In this illustrated talk, I outline the key arguments of my recently-published book The Next Welfare State? UK Welfare after COVID-19. While the pandemic has had a very significant impact upon the welfare state – in both the short- and the longer-term – in many ways, this just heightens the longstanding and deep-seated challenges that our welfare order has faced for at least a generation. I argue that we need definitively to settle accounts with the lingering sense that the welfare state could constitute some sort of ‘strategy of equality’. If this is what we want, we need something radically different.