Nothing changes everything. Given the scale of the disruption and desolation that the pandemic has wrought – from the truly global to the irreducibly intimate – it is tempting to think that COVID-19 is the exception. But it isn’t. Other pandemics have been and gone. We will not be living in a siege economy and society for ever. And a combination of herd immunity, vaccine and collective boredom will allow some sort of everyday to re-emerge. But we shall not be returning to the world just as it was, nor any time soon. The Global Financial Crisis (of 2008) now looks quite modest by comparison to COVID-19 but when the pandemic struck we were still in the process of recovering from that earlier disaster. As we saw in Chapter 1, the financial crisis ushered in an economic ‘lost decade’ and, as we also saw, the associated economic costs and losses were very unevenly distributed. The Global Financial Crisis was a ‘temporary shock’ with ‘persistent effects’ (Hanlon, 2017) – and this is one useful way to think about the COVID experience. Of course, in the latter case the ‘temporary’ is pretty long-standing and the ‘persistent effects’ are still extremely unclear, but certain to be profound – and to persist for at least a decade, probably much longer. What we also know is that, as after 2008, these consequences will be differentiated by class, gender, ethnicity, location and perhaps by age.

‘Scarring’, both social and economic, is something which always has its origins in present injuries. Although the world after COVID is clouded in uncertainty – not least knowing when it will ‘end’ and what that would mean – there is plenty that we do know. And a significant part of our still quite uncertain future is determined by what has happened already – not just the pathway of the disease but also, for example, the scale of public indebtedness. The challenge of the public debt is, of course, principally a threat – but it is also an opportunity (to do things differently). In this chapter, I concentrate on what is happening to our welfare regime (broadly conceived) in the wider context of an ongoing recession. I focus first on the recent past and the near-present. A little later, I turn to what may happen in the near-future.