid-19 emergency, parroting the wildly erratic line from an increasingly dangerously deluded White House. Fox is these days less a news company than an oligarchically owned state broadcaster.

The BBC, meanwhile, has been doing what it does best: providing reliable and trustworthy information to a huge audience – both broadcast and online, both young and old. On any surveys of trust it towers over other news organisations as well as other institutions in society.

Again, it is difficult to imagine any sane administration wanting to diminish the national, international and local reach of the BBC for the foreseeable future – far less hand over our national spine of communication and conversation to the Murdoch family and a bunch of talk-radio hosts.

Three and a half years ago we’d apparently had enough of experts. They seem to be back. More understandably, many were convinced the original dream of the world wide web was dead and buried. Maybe, today, not so much.

In our self-isolation, many of us have rediscovered some of the things that inspired such cause for hope when the web first demonstrated the power of combination. How many of us have relied on it for friends, food, family, education, health, fitness, worship, ideas, culture, ideas and knowledge over the past week or more?

Think of all the other utopian words that were associated with this new form of self-organisation barely a decade ago. Here are some: generosity, community, participation, sharing, openness, cooperation, sociability, learning, assembling, imagination, creativity, innovation, experimentation, fairness, equality, publicness, citizenship, mutuality, combinability, common resource, information, respect, discourse, conversation, contribution.

All these things seemed within our grasp. And then a kind of darkness stole over that shared space and we gradually began to give up on what, we soon convinced ourselves, had only ever been a lovely dream.

Well, maybe. And of course – unlike the NHS or the BBC – there is a genuine malign aspect to the way in which so many people have twisted the web’s capabilities into an engine of hatred, misinformation and bleakness. That will not wither away: there is a different kind of virality in play there.

But, in the end, the internet simply amplifies who we are. As the New York academic Clay Shirky wrote in his 2010 book, Cognitive Surplus: “Human character is the essential component of our sociable and generous behaviours, even when coordinated with high-tech tools. Interpretations of those behaviours that focus on the technology miss the point: technology enables those behaviours, but it doesn’t cause them.”

Surveys of trust since Covid-19 began to bite show people re-evaluating whom to believe. They, overwhelmingly, trust the NHS and – still – the BBC. They absolutely trust experts. They rely on mainstream news organisations while proclaiming low levels of trust in journalists as a category. They are inclined to trust their own employer – but not as much as they trust “a person like yourself”.

In Shirky’s 10-year-old analysis, trust in the world today is dependent on perceptions of motive. Why is this person telling me this? Is it for money, power or some kind of personal or political advantage? Or is it out of genuine disinterest? A respect for evidence? A feeling, in Shirky’s words, that “by treating one another well (fairly, if not always nicely) we can create environments where the group can do more than the individuals could on their own”.

There will be much stress and sorrow in the months ahead. But a kind of better future feels quite tangible. Love, humanity and combination may yet win.

Alan Rusbridger

Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and is a senior adviser to WATATAWA communications consultancy