TIts time should be a time of hope, optimism, even celebration, yet it is difficult to shake off the feeling of impending doom. The end of the Covid emergency is finally on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean everything will soon be for the better in this best of all possible worlds, he writes Aleister Heath.
Yes, vaccines could allow Britain to return to a society with most aspects of normalcy, hopefully, by spring. But this is where the Panglossian vision ends. It is never possible for a traumatized country to turn back the clock or receive a vaccine or no vaccine, and any politician assuming otherwise is in terrible shock. We will emerge from lockdown a country with permanent scars. Gone is Old Britain, replaced by a battered economy, poorer, more indebted, more risk averse, and, above all, a collective economy.
The story of the past nine months across the Western world is a story of state failure on a colossal scale, and it ended only with the extraordinary capitalist miracle of Big Pharma: the script could almost have been written by Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. However, this risks making no difference to the left, the socialist transformation brought on by the virus and our response to it.
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