The financial crisis put an end to New Labour despite Brown’s successful attempts to alleviate it. The “austerity” policies of the Conservative-led coalition, continued by Conservative governments that followed, completed Thatcher’s destruction of the post-1945 reforms, including through the introduction of Universal Credit, the “bedroom tax” and severe reductions to legal aid, all summarized adequately by Hennessy. In consequence, as he points out, in 2020 the “5 Giants” were very much alive, as indicated above, though he provides little detail of pre-Covid poverty. He rightly describes the attempts of the Scottish and Welsh governments, following devolution in 1999, to retain a more caring system so far as their limited powers allowed, raising the possibility of the break-up of the UK, soon reinforced by divisions over Brexit.

A Duty of Care : Britain Before and After Covid - Google Books

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? In A Duty of Care, the historian asks whether politics after Covid can match the reforming ambition of the 1940s.He was born in Edmonton, the youngest child of William G. Hennessy by his marriage to Edith (Wood-Johnson) Hennessy Similarly superficial surveys of the Major and New Labour governments follow. Blair and Brown receive due credit for improving health and education funding, for Sure Start, introducing the minimum wage, reducing unemployment and increasing economic growth, until overtaken by the international financial crisis in 2008. Hennessy rightly points out their reluctance to tax the rich: low incomes rose but the inequality gap remained substantial. Also, their preference for maintaining and extending mean-tested benefits over restoring universalism. But they were more successful in reducing child poverty than he suggests: according to the IFS by one-third rather than one quarter between 1999 and 2010. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Most of Hennessy’s previous publications have focused on the period from 1945 to 1979, which he presents as the golden age of the good chap. He is mainly interested in the centre and centre left of politics, a spectrum that extends from Denis Healey to Iain Macleod. The challenge to the consensus formed by such figures is seen as coming mainly from the Thatcherite right, with the left of the Labour Party not getting much attention. Now Hennessy has turned his focus to the impact of Covid-19. Like many who seek out ‘lessons from history’, Hennessy’s main conclusion is ‘I was right all along.’ The greater part of the book is a survey of postwar history that repeats much of what Hennessy has said before: he quotes generously from his own series of radio interviews with politicians. He describes a postwar period in which Keynesian economics dominated, the welfare state flourished and a Bevin-esque variety of patriotic Atlanticism prevailed. It turns out that what we need is the same again and that the right response to the effects of the pandemic is a ‘new consensus’ and a ‘new Beveridge’. These conclusions will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Hennessy’s previous work or, for that matter, to anyone who has read virtually any journalistic commentary on Britain in the last few years.

A Duty Of Care: Britain Before And After Covid | Stanfords A Duty Of Care: Britain Before And After Covid | Stanfords

I have always enjoyed listening to Peter Hennessey, but admit to finding this book hard going at times, despite its brevity. However, he does very well to produce a very focused analysis of post war Britain when measured against the 5 wants. John Preston’s Fall is an account of the life and death of Robert Maxwell, pictured in 1964. Photograph: Hulton Getty Peter Hennessy is an English historian and academic specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London. Hennessy is moderately optimistic that the nation’s shared Covid experience could be what R.H. Tawney termed “a source of social energy”, increasing awareness of the need for the state to care for its people, breathing life into reform debates that have existed for some time. Prominent among these is introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), as trialled in Finland and elsewhere. Or of Universal Basic Services (UBS), including housing, transport, childcare, social care, healthcare education, legal services, access to digital information and communications and a basic income. Both are designed to bring about social equality, social justice and, as Hennessy puts it, “serenity”. The problem remains of finding a government willing and able to introduce such costly measures, though we might reasonably ask why a government that can afford very expensive failed private services could not afford public services that bring real public benefits.However I found this to be a very scrappy and jumbled piece. It covers a very summary account of British health and social policy - taking the Beveridge Report as its starting and reference points - and concludes with a cri de coeur about developing a new Beveridge framework following the Covid 19 pandemic. He concludes with the hope that the experience will lead to “a new consensus” and an agreed programme of reform, a “new Beveridge”. He suggests “five tasks” necessary for “a more equal, socially just nation funded by levels of productivity that can only come from sustained scientific and technological prowess, with a set of effective democratic and governing institutions” (p. 131). The five “tasks” (not “giants” though they are quite giant) are, firstly, much improved social care. Hennessy rightly describes how its inadequacies, in particular that it has always been charged for and means-tested unlike health care though many frail people need both, have been repeatedly criticized by official committees and others over many decades, and repeatedly neglected by successive governments including that currently in power. However, he does not discuss how already poor conditions in the care system were worsened by cuts to local funding and “outsourcing” to profit-making private companies under Thatcher and since 2010. The detailed prescriptions for a better future advanced in this book deserve to be read by anyone actively engaged in politics today. Nobody knows more about the world of high politics in the United Kingdom than Peter Hennessy. Richard Evans, Times Literary Supplement

A duty of care : Britain before and after Corona

From 1992 to 2000, Hennessey was professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. From 1994 to 1997, he gave public lectures as Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. From 2001, he has been Attlee professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary. You quote Nigel Lawson saying that the NHS is the closest thing we have to a religion. But to improve its performance, does it need an overhaul or just greater investment? Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ The thought that during a pandemic a doctor might also have time to write is astonishing. But this is, it seems, what some have been doing. Gavin Francis, a doctor best known for his travel writing, is first out of the traps with Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and Covid-19 (Profile, January). Hard on his heels is Jim Down, with Life Support (Viking, March), the Covid diary of an ICU doctor at one of London’s leading hospitals. A slightly different approach to the crisis will come in the form of A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Corona by the distinguished historian Peter Hennessy (Allen Lane, August). deeply thoughtful ... the book is testament to Hennessy's own deep humanity as well as his expertise in the history of Britain since 1945, the era of the post-war consensus, about which he writes with such conviction. It is a valuable and exceptionally well-reasoned guide to how we might turn round a country battered not by war, as in 1945, but by a wave of disease unknown in living memory. Simon Heffer, Sunday TelegraphBIBTEX Dublin Core MARCXML MARC (non-Unicode/MARC-8) MARC (Unicode/UTF-8) MARC (Unicode/UTF-8, Standard) MODS (XML) RIS