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 Telegraph Relatedly, expect a slew of books about mental health – though not all of them will toe the line that we’re experiencing an epidemic of mental illness: Losing Our Minds by Lucy Foulkes (Bodley Head, April), for instance, seeks to overturn this notion, especially as applied to the young. On this terrain, one memoir stands out, having already been garlanded with praise from Robert Macfarlane: Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare (Chatto & Windus, March). Those feeling more than usually apprehensive right now might like to turn to Relax: A User’s Guide to Life in the Age of Anxiety by Timothy Caulfield (Faber, January), a handbook that is informed as well as wise (Caulfield is a Canadian public health expert). 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. Covid has highlighted the fact that the most severe inequalities are those found on a global rather than a national level. This raises questions about the implicit nationalism of the British welfare state. In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote that socialists ‘proclaim as a duty towards the fellow members of the existing states, [what] they are not prepared to grant to the foreigner’. In any case, are the architects of the postwar settlement people we would want to imitate now? What would Keynes have said about contemporary Britain? A eugenicist, he might have made some sinister remarks about the effect of Covid on the ‘unfit’. Had he witnessed British politics over the last few years, his scepticism about democracy would hardly have been attenuated. He might well have pointed out how different things would be now had graduates possessed two votes in 2016, as they did in 1945. John Preston’s Fall is an account of the life and death of Robert Maxwell, pictured in 1964. Photograph: Hulton Getty

Peter Hennessy, A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid

Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this at times arid but ultimately compelling account of British social policy since 1945. We recovered in the aftermath of the second world war. Can we do it again, post-pandemic? Hennessy attended the nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, and on Sundays he went to St Mary Magdalene church, where he was an altar boy. He was educated at St Benedict's School, an independent school in Ealing, West London. When his father's job led the family to move to the Cotswolds, he attended Marling School, a grammar school in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He went on to study at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a BA in 1969 and a PhD in 1990. Hennessy was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard University from 1971 to 1972.Jay Elwes Has the past decade blunted our sense of the duty of care? With Britain still beached on the problem of Brexit, will we ever recover from the cost of Covid to provide adequate welfare again, wonders Peter Hennessy

A Duty of Care by Peter Hennessy - Penguin Books Australia A Duty of Care by Peter Hennessy - Penguin Books Australia

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The part of this excellent Book I should like to highlight is its call for a 'New Beveridge' manifesto to transform UK Government along lines which are vitally needed now. Almost as soon as the pandemic began, it became a cliché to compare the UK’s response to Covid to its experience of the Second World War, but if anyone has earned the right to do so, it is Peter Hennessy. The historian, broadcaster and cross-bench peer is renowned for his books on postwar Britain, so familiar with his subject matter that he treats his “characters” – Churchill, Bevin, Wilson – as though he is writing about old friends. But just because Hennessy is able to draw such parallels does not mean he should. And at times his new book A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid, in which he attempts to chart the impact of the Beveridge reforms over eight decades and transpose their lessons on to the post-pandemic era, falters under the weight of its ambition. Your new book’s title is A Duty of Care . Can you define in brief terms what you mean by that phrase?But let’s move on from these (strange) times, to other times (and places). I could not be more excited about Fall by John Preston (Viking, February), an account of the life and death of the tycoon Robert Maxwell by the author of A Very English Scandal (though I still think it should be called Splash!). In biography, I wonder whether Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury, May) will make me feel any differently about my least favourite writer (if anyone can do this, it’s Wilson); The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (Weidenfeld, March) by Jennifer Higgie, the former editor of Frieze, is set to be sumptuous as well as fascinating; and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (Virago, February) sounds weird and un-categorisable (in a good way). Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography (Cape, April) is bound to be rich, complicated – and very long. (Bailey, the biographer of John Cheever and Richard Yates, was appointed by Roth, and had full access to his archives.)

Details for: Duty of care : Britain before and after Covid

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. 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.New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, Craig Taylor’s follow-up to his wondrous oral contemporary history, Londoners, is long awaited (John Murray, March), and it will be interesting to see how this book reads at a point when our urban centres feel so hollowed out. At the other extreme, The Foghorn’s Lament by Jennifer Lucy Allan (White Rabbit, May) is about – yes – foghorns, and promises to sit on the wobbly line (and, in this case, noisy, mournful line) between nature writing and music writing. 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.

A Duty of Care - Penguin Books UK A Duty of Care - Penguin Books UK

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. 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.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. The 'duty of care' which the state owes to its citizens is a phrase much used, but what has it actually meant in Britain historically? And what should it mean in the future, once the immediate Covid crisis has passed? Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’