History shows how UK could create a fairer society

A review of After the Virus: Lessons from the past for a better future by Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter (Cambridge University Press, UK £12.99, September, 2021).

After the Virus is an accessible, lucid and in many ways an essential read, revealing as it does the appalling outcome of decades of neoliberalism in the UK, leading to a ‘cancer of corruption and cronyism’ in the present government which the C19 crisis has alarmingly laid bare.

Written by an economist and a historian, it asks: ‘How can we defeat the virus of neoliberalism’s myth — the morally corrosive framing of rational economic man — and tell a new and rounded story of ourselves?’ And how can moral values be rethought for the UK to chart a new way forward and avoid a ‘truly dystopian alternative’?

An important first step, the authors say, is to look back at English history, together with the sometimes surprising insights it affords. And it’s this that furnishes the most enlightening and absorbing aspect of the book, revealing as it does that neoliberalism — favouring free-market capitalism, deregulation and curbs in government spending — is in fact a self-destructive political aberration of the past 400 years, and in no way has been the norm.