On 13 April, seemingly immortal Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger released a surprise single documenting the privations of the Covid-19 pandemic. The tongue-in-cheek lyrics of ‘Eazy Sleezy’ list everything from Zoom to banana bread to Tiktok, concluding that the past year will be ‘Soon a memory you’re trying to remember to forget’. But what if we can’t forget? And what if we shouldn’t?

Like many I’d spent the pandemic, Cassandra-like, watching the mistakes and missteps of a Brexit-forged government treating a deadly crisis as a problem of public opinion and individual action. Then, in mid-January, I received a phone call in the early hours of the morning. A slow, deliberate voice told me my sister, Alison Brown, had died. Like the majority of the country, we had accepted the privations out of a sense of preserving the greater good, but still we’d failed. She was 39 years old.

What to others was a period of whimsical memes and griping set against an abstract total ticking up was suddenly a breach of the way stories are supposed to turn out, an unhappy ending within a story not yet concluded which no amount of bunting and jingoism and appeals to the spirit of an illusory past of national unity would heal. In the weeks after she died I saw ambulance lights in the night, watched the ill-advised Christmas relaxation of restrictions edge the number of deaths up and up.

There is already a battle over what the pandemic and measures to control the spread of Covid-19 mean. A small minority of loud voices see the response of the UK’s government and devolved administrations in the essentials of personal freedom versus state power. Fuelled by the informal news economy of social media, some but not all of these voices follow familiar contours of distrust of the political and scientific ‘elites’, and at its fringes, the idea that somehow the pandemic did not happen, that their personal losses of everyday habit are more real than the actual losses of life, of health, and of livelihood.

At the extreme, these views collide in a mash-up of regressive impulses where ‘the return to normal’ involves denying the reality of the loss of life during the pandemic and the refocusing on whichever loss an individual felt most keenly. In this worldview, all political parties are as bad as each other for allowing measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus to be enacted.

It takes a special effort of thought to mourn those who have died and those lost as a result of an unfolding present. To do so brings to the surface feelings that something must change, that something has not been done, that something remains to be done which can prevent or alter the future. Like standing upon the back of a vast animal, each individual story is too small to outline the shape of what had been sacrificed until the sense of the magnitude of loss is entirely obscured.

The dead do not get to signal their irritation with no longer being alive. The bereaved are told now is not the time for blame, not while events have yet to settle. The populist route of concentrating on those who have yet to really lose much merely multiplies the inequality of the pandemic’s effects. The small ‘c’ conservatism of a ‘return to normal’ without acknowledgement of grief and loss will leave only empty seats and a baffled diminishment.

There is precedent for what happens when loss is not addressed. It’s clear to me that we did not find a collective story of loss for the destructive policies enacted under the umbrella of austerity from 2010 onwards. Life just got harder and more unfair and cynicism grew. ‘Austerity’, like the ‘The Cuts’, became a word too amorphous to capture the reality of the shrinkage of life and the whittling away of security and opportunity.

Anger at loss without avenues for exploration began to corrode the sense that another future was possible, reversing direction and routing us backwards to a mythic vision of the UK outside of the EU in a hazy, boomer-misted vision of what the UK was like before all of this modern rubbish. To speak of what had been lost as means of forging a path forwards was recast as juvenile, unpatriotic, dwelling on failure. This mistake must not be made again.

For many, the sense of what is lost will be a creeping, dawning sense that somehow the return to normality is not quite as satisfying as anticipated. It will begin, as awareness of the effects of austerity did, in the peripheries of vision. A shop you expected to be there isn’t anymore. A service you were sure was still open is shuttered now. Without centring on what and who has been lost, ‘levelling up’ and ‘building back better’ will ossify into a few flagship programmes and the rhetoric of ‘hard choices’ and ‘political realism’ will return. The grand dreams of renewal hatched by furloughed think-tankers and think piece writers from the comfort of their home offices will blow away like the last smoke of a discharged fireworks display. Things that had been there will not be there. In their place will be showy celebrations, bunting draped over a nation of graves and lost futures.

For Labour boxed in by a decade or more by spurious accusations of tax and spend and financial illiteracy, the risk is that without embracing a narrative that encompasses what has actually been lost, they will be boxed into the position of party-poopers in excelsis, opposing good old British common sense spending decisions and British spirit. It is necessary for the Left to address both the memory of those that died and also the economic and other damage the pandemic has brought. The two must not be separated. Grief without acknowledgement turns to anger and despair, and despair makes for regressive politics.

The dead do not get to define their own legacy. What is lost no longer exists to advocate for its own meaning. Those who remain, those who were saved, and those who were changed reconstruct what is lost to form the foundation upon which future decisions are made. Many column inches have been exhausted forecasting ways in which the pandemic will change us and society, but many assume there will be a definitive end-point. A tragedy needs discrete boundaries. It needs its subjects to be quiet, to stay in their place, to bow down to the political purposes to which their memory is put. It requires the dead to be at the same time brave and meek, and the survivors to keep in mind the sensitivity of those who remain and stand untouched. What has been lost to the pandemic and what comes after is not a tragedy. It is an unfolding political present.

It is not correct to say that the UK does not go in for public displays of grief and mourning. As I was writing this the country entered into a period of public and official grieving for the death of Prince Philip. The UK is filled with memorials to the dead. Across the towns and villages carved stone stands silent and stern in the memory of the sacrifice of soldiers, air crews, fire fighters; our coasts guarded by the remembrances of sailors and lifeboat crews. Each year the country burrows into comfort under a blanket of poppies and wreaths. Plaques and road names note the contribution of one person or another, buildings pass names into immortality for those prepared to google. Beneath that there are teddy bears and wilted flowers taped to lamp posts, graffiti murals, shrines at traffic junctions – all evidence of the impulse to mark, somehow, the passing of a friend, a family member, a colleague.

Through mourning and addressing the needs of those who have lost, what has passed is kept in the present. The dead and the harmed must not be silenced or diminished. The millions affected must not be just an awkward spectre at the banquet. A better country for those who have survived is not simply the country of December 2019 without the dead and lost.

The Johnson government has offered nothing to those who have lost during the pandemic. On Monday 26 April, the Daily Mail alleged that Boris Johnson had ‘raged’ in an October meeting ‘No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands!’ Whether these exact words were uttered or not, the crisis and the deaths which precipitated not just the Christmas that was cancelled but the lockdown which is only now easing are evidence of a reluctance to respect those who had already been lost and those who might be lost in the future. A calculation of who was dispensable and how many dead felt like ‘too many dead’ shaped the triangulation of policy, public opinion, and intra-party positioning. From October onwards the bodies did pile up.

So how should the Left mourn the dead? Accepting that the government ‘did its best’ is not good enough. Once the pandemic is over it will be too late. Memories of how we got here will be contested. The pandemic is not an act of god, it is a failure of our means of social organisation and a failure of government.

The first step is to cement in the public mind the magnitude of what our country has lost and why it has lost. Every person who has died as a result of the pandemic, either as a result of Covid-19 itself or from the near overwhelming of our public and medical services deserves to be remembered. A decade of austerity walked us to this situation. A lack of public spending to alleviate poverty, poor housing, insecure employment, health inequality, and the hollowing out of effective government in the aftermath of the EU referendum are all causative factors.

Celebrate individual and collective heroism in the face of intense national upheaval. Welcome those who are grieving for lost loved ones and lost futures. A few pints in the pub and a haircut will be welcome, but they will not bring back the dead, will not revive lost jobs and lost futures.