AT A time of global crisis, we look to history for lessons from earlier times, in the hope of seeing how we might come through our own troubles. 

Covid-19 is our biggest crisis since World War II — and woeful leadership in Britain is a common feature of 1940 and 2020.

In the dark days of 1940-41, the ruling classes of Europe and the United States were split between liberal globalists and fascists. 

In our own time, Europe and the US have seen the emergence of a new brand of nationalists challenging the liberal global order, including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

As in our time, the rise of an insurgent left was also seen in the 1930s, in Spain and France. 

France’s popular front government was overthrown, as was Spain’s republic.

In our time a new left emerged in Britain and the US, and both recently suffered defeats (even if, as in the US in 1940, the Democrats won against the Republicans in November). 

In 1940 the fascist powers were on the march, with the Nazi-Soviet pact shocking the world as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to stave off war by agreeing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler.

Our own neonationalists, from Trump to Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are not of the precise same ilk as their fascist predecessors, but they do represent a section of capitalism that prefers authoritarianism and protectionism to other forms of corporate-democratic governance. 

Even a leader who posed as a liberal during his election campaign, France’s Emmanuel Macron, has shifted decisively towards authoritarian nationalism since the mass protests that undermined his rule from late 2018. 

As in 1940, the mass labour movement and left have faced various defeats, despite having more recruits and their ideas becoming increasingly accepted as a viable way out of the crisis facing us. 

(Even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and International Monetary Fund today reject austerity and favour measures to reduce poverty and inequality.)

Today we don’t face a global war, yet multiple crises beset us, first of all the coronavirus pandemic, but also the climate emergency, and behind this, the zombification of the neoliberal capitalist system, which is now on permanent life support from state asset purchases to the tune of around $17 trillion since 2008 (and £900bn in the UK). 

In 1940 the state became the guarantor of the economic system in all major countries, mostly through massive rearmament and state employment schemes. 

For Britain, 1940 saw the debacle of Dunkirk, the fall of Singapore and the Blitz, while in May 1941 British-occupied Crete fell to a German airborne invasion. 

These events signalled the vulnerability of the country and its empire to Axis forces.

In our own time, the front line of this national struggle are NHS hospitals where the critical virus cases now number over 23,000, and where hundreds of medical staff have paid with their lives for trying to save those of others.

In 1940, the discredited leadership of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany, that had come to nothing with the 1939 invasion of Poland, was overthrown after the Nazi conquest of Norway.

In 2020, the failure of Johnson to respond to the pandemic and take early, decisive action left Britain exposed to a deadly virus, despite the advantages of being an island that could have closed airports and strictly quarantined those coming into the country. 

Despite being a government elected on the promise of taking control of borders through Brexit, Johnson kept airports open, did not impose a Covid-19 test rule for all travellers before they boarded a flight to Britain, or enforce a strict quarantine on arrivals, as islands such as New Zealand did from early in the pandemic. 

A friend from Kenya was shocked when she recently arrived in the country and offered border officials her Covid-19 test, to be met with total indifference before being waved through. 

The results of this negligent approach are there for all to see. (She was shocked at the state of things here, and happy to return to Kenya).

Each crisis has its own logic and we should be careful about overplaying the similarities. 

The Western leaders who eventually won the war against the Nazis were not rewarded equally. 

In the US, the progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected in 1944, although he died soon after. 

In Britain, Winston Churchill was defeated in 1945, too much associated with the failed pre-war order of poverty and mass unemployment.

He was defeated by Labour’s Clement Attlee. Today’s Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer may see himself as a similar “loyal opposition” figure, supporting government measures on the pandemic, rather than offering trenchant criticism as did his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. 

He may believe that, like Attlee, who served in the wartime coalition, he will be rewarded by the electorate for his responsible, sensible approach to the crisis.

Time will tell whether this supportive approach to a government that has manifestly failed at each hurdle in this crisis will pay off for Starmer, or whether it will see him held co-responsible for the social and economic fallout of the biggest crisis faced by Britain since World War II.

(The next crisis we are likely to face is the constitutional one that follows from Brexit: Scotland’s push for another independence referendum, opposed by both major parties at Westminster. This will be another critical moment for our leaders that could bring an end to the United Kingdom).

In 1945 millions of soldiers returned from the battlefronts politicised by their experience; the presence within their ranks of left-wing militants had won them to the cause of anti-fascism and socialism. 

Their votes swung the ’45 election to Labour, historians have noted.

It is possible that the experience of the Covid crisis will likewise radicalise millions of health workers, care workers and teachers on the front line of this epic struggle. 

Already, it has been the voices of doctors, nurses, teachers and care workers that have awoken the country to the reality of the crisis and the government’s failures.

This cohort of workers could be the vanguard of a mass movement to remake the country in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic.