I finished writing this book just as we passed the anniversary of the first nationwide UK COVID-19 lockdown (on 23 March 2021). It was a year unlike any other. Most importantly and distressingly, it saw more than 10,000,000 cases of the disease and in excess of 140,000 COVID-related deaths across the UK. In response to the rapid spread of the disease in March 2020, the government took infection control measures that involved suspending basic civil liberties – including freedoms of movement and association – and shut down significant sectors of the economy (essentially those that involved person-to-person contact). Education, for both school-and university-level students, was severely disrupted. Twelve months on, many of these regulations were still in place and the government was still effectively ruling by decree. It had committed enormous sums of money – close to £350 billion – to counter the effects of the pandemic, fairly evenly divided between support for households and businesses on the one hand and public services, especially the NHS, on the other. Public debt for 2020/21 was on a similarly unprecedented (peacetime) scale – at around 17 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In whatever way we choose to define the welfare state, it was transformed by the pandemic – though many of the changes were supposed to be ‘temporary’. Millions of people of working age became dependent upon the state for an income in a way they could never have anticipated. The number of people on Universal Credit (UC) – the government's principal welfare benefit – doubled from 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 in the nine months from March 2020 to January 2021. Through ‘furloughing’ for employees and support grants for the self-employed, the government avoided the mass unemployment – and the associated collapse of spending power – that the rapid contraction of the economy would otherwise have precipitated. The recession was still severe – GDP declined by around 10 per cent in the year to April 2021, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – but the hope was that recovery could be fairly rapid once more ‘normal’ trading conditions were restored. The government repeatedly found that its temporary measures – for example, furloughing and the £20 per week uplift in UC – had to be extended.