Keir Starmer has caught the public mood. Now he can shape the political argument | Will Hutton
As the Labour leader said, the impact of the virus has been worsened by injustice
It’s society, stupid. First, more than a decade ago, a banking crisis that would have brought the economy down without the £1tn in capital injections, asset guarantees and vast infusions of Bank of England cash into the banking system. Now a pandemic that will cumulatively cost another £1tn in extra borrowing, emergency lending and a doubling of cash from the Bank. Without deploying societal resources of £1tn twice over, the country would have succumbed to a collapse on an unimaginable scale.
Both crises have libertarianism at their root: a banking system allowed to run amok and a pandemic whose spread has been intensified by gross social inequalities and fatal hesitancy about exerting state authority. Yet a Conservative government, its hand forced by events, has had to throw all we have at it in order to overcome a threat that menaces everyone. Denial of the primacy of society in the name of libertarianism kills.
