There is much talk of changes in behaviour in the light of Covid 19, from keeping the air free of damaging pollution to re-evaluating the wages of poorly paid workers. Yet cars are back on the road in increasing numbers and the UK government had to be shamed into removing the NHS charge for health workers from overseas. Will anything change?

At local community level, people are helping one another as they do in a crisis. There is great love and kindness. But the grotesque parody of daily government ‘briefings’, where the bluster and bombast which brought us Brexit has been applied to talk of ‘world beating’ systems and inflated claims about testing and protection suggest that little has changed in the corridors of power. The Westminster government has a large majority and has shown itself willing to defy public opinion over the flouting of lockdown rules by one of its key advisers. The next election is not due to be held until 2024.

Yet the need for change which the pandemic laid bare – in health and social care, transport and climate change – are matters of public policy on a huge scale. We need to seek out and support movements for change at political as well as personal level. Shadow business secretary Ed Milliband, for example, is proposing a radical green recovery plan to rescue the post-coronavirus economy and retrain young people whose jobs have been lost. He has compared the scale of the task to that which faced the post war Labour government of Clement Attlee, which created the welfare state. Mr Milliband is already consulting business and unions in the development of proposals which will be put before parliament.

There is a section in Laudato Sí, Pope Francis’ encyclical on care for our common home, which is headed ‘Civic and political love’ (228-232). In it he links the personal with the political. ‘Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world… Social love is the key to authentic development: in order to make society more human, more worthy of the human person, love in social life – political, economic and cultural – must be given renewed value, becoming the constant and highest norm for all activity… When we feel that God is calling us to intervene with others in these social dynamics, we should realise that this too is part of our spirituality, which is an exercise of charity and, as such, matures and sanctifies us’ (231).