As I write it has been revealed that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is in an Intensive Care Unit suffering from COVID-19. If you’ve read anything else I’ve written you’ll know I have a virulent antipathy for his politics, but I wouldn’t visit this on my worst enemy; which he isn’t. And even if he were, as a Christian I am enjoined to pray for my enemies, so that’s what I’m doing.

Death, it is said, is the Great Leveller. In his hands all, regardless of rank, wealth or status, are equal. The same cannot be said of his apocalyptic posse-mates, War and Famine, who seem to embrace the weak and the poor more readily than the wealthy and the powerful. Plague, though. Plague, as we are discovering, is no respecter of rank or position. Which is, perhaps, why for the most part the people of this country have been content to accept the limitations that have been placed on freedoms we have long cherished.

On Thursday I did my weekly shopping at Tesco. I was struck by the way that folk were queuing up patiently, six feet apart, outside the store as they were allowed in on a one-in-one-out basis. I was struck how, after the initial panic-buying of toilet rolls people were buying sensible quantities of everyday items. I have been struck, too, by the insistence from so many of those whose opinions I have read on social media that staying at home is not just the right practical thing to do, but the moral thing to do.

Perhaps it is the indiscriminate nature of disease that has reminded us of our duties and responsibilities to each other as members of the community. It is the fact that failure to contain the virus may have terrible consequences not just for ourselves and our families but for countless vulnerable people we will never meet, never know, never hear of, that underpins our willingness to desert our streets in the cause of social distancing. Never has Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that there is ‘no such thing as society - only individuals’ been more wrong. Society does exist in that recognition that we have responsibility for the welfare of others.

So what happens when this is all over? Do we ‘go back to normal’? In many ways I hope we do, but in some ways not so much. I’d like to think that, when this terrible virus has run its course, we remember who it was that stood at the front line in fighting it - the doctors, nurses,  paramedics and other staff of our hospitals and that we never, ever, again allow the dictates of free market economics to undermine our National Health Service.

I hope that we remember that our bins were emptied, post was delivered, shops were opened and staffed and countless other jobs were done that allowed people to survive by people on some of the lowest wages in the country while those our politicians have vaunted over the last few decades - the bankers, the hedge-fund managers, the likes of Tim Martin and Richard Branson - did all they could to protect their wealth, rather than our people and that we never, ever, again imagine that wealth and value to our community are somehow related.

I hope that we take cognisance of the fact that, when the homeless presented a challenge to containing this disease, we found shelter for them; that we recognise that, for those on zero-hour contracts or working in the ‘gig economy’, every protracted disease inflicts economic hardship every bit as heavy as that being suffered by too many of our people who have lost livelihoods as businesses have shut down. May we never, ever, again place the principles of a predatory and parasitic strain of Capitalism above the most basic needs of our people.

If this disaster has taught us anything it should be this: that we all have responsibilities for the wellbeing of each other - whether we are kin or stranger and regardless of race, belief or social class. If we have discovered an esprit-de-corps in this crisis, I hope it continues. And when this is all over I hope we do not go back to ‘normal’ - not if ‘normal’ is the ennobling the pursuit of selfish greed that has characterised our economic creeds over the last decades.

Some folk have spoken of being ‘at war’ with this virus. I’m not sure about that. Some have invoked the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’. Maybe. But in 1945 the people of the United Kingdom, at a time of economic collapse, chose not to ‘go back to normal’ but to build a better future where the responsibilities we have for the well-being of one another was recognised in the founding of the NHS and the forging of the Welfare State. Let’s not go back to normal. Let’s go forward to something better.