Page 6 - PT-Spring-2021

Gethin Russell-Jones

Coming up for air

after Covid-19

can’t tell you the number of TV and radio unfeeling deity. That depravity and sin are more powerful
interviews I’ve heard over the past year that than the vulnerable love of God in Christ. We are human
I have begun with the following question: ‘So beings, made in the image of God and so we go about our
how worried should we be about…’ And it turns lives in the sure knowledge of original blessing and not
original sin.
out that we should be very worried about more This is just as well, because life after Covid is going to Photo Credit: istockphoto.com/borchee
or less everything. be busy. There’s much to repair and change if our world
Listen to virtually any pundit on any given is going to be fairer and more just. And there are some big
subject and you’ll be led to the conclusion that ideas being mooted out there.
we’re going to hell in a handbasket. Preface any One of the most exciting possibilities being mooted
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question with the likelihood of fear and this is is a new Beveridge Report. Eighty years ago, Liberal MP
and economist, William Beveridge, was commissioned
what you’ll get. Every time. It’s getting worse, to produce a cross-party report on the economic
it’s going to be terrible, there’s nothing we can reconstruction of Great Britain.
do about it. He presented his report in 1942, as World War Two
filled the skies, seas and land with weapons of mass
So I’m going to attempt to write about a future that’s destruction. Sporting the catchy title of ‘Social Insurance
hopeful, where change occurs for the better and not the and Allied Services’, this report was revolutionary in its
worse. Where there are more winners than losers. I believe impact and fuelled the Labour Party’s landslide success in
that a Christian view of the world is infused with hope. the 1945 General Election.
The last time I checked, Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb Beveridge’s report proposed that all people of working
remains empty and the bones of Jesus have not been found age should pay a national insurance contribution into a
anywhere. He is not here, he is risen, is still the confession general fund that would benefit everyone. This would
to which the Church adheres and thus I take the view that if enable benefits to be paid to the sick, unemployed, retired
death is not irreversible then neither is anything else. or widowed.
And by the way, this Christian hope is not centred on It was the creation of a welfare system. In a phrase of
pies in the sky when you die but on the renewal of all things poetic flourish, the report called on the government to
in the light of the resurrection. find ways of fighting the ‘five giants’ of Want, Disease,
Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Fundamental to
Big ideas in the making Beveridge’s scheme was the need for a National Health
I used to be a Calvinist but now I’m an optimist and a lot Service, created by the Labour Party in 1948. At its launch,
happier for it too. I no longer accept that people, culture Health Minister, Aneurin Bevan said it had three core
and world events are somehow predetermined by an principles: ‘That it meets the needs of everyone; that it be

6 The Plain Truth Spring 2021 Find us online at www.plain-truth.org.uk