How the coronavirus crisis will change British politics forever

Trying times always alter how the country sees its policies, writes Sean O'Grady

A shift to the left is far from inevitable (PA)

Given the experience of the last few weeks, not to mention the last few turbulent years, it seems a bit of a mug’s game to venture any kind of predictions about the political future.

Still, one thing that long history and expert opinion does have confidence about is that the Covid-19 pandemic is essentially a finite event. Though it will be a long haul, and the development of a vaccine will probably take a year or more (so they say), eventually political, economic life will return to normal. However, as with every other war that has inflicted suffering on the civilian population, there will be changes in public attitudes, within parties and within government.

There is already an upsurge in public affection for the NHS, and support for our other essential public services – education, transport and social care, for example. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone,” as the old song goes, and that certainly feels the case today. There is no public opposition to the way the state has had to take back control over public-private partnerships in the NHS and on the railways, for example. Would we necessarily precisely go back to the way things were run before the coronavirus crisis?

It does seem improbable at this juncture, even allowing for the unprecedented conditions we face. Much the same goes for what we used to call social security. All of a sudden, great swathes of society who never dreamed that they’d have to turn to the state for financial assistance are discovering just how mean and inadequate the “safety net” has become. Indeed for the self-employed and many casual workers, it is non-existent. People are appalled by it; the “scroungers” appear not to have been living it up after all.

Very few of us, a matter of weeks ago, could say what the rate of statutory sick pay is; now it seems everyone asking themselves how they could get by on £94 per week. Universal credit, deservedly, has been subject to wider scrutiny, and found badly wanting.

Such nascent ambitions for improved public services will, however, collide with the task of managing a much larger national debt – the coronavirus mortgage you might call it. After the huge debts run up over two world wars and a recession, the British national debt rose to about 260 per cent of national income (like a 2.6 times income home loan). Now it is around 85 per cent, having risen steadily since its low dipped 30 per cent mark around the millennium (the financial crisis and subsequent recession ballooned it). By next year? Maybe 150 per cent of GDP, or more as the state takes on the nation’s wage bills and takes out the biggest bridging loan in history.

The question then will be how quickly the nation wishes to pay it down – which means either higher taxes, lower public spending or somehow revolutionising British economic growth. The traditional way of shredding British debt is via “printing money” and price inflation – itself a redistribution from savers to spenders and destabilising for an economy. Don’t forget that even if the economy bounces back strongly next year and there is a good deal of catching up on postponed spending (eg on a new car), some output, profits and tax revenues will have been lost forever.

The good news is that much of the UK’s debt is long dated and on low interest rates, but that may not hold forever as rates return to normal. A good deal of it is held abroad, and any big sell-off would crash sterling, with higher prices in the shops.

There will be tough choices, and, it has to added, the backdrop of Brexit will make matters more complicated and challenging – or liberating and easier, depending on your point of view.

Which leaves us with the personalities and the parties. If the public turn on Boris Johnson because of his (perceived or real) dithering about the lockdown, his premiership will be over almost before it has begun. The irresistible rise of Rishi Sunak may not be over. The next few weeks will tell. There is even talk of suspending party politics and running a national government.

It seems axiomatic that the coronavirus crisis will shift politics to the left, and tilt things in Labour’s favour, but not necessarily. The quip, in poor taste, is that it arrived too late for Corbyn’s leadership – yet maybe not. Under Johnson’s leadership the Conservatives has already been responding to a shifting public mood (famously in some traditional Labour areas) with a set of populist policies; giving the voters what they demand. That has largely been continued during the crisis, with the very un-Tory measures now being introduced. Labour’s knee-jerk response to any given package is “not enough”; it remains to be seen if that moves the political dial – at the moment the public have bigger things to worry about, and the local and mayoral elections have been postponed. The Labour and Liberal Democrat leadership contests are attracting even less attention than before the outbreak. A referendum on Scottish independence will have to wait a while longer.

The First World War destroyed the Liberal Party, boosted Labour and gave us votes for (some) women. The Second World War saw Churchill’s Conservatives crushed, a Labour landslide, the creation of the NHS and the end of the British Empire. At the end of such experiences, people tend to ask big questions about why the nation could achieve things under “war conditions”, (such as having women driving buses or eliminating mass unemployment) that were always said in peacetime to be impossible or unaffordable. We have some similar pressing questions today.