Our most severe national emergency since the guns fell silent across Europe three quarters of a century ago consists of three overlapping disasters: a public health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis. Every day, more people are hospitalised, rushed to intensive care and prematurely inhale their last breaths. While supermarkets enjoy a short-term, panicked boost, a nation under quarantine is not spending its cash in pubs, bars, cafes, restaurants, hotels, taxis and a huge array of shops: why splash out on that special shirt or dress no prospective date will see for the foreseeable future? Over the last generation, capitalism has been reconfigured to stand on two stools: the financial sector and rampant consumerism. What happens if you strip consumers from consumer capitalism? This, it transpires, is our latest economic experiment. There is a growing consensus that free-market capitalism is incapable of addressing this national emergency Which brings us to our social crisis. This is a society in which a quarter of adults have no savings, and for those aged 22 to 30, that rises to half. There is no financial cushion if their income evaporates. As it is, most households below the poverty line are in work, and there are 4.7 million workers in a gig economy defined by insecurity and a lack of basic rights. Even in normal times, seven in 10 small-business owners have been kept awake by cash flow problems. The private rented sector – which has doubled in the last two decades – is defined by rip-off rents and insecurity: rent hikes have outpaced stagnating pay over the last decade, and young key workers are shelling out more than half their wages on bank transfers to their landlords. Advertisement From Uber drivers with collapsing numbers of rides to laid-off airline workers, incomes are in freefall but rents and household bills are still to be paid and children need to be fed. The social crisis bleeds into the public health crisis, too: a cleaner with a family to support will rationally judge that, given there is no question of surviving on £94.25 a week of statutory sick pay, the onset of illness will not deter them from their already low-paid work, and so the virus spreads. At times of national emergency, anything other than total submission to the government’s strategy is frequently portrayed as sabotage, as undermining a life-or-death fight against a vicious enemy. The second world war is often invoked by way of comparison: yet there was a flourishing public debate over the government’s wartime strategy, one which led to Neville Chamberlain being toppled after the fall of Norway, and the Nazis were a sentient opponent, whereas coronavirus is not. The government’s failures on our three national crises must be addressed. It is the case that, in the public health crisis, the UK was an international outlier, that several experts savaged the government’s approach, that France has threatened to ban British nationals because of our slow response, and that Boris Johnson U-turned on the so-called mitigation approach because its continuation would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Neither is it treason to point out that the Tories left us ill prepared – they didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining, you could say – by leaving the NHS desperately underresourced and its staff demoralised. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, hoped to dazzle by spraying around seemingly unimaginable sums: but £350bn in loans and loan guarantees is rightly viewed by financial experts as a sticking plaster that may not prevent mass job losses. There are no conditions attached, either: businesses should only be offered help if they agree to protect wages and salaries with no redundancies. Above all, the government has so far manifestly failed to address the social crisis: a three-month mortgage holiday for those struggling is a welcome first step (though banks may already offer this anyway), but it does nothing for the 11 million renters, many of whom are in low-paid and insecure work, or the self-employed, or those already cast into unemployment. There is a growing consensus – in rhetoric, at least – that free-market capitalism is incapable of addressing this national emergency. ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston, writes in the Spectator demanding Boris Johnson “borrow from Corbyn’s playbook to prevent a coronavirus crash”; ConservativeHome demands the government “tear up the rulebook – we need Big State Government on a scale unknown in modern times”; while a former Tory minister calls for the temporary nationalisation of any troubled business. With all agreed on drastic state interventionism, the left should not fear being unambitious in its demands. Hiking statutory sick pay is an obvious first step, but it would not go far enough. Denmark has committed to cover 75% of private sector workers’ salaries in struggling businesses, with bosses expected to pay the rest, while Sweden has committed to ensure temporarily laid-off workers receive 90% of their salaries. Guaranteeing that workers have their incomes protected is an urgent demand. With Hong Kong depositing $1,200 into the bank accounts of its residents, and even Donald Trump committing to $1,000 cash payments for all US citizens, a universal basic income should surely be considered here, too. Radical action needs to be taken to protect private renters, including banning evictions as New York, Seattle and San Francisco have already done. If major businesses such as Virgin Atlantic demand state assistance, it should be in exchange for government stakes rather than no-strings bailouts. Household bills should be suspended. The UK was already in a social crisis before a pandemic began shutting down human civilisation; it now risks a social calamity. It has taken a virus to publicly expose a damning indictment of our entire social order: that millions of people in a wealthy nation are always one pay cheque away from extreme hardship. Without radical action – which must become the new common sense – a social emergency will long outlast the public health crisis. Now is the time to demand action, not to blindly submit.