DEEP darkness of night is passing. Perchance to dream. After wartime nightmares, a vision of a land fit for heroes blazed out. Beveridge’s five giants of Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness were to be slain. A state that cared from cradle to grave lit the horizon. Later a different tale bewitched.

The new storytellers promised reborn titans would lead to rising tide of prosperity. This dream turned to dust in 2008 yet the evil spell was unbroken. Now the pandemic wakes us from sleep with a jolt. The fabled shrugging Atlas revealed as a grasping and useless parasite. Those who paid no tax demanded payment from tax payers. Virgins on private islands now not so pure.

Salvation instead delivered by the long despised public sector and low paid (high skilled) zero hours labourers. The care workers, street cleaners, refuse collectors, the shop workers being more socially valuable than the tax cheater’s accountants.

Let us now dream of a new world. One in which there is no homelessness (we suddenly find this is possible) and in which no-one falls between the deliberate cracks in the safety net once there is a Universal Basic Income.

Let us see the unsustainable planet destroying corporations that spew soot into the stratosphere replaced by Green industries that prosper within the live giving limits of the planet’s rich renewable abundance.

Those with access to the internet can see this as a bed time story ‘The Great Realisation’ by Tomfoolery. Don’t ask ‘When will things return to normal’. Let us instead take this pause that nature has thrust upon us to rediscover whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure.

Then think on these things, then wake to realise a new world.

Cllr Dr Jon Orrell

Crescent St

Weymouth