IN the 2008 financial crash, the inefficient capitalist pals of the Conservatives crashed the world economy.

I was flabbergasted by how the Tory-Lib Dem coalition got away with the bare-faced cheek of blaming the crash on too much public spending.

It was galling to see the many pay for the dodgy dealing of the few with a decade of austerity.

In 2011, I penned a short story about an imagined second financial crash in the near future for Scottish Left Review magazine.

I envisaged a scenario where there was no cash for a second bailout, the global population faced impoverishment and there was no market left for the capitalist class to make money out of. The world had to turn to socialism as an emergency measure and put all resources to collective use.

Back then, I had pencilled in 2020 as the year of the second crash.

My crystal ball was a bit off but I did manage to select 2020 as a year of global crisis. Only, it was a coronavirus crisis, not a financial crash.

And while world socialism has not yet been declared, governments have indeed had to resort in at least some ways to putting resources to collective use to tackle the crisis.

That includes the UK initiative to pay the wages of furloughed workers, inadequate though it is.

In my yarn, people adapted to equality and would not give it up.

Everyone had a say and the space to be creative as well as the responsibility to take a share of tasks we all depend upon such as cleaning, according to their ability.

Such equality is still far off but it has been incredible to see even right-wing politicians and the media, faced with coronavirus, admit that those who look after and educate our children, care for us when we are ill or infirm, drive us to work, produce our food and transport it, sort it in the shops and serve us it at the till, and those who clean the buildings, vehicles and equipment involved in all this are essential and valued workers.

I wrote a later tale called It’s No Fair! for Lallans, the magazine of the Scots Language Society. This was a fictional account of an actual mining accident James Keir Hardie was involved in as a child.

The shaft of the mine down which the miners entered the pit had started to narrow.

The “cage” had become stuck in the closing shaft. The rescue team had smashed the cage and were lowering a large bucket to pull men up in turn.

The young James was fed up waiting and wandered off to attend to his friend Donald, the pit pony. An older miner guessed where the youngster would be and retrieved him to send him back up in time.

I pictured Hardie chatting with Donald and complaining that they were stuck down in the gloom while the bosses lived the high life. I portrayed the youngster, once safely above, asking franticly about how Donald would be rescued. Hardie exclaims that “It’s no fair!”

Raging that things were “no fair” was a strong part of Hardie’s campaigning. He was not looking for a free gift for people with nothing to offer.

He was campaigning urgently for doable, practical policies to make life fairer for the mass of the population who were already contributing by doing the hard work that created society’s wealth but who received a scant share of it in return.

In 1945, the mass of the population in Britain decided that it was “no fair” that they should make the sacrifices to defeat fascism and then go back to the way things were.

It was their aspiration to have a public stake in the economy and the security of a welfare state and a national health service. This vision was real and the people voted it in. In today’s coronavirus crisis, people readily see that leaving it to the market is not an option.

They see that rich shareholders are not the vital personnel who will help us survive. The state has had to intervene to close vast parts of the economy temporarily for collective safety and pay the wages of the workers affected.

It has had to encourage and rely on newly discovered “essential” and not always well-paid workers to carry on labouring for our collective wellbeing.

Even so, many people have still been left behind. Covid-19 has worsened the position of workers on low incomes and unemployment has mushroomed. Across Scotland, as in other parts of Britain, concerned citizens have enlisted in their droves in new community groups, joining already existing food banks in trying to meet people’s basic needs through the crisis.

In the Falkirk council area, to take one example, crisis grant applications are up 50 per cent on this time last year. In March 2019, there were 6,235 universal credit claimants in the area; the figure for March 2020 was 8,405.

The council, assisted by the Scottish government, charities and other agencies, has been supporting community groups meeting basic food needs.

Demand for the service has gone up by 61 per cent since it started in April and the weekly cost has gone up from £7,000 to £13,000.

Those in need and the community groups serving them know fine well that this situation is one of systemic, not individual, failure.

The right wing will hope that they can wait for familiarity and fatalism to creep in before whipping us all back to the grindstone of normality.

And the temptation for Holyrood could be to settle for managing all this a bit better than Westminster.

This is the time to back up those who rage that “it’s no fair.” We must make the arguments and stake a claim now for a socialist future. Socialists need to use every avenue in marshalling support, including the arts. And if Ken Loach is reading, how about Hardie the movie?

Tony Beekman is a Unison steward and works in Community Learning and Development. He is a regular contributor to Lallans, the magazine of the Scots Language Society.