Social affairs

On the anniversary of the first lockdown, I wrote a piece for the New Statesman magazine about how far the pandemic was “resetting” our relationship with work, leisure, welfare and care. I spoke to a range of people whose lives and values had changed wholesale in the age of Covid-19: a businesswoman who had earned a six-figure salary at a bluechip company now relying on Universal Credit; an events executive who had been furloughed – paid to do nothing – for a year; a CEO who had given all his staff a four-day week. Such stories and the dramatic shifts in where and how we worked suggested the pandemic was an opportunity to rethink our priorities as a society. Since then, there has been some evidence of this reset, at least on the part of individuals. More than three-quarters of British people say the pandemic has made them reconsider what’s most important in their lives, according to a report titled How Covid Changed Our Minds published in July 2021 by the Global Future think tank. A September 2020 study by the insurer Aviva found that 2.4 million Britons are planning to switch to an entirely different career path in the year ahead as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. All of this was speculative until the release of the landmark British Social Attitudes survey today (21 October), which suggests there have been significant (though not unprecedented) shifts in the British public’s outlook since before the pandemic. The National Centre for Social Research has published the results of this year’s British Social Attitudes survey, the UK’s most important and longest-running tracker of British public opinion – based on a special online survey carried out in July 2020 and the regular British Social Attitudes annual survey carried out towards the end of that year. It shows notable changes in attitudes towards both inequality and welfare. Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) agreed that “ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth”. This figure is up from 57 per cent in 2019 and higher than in any year since 1998. The same proportion (64 per cent) agreed that there is “one law for the rich and one for the poor”, up from 56 per cent in 2019. The figure has not been higher than this at any time since 1997. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r