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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast.

The Spectators look at some of the most intriguing and important issues within the pages of the magazine.

I'm Katie Balls.

This week, will society ever fully reopen after coronavirus?

Or is the expansion of government power too difficult to reverse?

Plus, is negotiating a Scottish

independence deal the best way to save the Union? And finally, is something untoward happening

in Britain's graveyards? First up, in this week's cover piece, Johann Norberg argues that

coronavirus risks ushering a new era of big government.

He joins me now with Gerard Baker, editor-at-large at the Wall Street Journal.

Johan, this week's cover piece in The Spectator,

you write that liberal democracies are falling into a coronavirus trap.

What is the trap?

Well, any time that there is a major crisis in society,

we have this tendency to look to a strong man or big government to protect us against it. And this

has not been an exception. The only thing is that it's been much more dramatic than we've ever

seen before, I would say, in peaceful times in liberal

democracies. We've seen an unprecedented expansion of government power. And it has happened quickly

without much of debate, without any kind of cost-benefit analysis. We've shut down borders,

...