We’re still suffering from social long Covid

It’s not unusual, after running a focus group, for a particular comment to stay with you for days. Ordinary people who aren’t hyper engaged in politics are often far better at capturing the state of the country than any political soundbites.

It was Clive, a crane driver from Dudley, who made one of those remarks recently. Having set out his excoriating views on the performance of the government to date, he moved on to explain what he thought was the real problem facing Britain: that we had never properly recovered from Covid. I probed him further on what he meant: the NHS, schools, debt? Instead, what he said was both more quotidian and far more profound. Clive explained that when it came to the construction sites he worked on, ‘Before Covid we all used to have lunch together, but since then we just sit in our cars and eat alone on our break.