What kind of society will emerge when coronavirus crisis has passed?

How will it be when it’s over? Or, at least, when we emerge from the first rounds of the epidemic? Will everything, or almost everything, be changed, changed utterly, even, to steal from Yeats, will “a terrible beauty” be born?

Will we conclude that the values which have, apparently, informed our political, economic and social policies for so long – since 1979, perhaps – should now be consigned to the dustbin as idols or false gods?

Does the weekly applause for doctors, angelic nurses and all workers in the National Health Service indicate that we recognise that there is indeed such a thing as “society” and that our values have been warped by the dominance of finance? Will private equity yield to an old, now recovered, sense of  public equity, fairness and moral justice?

Will the Prime Minister, escaped from his glimpse of the jaws of death, remember those “whose shoulders held the sky suspended/ what God abandoned, these defended,/ And saved the sum of things for” (all too little) pay”?

It’s possible. We have certainly had a shock, and shocks may be salutary. For the moment anyway, there is general agreement that the public interest has priority over private interests. The rights of individuals have been curtailed in, admittedly, our own interest in being protected from the virus, but they have primarily been limited for the general good.

People who are now suddenly seen to have been undervalued are hailed as heroes. The Government promises the most lavish public spending since the Second World War, and there is no talk of Austerity, no admission that someday the bills will be presented.

But will it last or will it not be long before some lines of Larkin, sour even by his exacting standards, ring true again?

First slum, of Europe: a role

It won’t be so hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts

Will it be long before we are told again that the inefficiencies of the NHS require to be corrected by the introduction of keener competition and greater managerial expertise? Will it indeed be long once normalcy has returned before we again hear complaints about the difficulty of seeing your own doctor, scandalously long waiting-times for treatment, over-crowded A&E departments, doctors and nurses with a poor command of English, and all the moaning we have heard so often over the years?

“O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, and Tommy go away

But it’s ‘Thank you, Mt Atkins,’ when the band begins to play

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, how’s your soul?

But it’s ‘Thin red line of ‘eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.”

Well, it may be different this time. The return to the life to which we were accustomed will be slow and uncertain. We shall all be aware of the possibility, even the likelihood, that the virus will return in a second wave before any vaccine is ready, and with it a second lockdown and more business closures. It will take time also for all the bills to be presented and an accounting to be made.

The urgent demand will be “get the economy going”.  Businesses will have folded. Reconstruction will offer opportunities and rich pickings. If you hope to see more of what is called “social investment”, you may be disappointed. Such investment generally takes some time, often a long time, to bear fruit.

Building that land fit for heroes may be no easier now than it was when that promise was made after the Great War of 1914-18. Suppose, with so much slack, there are opportunities for quick profits. Suppose that, as is quite possible, recovery from what is now surely a recession, even a slump, leads to a boom. Recovery may indeed be quite quick, for this is not a normal recession, one caused by bankers’ greed or the failure of market forces. What then? Will greed be good again?

The outcome for the economy is anyone’s guess. So too is the consequence of the experience we have endured as individuals, families and social beings. That experience has been mixed. It has given us an opportunity to reconsider the way we have lived and our relationship to neighbours and other people in general. At the same time we have been under orders, submitting to the commands of government and public authorities as never before in times of peace. Has it changed us?

Turn, as one often does, to gnomic wisdom. Turn to Kipling and “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man –

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: –

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins?

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

For pessimism, which some call realism, you can’t beat Tory poets like Kipling, Housman and Larkin.