My purpose in this first chapter is to establish just what the welfare regime in Britain looked like on the eve of the COVID-19 crisis. The decade of welfare austerity, signalled in George Osborne's Mais Lecture on 24 February 2010, had already come to a rather faltering close with Chancellor Sajid Javid's Spending Review at the end of the summer of 2019. And this shift was consummated with the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak's first budget in March 2020, which promised growth in public expenditure of 2.8 per cent for the years between 2020/21 and 2023/24. This initiative committed the government to building and funding a public sector larger than it had been at any time between the 1980s and the financial crisis of 2008 (including all of the years of New Labour government prior to the crisis). This future scenario was almost immediately overtaken by (unanticipated) events. Thus, Rishi Sunak's first budget also included a series of emergency spending measures designed to deal with the developing crisis surrounding the outbreak of COVID-19. These turned out to be just the first, now rather modest-looking steps in what was to become an unprecedented peacetime programme of public spending, designed to save the economic life of the nation, while protecting its collective health. As we shall see in Chapter 5, COVID-19 took us into a new world of public expenditure and public indebtedness. The hard-won savings that had been eked out over a decade of austerity were blown away in a couple of months as the Treasury committed itself (initially) to an additional £218 billion of borrowing for 2020/21.

While the pandemic, and the wealth of measures taken by the government to counteract it, has had a profound impact upon our welfare order (and our well-being), it has not simply ‘undone’ what was there before. As we shall see, while some changes will endure, and while the impact of some of the more temporary measures will have a lasting effect, much of what the government did was self-consciously designed to be short term – to ‘do whatever it takes’ to get us through the crisis. The longer-term consequences of these shorterterm changes – plus the impact of simultaneously moving to a post-Brexit world of work and trade – may take a generation to emerge. For now, they remain profoundly uncertain.