It comes to something when we hark back to the early days of Covid with any feeling of positivity. Clearly for many, they were a deeply upsetting, potentially tragic, and universally disrupting time. But now with the benefit of five years of hindsight, it seems more possible to isolate particular aspects which provide a little useful guidance for the future.
One of those is distilled later in this edition, when it is noted that when the community is really up against it, such as was the case in the first half of 2020, it pulls together well, and delivers major projects which at any other time would be mired for years in debate and territorial squabbling. When faced with a clear and present problem, decisions are made, and actions are taken, with a speed and commitment that are typically absent in the normal run of things.
Which does really beg the question as to what do we really consider to be a problem? Because on the evidence of what happened in that early phase of the Covid pandemic, if we really judge it to be a problem, we will sort it out, at least as far as possible.
When put in that very simple context, one does wonder what scale of “problem” we attribute to some of the serious issues that we write about regularly in these pages. Like our perennially sluggish productivity, or the often-debated housing crisis, “bean drain” or shrinking economy. Or the growing cost and size of the public sector. Or the dynamic cocktail of opportunities and challenges facing our economy through the forward march of artificial intelligence.
No one is arguing that some actions aren’t being taken, or that the totality of any of those issues is in our control; the point is simply one of focus and commitment. That if we really believed there to be a clear and present danger (or opportunity) presented by any one of them, then we would see the sort of purposeful, cross-community cohesion to do everything we could which we saw in 2020.
If that point is pursued a little further, then the same question becomes simpler: what do we really care about? In 2020, we really cared about doing all that could be done to protect the community from the as-yet-unknown threat of a new virus.
Perhaps it is only when we agree that any one of the above issues is a direct threat, that we will find the cross-community motivation to act.
