Only now, hopefully not too late, we are beginning to understand that all that stands between us and the plague’s most horrifying effects is good government, something which we have sought to destroy for some decades, deriding it, dismissing it, downsizing it, underfunding it, and, as witnessed when the Morrison government returned to power, hectoring and bullying it.
And so we reap our bitter harvest.
A system of thought, an idea of the state, a way of running nations, a grossly unequal economy, all that began 40 years ago with Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society, must end with the way we respond to this deadly virus.