The big headline at the weekend was that Boris Johnson doesn’t like going to meetings and leaves everything to the last minute, which was the biggest non-surprise of the year. He’s a journalist for God’s sake and journalists always leave everything to the last minute. It’s also the job of journalists to point out how badly other people are running the country. I’m yet to be convinced they should be running it themselves.

But this is what crises like coronavirus do: they reveal, and expose, what people are like, but they also transform, and change, people too, and I’d be surprised if the Prime Minister’s time in hospital hasn’t changed him in some way. Speak to doctors and nurses and they’ll tell you that intensive care has a profound effect on anyone who’s ever been a patient there. You tend to reassess your life when death brushes up against you.

The changes, if any, that have happened to Mr Johnson may become clear in time, but we can hope for one at least. Some of the nurses who treated him in hospital were migrants who’d come to the UK to work in the NHS and you’d like to think that fact would make the PM reconsider the benefits of immigration and go for a different kind of Brexit. In that sense, perhaps the coronavirus will have shifted him a little to the left.

You wonder too if the effect is more widespread: we now have a Tory government, so recently wreathed in austerity grey, that has overseen an unprecedented expansion in state benefits and support, paid for by a massive increase in public debt – no wonder the new Labour leader Keir Starmer is struggling to find something to disagree with. The crisis has also made some people reconsider their political assumptions, which is only right and proper: many facts have changed, so many opinions must change too.

My hope is that the effect will work on everyone to some extent: left, right, Remain, Leaver, unionist, nationalist. For example, I’d like to think that some of the Scots who’ve been inclined towards independence will ask themselves whether coronavirus doesn’t demonstrate the social and economic benefits of nations working together in unions.

Equally, other people may be thinking again about what the state should be doing for its citizens and I hope that would include the PM, although it won’t be easy for him – as a journalist and politician, he’s railed against the nanny state; now, suddenly, he finds himself wearing nanny’s apron. 

That second category – people who’ve looked again at their views on state support – is particularly interesting and I would certainly include myself in that group. I’ve seen lots of friends lose their businesses and incomes in the last few weeks and I’ve seen them try to access state benefits or the other government schemes. It’s been upsetting and unsettling and in the end it may not even work – there’s no guarantee they’ll get what they need to see them through.

In some ways, what’s happened has exposed the problems with any kind of means-tested system: it takes time to process, it costs a lot of money, and it can lead to unfair cut-offs between people in similar circumstances. But there are problems with universal benefits too: they’re also expensive and you spend some of the money on people who don’t need it. Both systems have their drawbacks.

However, the Covid crisis has particularly underlined the problems with our current set-up. The sudden influx of people needing help means a lot of bureaucracy and expense; it’s also inefficient, potentially unfair, and inclined towards abuse. We know, for example, that a lot of people who are entitled to help have not applied (the same happens with regular benefits); conversely, some companies have furloughed staff while getting them to do work on the side.

All of this bureaucracy and abuse could potentially have been avoided – and I find it hard to believe I’ve come round to an idea I would’ve once considered loony left-wing – by a system that works to a basic, bottom-line income that’s paid no matter your circumstances. It would mean everyone would be guaranteed a basic level of support without having to go through a long process to access it and we would not be facing such a sudden and catastrophic surge in spending. There are also good, Conservative reasons for supporting a universal income provided it came with a reduction in other benefits: it would make the pubic sector smaller, and if it improves people’s health, it might reduce the cost of the NHS.

The NHS, as it happens, as well as social care, is another area where reassessment is going on. To some extent, there’s been a little bit of cant in the criticism of the government handling of coronavirus – an unprecedented crisis situation is never going to go entirely smoothly and it should be judged by the circumstance of the crisis rather than before it. But for a long time the UK and Scottish governments have talked about spending increases on the NHS and social care without addressing the question of whether we are spending enough. At the end of all this, we urgently need a realistic assessment of what the system actually needs.

We should question other shibboleths too. Even where I am in the middle of nowhere in Ayrshire I’ve been appreciating the lack of cars on the road and planes in the sky; it was so quiet the other day I heard a sheep fart. So perhaps, for a start, we could address the ludicrous cheapness of air travel by taxing it more heavily – certainly, the SNP’s been moving on the issue and has repudiated its old policy of big cuts for airlines. A lot of people might also be much more sympathetic now than they were towards financial disincentives on owning cars.

READ MORE: Mark Smith: The problem with the Scottish Government’s laws on Covid? They don’t go far enough 

I’m not saying any of these ideas are madly radical and I’m not saying my sympathy for them qualifies me as a leftie. But this crisis has changed the lives of every person in the country, and principles and assumptions that we took for granted have been undermined or swept away altogether. We are not going to be the same when all of this is finished and many of our opinions won’t be the same either. If you’re looking for a positive from coronavirus, perhaps that is one of them.

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