It’s extraordinary how little we talk about Covid, given how profoundly it continues to shape our society, economy, and public services.
From Furlough to Fallout: The Lasting Economic Impact of Pandemic Spending
As Heather Stewart et al. note in The Guardian, the pandemic marked a dramatic – though temporary – expansion in the role of the state. Almost overnight, the UK government introduced measures on a scale unseen in peacetime, including the furlough scheme, which covered up to 80% of workers’ wages to prevent mass unemployment. At a cost of £70 billion, it kept millions of people afloat during months of lockdown and business closures.
Alongside furlough came business grants, bounce-back loans, emergency increases to Universal Credit, and funding for PPE procurement and vaccine rollout. Altogether, these interventions added approximately £400 billion to the national debt, placing enormous strain on public finances.
Today, the cost of borrowing has risen sharply, and the UK now spends over £100 billion annually just to service its debt – more than double the pre-pandemic figure. That’s more than the entire education budget, and comparable to defence and welfare spending.
A Health System Under Strain: The Hidden Legacy of Lockdown
Meanwhile, the long-term effects of the pandemic continue to ripple through essential services. NHS waiting lists remain at record highs, with over seven million people in England alone awaiting treatment. Many of these delays stem from care postponed during lockdowns, compounded by workforce shortages and underinvestment.
Mental health services, too, are stretched to breaking point. The psychological toll of isolation, grief, economic insecurity, and the trauma of the pandemic itself has led to a 36% rise in demand for mental health support compared to pre-Covid levels. Young people, in particular, report unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. Yet services remain chronically underfunded, with long waits for counselling or specialist care.
What Happened to Big Government? The Vanishing Vision of a More Supportive State
While the pandemic briefly raised public expectations about what the state could and should do – such as supporting livelihoods, housing the homeless, or delivering food to vulnerable families – those ambitions have since withered. The political resolve to tackle major systemic issues, such as the crisis in social care or the housing shortage, appears to have evaporated. Promising initiatives like online GP consultations have been retained, but broader reforms have stalled.
Other countries have grappled with similar questions. In the US, President Biden’s stimulus packages echoed the logic of emergency spending, but attempts to extend that logic to a permanent expansion of the welfare state – through free childcare, improved healthcare access, and better housing support – have faced strong political resistance.
In the UK, the temporary nature of Covid-era interventions stands in contrast to their lasting consequences. We face a paradox: the pandemic revealed that rapid, large-scale government action is possible – but we seem to have retreated into an era of austerity, even as the social and economic fallout of Covid lingers. If we don’t confront this mismatch between expectations and delivery, we risk entrenching inequality and allowing essential public services to degrade even further.
Relevance to A-level sociology
The Nation state’s response to Covid and the fact that if anything we are still more reliant on the nation state than ever as we struggle to overcome its legacy suggests that we live in a late modern rather than a post modern society.
Postmodernism emphasises individual freedom from social structures, whereas late modernism criticises this pointing out that structure is still important, which is clearly the case here.
HOWEVER, the fact that the Nation State, or the Welfare State has struggled to maintain support at the level it did during the Pandemic reminds us that we are living in a firmly neoliberal era, in which State support for individuals is relatively limited.
This is also an interesting reminder that macro-style sociology is still important to understand the personal crises individuals face….. for example one legacy of Covid is the increase in individuals suffering poor mental health.