If any single event could be said to mark the birth of modern society, my own TOTP would hark back to the 14^th century.

The Black Death is reckoned by historians to have accounted for the deaths of between 25 and 60% of England’s population and, in my view, marks the birth of capitalism on which society is organised.

Hitherto serfs were enthralled to landlords by ties of feudalism. The great labour shortage caused by the deaths of so many meant landlords needed to compete in wages offered for labour.  It was, for the first time, supply and demand on a mass scale.

Fast forwarding to more recent times and introducing a second thread, the debts the UK incurred to the USA to enable us to prosecute the Second World War were not finally paid off until 2006 – over 65 years after the end of that war. 

Rishi Sunak’s borrowing from our future will prove, I am sure, an equally long-term mortgage.  But consider this: the payback to the USA happened over 65 years of relative economic stability.

Pandemics occurred in the UK in the 14^th, 17^th and 21^st centuries – a once-in-a 300/400 year phenomenon.  But this is a stat and not a schedule.  A once-in-a 400 year pandemic might not happen for a thousand years.  Or it might happen tomorrow.

Furthermore there are any such numbers of disasters not limited to pandemics – global war, asteroid collision, mega-volcanoes, tsunamis and, of course, climate change with its sub-sets of rising sea levels, worldwide crop failure, super forest fires, desertification and mass migration to name but a few.  Any of these or a combination would test a stable society.  For a vulnerable one, economically weak and up to its eyeballs in hock it could prove a seismic shock. 

In other words, we might not get a clear run at re-establishing economic stability before the next shit hits the fan.  If that happened changes could emanate every bit as fundamental to liberal democratic society as capitalism was to feudalism 600 years ago.

Who knows what that change could be?  I suspect I shall never find out – but our grandchildren might.