“We’re going to have to re-imagine the economy” Keir Starmer told the Today programme earlier this week. “We can’t go out clapping our key workers… and then return to business as usual at the end of all of this. Most of those key workers are underpaid and undervalued… we’ve got to have a vision of a better society coming out of this, not only for those who are literally keeping our country running by putting their lives on the line but for the whole country”.
If we are to treat our key workers with the respect they deserve — the respect we all deserve — we don’t just need a vision of a better society, we need a vision of a much better society. But making meaningful change happen is always challenging, especially in our often-hostile political and media environment, so we also need a realistic plan for delivering an ambitious vision. Luckily, three lessons from modern history suggest we already have much of what we need to develop and deliver that vision:
1) A proposition everyone can agree on (or, more accurately, a proposition that any reasonable person would be embarrassed to publicly disagree with).
