A Duty of Care review – an excellent book written for another world

A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid by Peter Hennessy (Penguin), £15.89.

A Duty of Care is a casualty of war. Written by polymath, Lord Hennessy, it was conceived to help reshape Britain after Covid. The final chapter, “The Road to 2045”, meticulously argued with typical Hennessy care, assumes the institutions he calls on to correct the policy failings of the pandemic will be set to swing into action. 

He is a big government, big picture guy to his roots. That road has been shelled to smithereens by Russian tanks rolling across the Ukraine border. Sod post-Covid. We now live in a world a hair’s breadth from nuclear disaster, struggling to understand how to cope with Russia as a pariah state, plunged into an energy crisis of Europe’s own Nordstream-making and facing the end of globalisation as a generator of economic growth.

The elephant in the room is that this excellent book was written for another world, facing different priorities. Yet, it still has huge value, if only for the narrative of events leading to policy failures pre-Covid outbreak. There will, however, be another pandemic, so “Be Prepared”.

Chapter 7, “Pathogen Britain and Its Lessons”, should be compulsory reading for Whitehall mandarins. While it is a tad Captain Hindsight, Hennessy does not pretend to have known all along what the policy idiots could not see staring them in the face. 

Rather, he draws reflective lessons from a careful analysis of failure, while giving credit for unexpected success — vaccine discovery and roll-out, genome decoding — and charts a path for extending the lessons learnt there to other policy areas.

To understand the book, it is important to understand the author. Peter Hennessy is a fixed, benevolent feature of the establishment landscape. 

Sitting in the House of Lords as a crossbencher he eschews party affiliation but is weel-kent as a longstanding left-wing intellectual. With a slew of well-received publications to his credit, his reputation goes before him, so I won’t dwell on that. 

When I was an MP, he was a familiar acquaintance on the seminar/think tank/lobby lunch circuit and although I did not — and still do not — espouse his “big state” views, his was company to be sought out and enjoyed. 

He is a decent man, endearingly puzzled by those who are not, interested in bettering the common good. I have no quarrel with that. I just think he goes the wrong way about it. But he is always worth listening to, or reading, as this book amply proves. 

Unless you are Vladimir Putin it is difficult to argue with Hennessy’s starting point — that those in charge owe a duty of care to those they govern.

That starting point, Chapter 1, “Nye’s Perambulators”, is a reminder that, even in the darkest of the Second World War days, Churchill’s coalition government had the time, inclination, and foresight to commission the Beveridge report. A duty of care for the post-war future.

The welfare state mapped out became the Labour Party’s winning manifesto, and between 1944 and 1949 ten major pillars of legislation covering Health, Education, National Insurance, Housing, National Assistance, Family Assistance, National Parks, Housing, Town and country planning and Legal Aid would change Britain forever; although, it took Harold McMillan’s Conservative government and 13 years of Tory misrule to make it a reality.

Hennessy goes on in Part 1 to laud the post-war pursuit of consensus — on both sides of the House of Commons — charting the beginnings of social unrest and economic decline as that consensus morphed into labour relations confrontation under Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, opening the way for Margaret Thatcher.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – Out! Out! Out!” Well, the author doesn’t quite descend to riff-raff sloganizing, but that old 80’s riff is a fair precis of his analysis of the Thatcher government’s market reforms, deregulation, pursuit of monetarism and encouragement of the raffish “Loads’a money” City ethos, all of which he finds abhorrent.

Chapter V, “Social Market”, takes on the post-Thatcher era — Major, Blair, the Cameron coalition, May and Bojo, assessing how much progress has been made in slaying the Five Giants confronted by Beveridge: Want; Disease; Ignorance; Idleness and Squalor.

Hennessy acknowledges the massive progress that has been made by post-war governments, but marks all their cards, “Could do Better”. As rational intellectuals with no responsibility for policy execution are prone to do.

Chapter VI bemoans Brexit — the author is a Remainer, no surprise there — and contains a fascinating five pages headed “Brexit Timeline”. What a bloody awful five years that was; from the Cameron pledge of a referendum in 2015 to Boris Breaking Free at the end of 2020. 

Being reminded of the incessant machine-gun chatter of summits, Benn Act deadlines failed withdrawal arrangements, stop the clock extensions, and John Bercow, made me almost cry with relief when Covid strode centre stage.

“The Condition of Britain Question” passage takes A Duty of Care beyond social policy. We must nurture our nation. “A pathogen had struck which was heedless of national borders”, says Hennessy, making the argument for preserving the unity of the United Kingdom. Lord Hennessy has clearly not tuned into Radio Sturgeon anytime recently.

Casting Covid as a UK unifier may seem logical to him, but it is not how it worked out. Scotland’s First Minister focused her duty of care on her obsessive nationalist agenda instead. 

Anything to be different from Boris Johnson. So, as the author’s meme is a Joan Baez Set My People Free, north of the border, Wee Krankie’s (N Sturgeon) was Coop My People Up. I would have valued some rigorous analysis of that contradiction.

As one would expect of the author, the supporting content of this book is rich. At the back of the book, “The Timeline of Lockdown Britain” extends to 23 pages, a vital ready-reckoner of how events panned out. There are no fewer than 17 pages of chapter reference notes, providing readers with a road map to further source material to dip into. 

The writing style is down to earth. Peter Hennessy wears his intellect lightly, being neither lofty nor condescending. Just plain readable. It is tragic that the rhetorical Chapter VIII — “A New Consensus and a New Beveridge?” — has been train-crashed by the outbreak of a European war.

The bad news for Lord Hennessy is that, in the public interest, he must pick up his pen again and go figure out how his overarching principle — that governments owe A Duty of Care to their citizens — can infuse the new or reshaped global governance structures that will emerge in a post-Putin era. Sorry, Peter. Your work is far from done.