Start The Week

The historian Peter Hennessy asks whether post-Covid Britain needs to set out a new social contract, comparable to the Beveridge report after WWII. In A Duty of Care, he looks back to the foundations of the modern welfare state and the ‘five giants’ against which society had to battle – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. He tells Helen Lewis that after the effects of the pandemic, it’s time to be ambitious and try and work together to tackle today’s comparable giants. In a damning report commissioned by the NHS Race and Health Observatory earlier this month, it was revealed that minority ethnic patients suffered overwhelming inequalities. If a new Beveridge is to be conceived diversity will need to be at its heart, but the anthropologist Farhan Samanani is concerned that increasingly ‘difference’ is being seen as a threat to societal cohesion. He has undertaken field research in the north London area of Kilburn – one of the most diverse in the UK. In How To Live With Each Other he explores the ca