Evening skies are, it seems, always clear these days. Even when the day turns cloudy and cold, and winds hit 40mph, by 8pm the sky is clearing, and Venus shines brilliantly, as it has since February. It will later this year shine brightly as a morning star, and return as an evening star in the autumn of 2021. We have the certainty of billions of years.

How marked the contrast with the fragility of our Covid times. None of us knows how the exit will work out. There are two fundamental directions – two well-defined attitudes. One, a re-set to where we were. There will be some big shake-outs, but we will revert to the old norms as we did after 2008. Old inequalities may be embedded even deeper. We will be in denial.

The other, an awareness of the fragility that our climate and health crises have highlighted, translated into a determination, in Europe and the USA at least, to re-set our priorities – with regard to conditions of work and taxation, and to the way we care for our planet, and moving beyond our respective health services to the way we care for each other.  (The USA in this regard has further to go than others.)

Nadia Whittome, at 23 the youngest MP in the House of Commons, is working weekends during the crisis in a care home. She recalls how, a couple of months ago, she ‘asked Priti Patel which aspect of social care she considered to be low skilled and she couldn’t tell me’. She thinks Patel’s response might be different now. ‘We’ve found out,’ Whittome continues,’ during this pandemic whom we couldn’t do without. It’s not the offshore companies, the hedge fund managers and the bankers; it’s the porters, the cleaners, the delivery drivers, care workers.’

This is the change of emphasis, more than emphasis – a change to fundamentals, we might hope to see. Though I’m not sure I share her optimism about Patel.

But we can’t do without growth. Without it we’ve no hope of financing the vast deficit we’re racking up, rising (according to a leaked Treasury document quoted in the Telegraph) from £55 billion before the pandemic to £337 billion. Extending the furlough scheme alone could be £80 billion on its own.

At the same time, growth on its own, without a re-set, will only polarise societies even further. ‘Agitation for more progressive and distributive policies’ will not go away. (Historian Walter Scheidel, quoted in The Guardian.)

There’s little sign that the government has any understanding of this. They’ve intervened in an extraordinary way, out of sheer necessity, but their instinct is and will be to free up market forces as soon as possible. Some Tory MPs are demanding that the government shouldn’t, post-crisis, be supporting unprofitable companies. I won’t critique this daft idea further other than to say that profit is too often a short-term measure, and a poor guide to the public utility, or longer-term success, of an enterprise. And what agency would be deputed to make these decisions?

This would be a different kind of shake-out for the one we might hope for. But it would fit well with the government’s Brexit agenda. As I’ve argued before, a post-Covid financial crisis will hide the economic debacle that’s likely to follow from a country operating post-Brexit under WTO rules.

Keir Starmer has declined to join the other parties in demanding a delay to the 31^st December cut-off date for negotiations with the EU. I’m not sure he’s right on this – but it does mean he keeps his powder dry. Brexit is a high-risk card to play in any form for Labour. If, or when, talks collapse, and the government shows no signs of wanting to make the compromises a free trade deal with the EU will require, he will be in a stronger position.

His focus, as it was in the second (and largely unreported) part of his reply to Boris Johnson’s speech last Monday, has to be on creating a better society post-pandemic. One, as he put it, where we no longer under-invest in our public services – and yet expect front-line workers to protect us.

I don’t want this blog to be party political. First principles for me are compassion and enterprise, or enterprise and compassion, operating in tandem. But in the current climate I have no trust in the Conservatives, and I do have some hopes that the sheer common sense and decency of Starmer might yet deliver – exactly what, time will tell.

A society, and a wider world, which is a little, maybe even a lot, less fragile, is something to aim for.