Perhaps the most basic of all the lessons to be learned from our experience of COVID-19 is that we can't get by without the state. We may not like it. And it may have shown itself repeatedly to be unfit for purpose. But it is hard to see how we could hope to navigate our way through this crisis – or indeed the next one – without it. And this state remains, first and foremost, a welfare state. In practice, modern states spend most of their time and energy (and resources) funding and organising welfare. All states tax and spend. They are huge engines of revenue generation and distribution. And even the ‘meanest’ of welfare states reduce market-generated inequalities significantly. In Britain, for example, the reduction in the Gini coefficient before and after taxes and transfers is close to 25 per cent. But states do this now in societies that have become much more unequal – socially and economically – and in which those inequalities seem to be ever more firmly entrenched. The task I set myself in this book was to consider if and how we could devise (or, in the first place, begin to imagine) a new welfare regime that might embody a ‘strategy of equality’ for these changed circumstances. To do this, we had first to look backwards to make sense of what had happened, before thinking about how we could do something different in the future.

In Chapter 1, I looked at the welfare state as it was at the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, and after ten years of Conservative management. Austerity was certainly a key theme in this period – but so were conditionality, dependency and paid work (at almost any price). In the shorthand that we use to describe these processes, this might be called a strategy of inequality. While inequality did not quite take off in the ways that some people feared and/or supposed, almost nothing was done to address historically high levels of unequal access to income, wealth, health and opportunity. Significant sections of the population were made poorer and child poverty – which is a good barometer of a society's intention to look after its disadvantaged – was allowed to grow by at least 500,000 across the decade.