Covid-19, read correctly, has a lot to teach the human race. It is clear that individuals with pre-existing health conditions are particularly susceptible to the disease. But the same applies to any large body of people, whose susceptibility to Covid-19 is also aggravated by pre-existing conditions. The underlying chronic malaise of the body politic is glaring inequality and its consequence, sheer poverty, which means lack of adequate income, shelter, health care, food, job security and education. In short, human misery.
In unveiling his four steps out of lockdown earlier this week Britain’s prime minister was like a doctor proposing treatment for a patient who has just turned the corner and at last has a future to look forward to. But it must not be a future with the same pre-existing conditions as before. If “building back better” is to mean anything, “better” must mean fairer, more just and therefore more equal.
Covid-19 has not only revealed inequalities, it has sharpened them to a shocking degree. School is a great leveller, and without it children from poorer homes are having almost insuperable difficulties trying to continue their education through home-schooling. It has been hard enough for middle-class families in book-lined homes littered with smartphones and tablets. What happens to children in noisily overcrowded family homes without computers or fast broadband? Or books? It has been estimated that one in five primary school children go on to secondary school without having learnt properly to read or write. One day they too will be parents; were their own parents ever really literate?
25 February 2021, The Tablet
Build back fairer
Social policy after Covid
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