Two questions spring to mind as the coronavirus crisis deepens.
Could 2020 be another 1945, a year when the people demanded a better deal from their politicians – and got it?
Could Sir Keir Starmer emerge as another Clement Attlee and become the nation’s urgently needed focus for change?
The parallels are beguiling. Winston Churchill won the war and lost the peace. Boris Johnson may win the war against Covid-19, but lose an election to Labour.
On all sides, the clamour for doing things differently is mounting. No going back to the pre-pandemic starvation of the NHS. No more war against junior hospital doctors, who are dying in the front line.
A curb on the accelerating drive to insecure, underpaid work by greedy employers who put profit before people. A brake on the bonus culture for fat-cat bosses.
A new deal for the jobless, and an end to the accursed, discredited Universal Credit system.
Above all, a change in attitudes is compelled. The Tories who revelled in “rolling back the state” must now admit it was the state that saved British lives and businesses.
Without massive Treasury intervention, based on billions of borrowed pounds, the economy would have collapsed completely. Without state direction of our social lives, millions could have perished.
The state is us, not some disembodied, alien structure forced upon us by outside forces. It’s what we make it.
And that’s the key to what I hope could become the Starmer decade.
He must labour to reshape the state, and what it does, in the image of our post-war hopes and dreams.
