The outbreak of Chinese Covid19 is going to have profound effects on British society and on British politics even after it is over. I truly believe that this is one enemy that can be fought effectively as it has arrived at a time when science can in time develop tools to counter it. As I have said before, this is not 1918 when no medical professional or any scientist even knew what a virus was let alone that it was the cause of influenza. Those fighting the 1918 influenza outbreak were often under the erroneous impression that influenza was caused by a bacterium. We are not in such times today.

When this disease is beaten, and I truly believe that it will be, it’s quite possible that there may be a re-evaluation by the public about what is important and what is not. There is now a whole new generation who have tasted uncertainty for the first time and this is going to have an effect on the populace. Uncertainty has been a fact of human existence for millennia, but for some in the West uncertainty has been banished, until now. I suspect that today’s millenials will be telling stories of this period in a few decades time and prefacing their tales with ‘during the Covid19 plague……’ just as the generations prior to mine told stories that began ‘during the war…..’

After this crisis is over and countries like the United Kingdom start to rebuild, I don’t think that it will return to a period of political business as usual. Many things will have changed and policies that the politicians favour may be very much out of favour with the public to such an extent that carrying out these policies will be all but impossible for governments to sell to the public.

Some policies like open borders and ‘refugees welcome’ are now dead in the water despite the noise still being made about them by far Left activists. When the population of a country suffers from a world wide pandemic that has been to a large extent assisted by open borders and pro-refugee policies, it tends to see such policies not as altruism but as a threat to safety and security. Strong border policies are more than likely to come back into fashion when this crisis is over. I foresee a situation where woe betide the idiot who shouts ‘let’s open the borders’ or ‘what harm can letting in ‘refugees’ have?’ Such policies are not going to be popular after this, in fact they are going to be even less popular than they are already.

There’s also probably going to be a re-balancing of industry. For the last decade or more it’s been both convenient and cheaper to offshore the ‘oily rag’ type industries such as steel production, heavy engineering, medicine production and electronics to places like China. After this crisis I think that both government’s and industry will rev-evaluate whether this is still a good idea. I foresee that much industry that has been offshored may come back to Western nations such as the United Kingdom. This in my view would be a good thing but it would take time to rebuild capacity in these areas as they have been underinvested in for far too long.

I also believe that luxury beliefs will take a hit following defeat of Chinese Covid19. These luxury beliefs are ones that can only be held by those who have few other worries and encompass such things as the far shores of environmentalism, identity politics and transgenderism. Having to go through a period where people have to go into survival mode will concentrate minds. Trying to sell false apocalyptic narratives such as ‘climate change will bring disaster’ or ideologies that there are 57 genders will find that they have less traction in political circles after this crisis than they had before. It’s difficult after all for a person running low on food or who has just used their last roll of toilet paper to have any sympathy for a person who demands, with the backing of law, that you use their made up pronoun for their equally made up gender. If the government is serious about rebuilding the nation then it has to drop policies that have their roots in these luxury beliefs, chief among which is the lunatic desire for Britain to go ‘carbon neutral’. Many of the industries that were seen as ‘dirty and polluting’ because of their CO2 output and were sent out of sight and out of mind to China, are going to have to come back so that Britain is no longer at the mercy of a bunch of authoritarian Communists from the other side of the world. This crisis will hopefully make Greta Thunberg yesterday’s woman and about as relevant to our survival as the eccentric who used to walk around London telling people that eating less protein will cause less social problems. Many normal people had had it up to the neck with the environmental extremists as well as the identity politics promoters and the bullying transgender activists and I suspect that such types will not be well received if they try to pick up where they left off when this crisis is over.

Depending on how things pan out over the next few weeks or months, I believe that other policies that have been favoured by governments may fall out of favour with citizens and subjects. I believe that top down multiculturalism will be seen as a busted flush especially if the crisis shows up societal faultlines based on communalism.  Profiteering by one community from another or exploitation of one community by another will cause social wounds that will be very difficult to heal. It may well be that we will move from a situation where at present communities are left to themselves and to often recreate in the UK the backwards socities from which they came, to one where integrationism becomes the order of the day. This would in my view be a good thing as it is integrationism that has been a characteristic of successful migrant groups whilst siloised multiculturalism has been proven to cause much more poverty and division because those in certain communities do not feel the need or have the need to venture out of them. If people have narrow horizons then they have narrower opportunities. I grew up in a port area and like all port areas there were different people living there, it was not unusual for example to see Chinese and North Koreans in Mao suits walking by my late grandmother’s cafe. It was an area where mixed race and faith relationships were common, but ultimately it was integrationism that brought people together whereas multiculturalism in this area has driven people apart.

When this crisis is over I also believe that there will be some sort of re-thinking of the NHS and how it operates. The NHS, despite being trumpeted by the Left and the Establishment as ‘the envy of the world’, is being shown to be woefully inadequate to the task of tackling this epidemic. I would hope that when Chinese Covid19 is finally beaten the public will start to kick up a fuss about why the NHS is such a sclerotic bureaucracy where there are more administrators than doctors. The public should also ask awkward questions about where money has been spent on guff like ‘diversity and inclusion managers’ instead of things like ventilators. For the money that has been wasted on worthless guff in the NHS, Britain could have had mothballed hosptials kept ticking over in case of some future emergency such as an outbreak of a disease or some natural disaster.

I really don’t believe that we can return to politics as usual. This crisis has shown that Britain faces a number of problems both societally and structurally that cannot in the present situation be pushed under the carpet or cracks that cannot be papered over by slinging more good money after bad at the problems. Although HMG is doing a reasonable job of tackling the situation as it exists at present, when it is over all of these structural, societal and economic problems that have been built up in Britain over the last few decades will need to be tackled, I really don’t think that the public will go back to sleep after this and allow business as usual.