The media has blindly accepted Jeremy Hunt’s line that austerity is a “bitter-tasting but necessary medicine”, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. When Rishi Sunak took office, for example, a BBC correspondent declared the new PM had no alternative but “to agree to spending cuts”. That’s simply not true. The Chancellor’s “slash-and-burn” approach is not inevitable; it’s a political choice. It was the same after 2008, when George Osborne’s cuts were accepted as the “necessary antidote to a deficit crisis”. There was no mention of the fact that the low cost of borrowing could have allowed for “extensive public spending”, just as there’s no mention today of the fact that the “supposed £50bn fiscal black hole” is really a made up figure based on the government’s own targets. We mustn’t fall for this nonsense again.

The Black Death was, proportionally speaking, “the most lethal catastrophe in human history”, says Peter Frankopan in Prospect. After appearing in 1345, the deadly plague killed millions as it spread across Europe, Africa and Asia, with a mortality rate as high as 60%. But as James Belich argues in The World the Plague Made, the virus also sparked “a series of innovations, changes and development” that led to a “golden age” lasting more than 150 years. The main reason was, simply, that so many people died. When a population halves, the amount of resources the survivors are left with, per head, doubles. Suddenly people had a bountiful supply of “carts, wagons, horses, oxen, mules, boats, ships, barns and granaries”.