SEVEN weeks into lockdown it’s natural that we’re all looking for the dove with the olive branch signifying this virus is receding. I fear, though, that a generation will pass before we encounter anything resembling normality. I’d be wary too of those eagerly plotting road-maps out of uncertainty and consider first what might lie behind their enthusiasm.

I spoke recently to a secondary head-teacher who told me that his school – and many others – are preparing for serious challenges in dealing with the mental and physical impact of coronavirus on his pupils. This, he suggested, will last for many years. Several health professionals have told me that the long-term psychological damage of coronavirus on individuals and families is what you might associate with surviving a war. Anyone who thinks we’ll be meeting ‘normality’ any time soon is deluding himself.

Schools, especially those with a high quotient of disadvantaged pupils, will be required to provide a full suite of social services. To an extent, this had always been part of their duty of care. In the years ahead though, this will become their primary function. At this stage we can’t easily put a figure on the number of children affected by parents losing their jobs or struggling with overwhelming debt. The word ‘unprecedented’ is now the most common in the pandemic lexicon and it fits here too. And we can only guess at what other iniquities many children will have been forced to witness.

It’s almost unbearable to imagine what terrors many women and children are currently experiencing. Last week, Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of domestic abuse charity, Nia, reported that domestic violence killings have more than doubled during the lockdown. Ms Ingala Smith has been monitoring the numbers of women killed by men in the UK for an annual femicide census and has identified at least 16 suspected domestic abuse killings occurring between March 23 and April 12.

Ms Ingala Smith said the number of women killed by men in the first three weeks of lockdown is the highest for 11 years. We also know the communities in which this apocalypse is most prevalent. According to the Scottish Government’s latest statistics, these places are seeing coronavirus death rates three times worse than in affluent neighbourhoods.

After lockdown, as society hurries to re-locate order, the money-changers will be found at the head of the throng. Yet, if the country's primary focus is on the recovery of its people then corporations and commerce; police and judiciary; must also be encouraged to change dramatically the way they go about their business. To borrow another locution from the coronavirus glossary, this should happen in ‘lockstep’ with the programme of welfare that will be required if we are serious about the post-pandemic recovery.

We've all warmed to the acts of kindness and compassion which have made the lockdown more bearable. The true worth of our claims to be a ‘decent’ country fit for heroes will lie in how our civic authorities and our corporate giants treat people.

The Government was very quick to create emergency legislation to provide an aid package to preserve jobs. Something similar must be enacted to ensure large companies with big profits don't hide behind coronavirus to dispense with their workers. This perhaps will be an early test of Keir Starmer’s credentials to lead the Labour Party. Following the 2008 banking crisis countless large companies treated their employees as mere collateral damage. It didn’t matter that their huge profits would soon recover in time; in the short term the ravenous demands of their shareholders had to prevail.

Greenock and Stockbridge: A tale of two Scotlands under coronavirus

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was considered by the UK Government to be too big to fail and public cash was found to save it. It repaid the nation’s largesse by establishing its Global Restructuring Group to locate and hunt down small and medium-sized businesses; menace them into liquidation and then gorge themselves on the assets for a song. It was a scandal.

In pre-coronavirus times large firms who felt pressured into morality would blackmail the country by warning us that if too many regulations and controls were imposed on them they'd have to up sticks and relocate elsewhere. Aye, well good luck to them if they attempt to pull that one now...

In times of crisis we are all urged to pull together and channel our inner Dunkirk. We all fall in quickly. It soon emerges, though, that the new rules rarely apply to the corporate world. In the US those banks tasked with disbursing cash intended to relieve small businesses chose instead to favour their large corporate clients. The relief programme was intended to give emergency loans to firms as an inducement to businesses not to ditch their employees. It ran out of money last week because the larger firms were served first. More than 60 of these firms, some with market values of more than $100 million, received a combined $300million in loans.

We saw something of this last month in the UK as multi-million-pound firms with massive profits moved with remarkable haste to avail themselves of the Government furlough scheme. This money tree can’t maintain such windfalls indefinitely. A time will come when the Government must move to protect the employees when the directors revert to their base instincts.

We too easily swallow the pernicious fiction of capital that entrepreneurs are our sole wealth-providers. In this we’re told that they live to provide jobs from the wells of goodness that spring in their saintly hearts. Aye, right. The reality is that if many of them could find a way of amassing profits without having to use workers at all they’d regard it as the golden ticket.

In the years ahead we will be urged to alter our behaviours and to get with the new reality. This must apply to the corporations too. They must be made to assist in the national recovery programme by putting people at the heart of their enterprises before profits. In time, their bonuses can return. Meanwhile, they can be parked in the same way that many others have parked their wellbeing to keep this country’s lights on.

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