Coronavirus is launching us into a new era of poverty, turmoil and conflict

London: A while back, someone sent me a short video on WhatsApp in which, against a suitably faux-inspirational New Age soundtrack, a Polish singer/songwriter, Riya Sokol, thanks COVID-19 for the many gifts the disruptive powers of the virus are supposedly showering on the world.

So cringingly awful is it that to begin with I thought it must be a spoof - but apparently not. Thank you coronavirus, it says, for forcing us to slow down, for the cleaner air, for grounding the aircraft, for the re-evaluation of our lives and the luxuries we once enjoyed, for making us understand that we are all connected, for the unity it has bestowed on mankind, for the chance to build the world anew, and so on.

All this delivered without a trace of irony.

According to Sokol's website, the video has been downloaded more than 15 million times and translated into dozens of languages, so there is a market for this kind of guff. I wouldn't deny that the virus might indeed change some things for the better, or that we should seek the positive in even the most dire of situations.

Yet the brutal reality is the very reverse of what this video hopes for; the strong likelihood is that the effects of the pandemic will be devastatingly negative. Today's lockdowns do seem to mark the transition from one age to another, but not to the imagined bright new dawn - rather it is from an era of almost unprecedented stability and advancement to a much darker time of conflict and economic turmoil.

Nothing is ever set in stone. Yet it will require much wiser leaders on the global stage than we have now to turn this crisis into one of collective opportunity. We face an exceptionally destructive disrupter, not a positive one, and so far, we have proved peculiarly ineffective in countering it.

Here are 10 ways in which the virus threatens to change the world - most of them not in a good way.

Begin with what is already very obviously the start of a new Cold War between the incumbent military and economic hegemon, the US, and the aspiring one, China. Relations between the two superpowers have been on a sharply deteriorating trend for a long time, but as on so much else, the pandemic has brought matters to a head. Rather than uniting the world against a common foe, the virus has been the object of increasingly bitter recriminations.

The resulting blame game has fast-tracked pre-existing deglobalisation trends, threatening to make the world economy less open, more protectionist and less inclined to cooperate even on matters thought to be of vital global importance, such as climate change.

Taking advantage of apparent American incompetence in its handling of the virus, a dangerously emboldened China has used the pandemic cynically to assert its authority and influence. Some might think the more localised supply chains that are the probable consequence of this breakdown a positive development, but this assumes both that siloed supply can be as efficient as global and that it doesn't result in wider geopolitical conflict. Unwise to bet on either.

Having finally woken up to the fact that we have traded our security for cheap supply from an authoritarian regime with delusions of grandeur, it may be that we were always destined to have this conflict, but that doesn't make it any more welcome. Geo-political power struggles nearly always end disastrously.

Second, the virus has turbocharged a further jump in economically destabilising debt, both sovereign and corporate. Never before in peacetime have we seen anything quite like it, and although it is possible to exaggerate the dangers - debt is, in truth, a hall of mirrors, money we owe to ourselves - excessive debt also tends to end in conflict, this time between debtors and creditors. The work-off is invariably painful and fractious, with the creditor one way or another always eventually forced to take a big haircut. Inevitably, the process is a traumatic and politically divisive one.

Third, one way of getting the debt down is to raise taxes. In the UK, the Government is committed to not raising any of the big three taxes, income, VAT and National Insurance, but that doesn't preclude the imposition of wealth taxes, which the virus has made politically respectable. Polls show wealth taxes are popular, but people should be careful what they wish for. Confiscation of wealth to pay for public services will ultimately make the whole nation poorer.

Fourth, a bigger state, with higher levels of public spending and intervention is now pretty much hard baked into our long-term future, together with, fifth, more intrusive surveillance, less privacy and a greatly expanded official class.

Sixth, lockdowns are giving rise not just to excessive levels of debt, but also threaten long-term damage to supply. Many businesses won't survive. This in turn threatens a poisonous cocktail of high unemployment, stagflation and social division. Economically, we are getting ourselves into a terrible mess that will take years, if not decades, to correct.

Seventh, the virus has effectively dynamited an already dying high street. Many shops will not come back. Nor will, eighth, cash - again enabling much higher levels of surveillance and manipulation as we accelerate towards the cashless society.

Ninth, the era of mass travel may well be over. Flights will become more expensive, with holidays abroad again a comparative luxury confined largely to the better off, as it used to be until the 1970s. Persistent social distancing threatens lasting damage to the mass-market end of the travel industry. That's nice for the wealthy, but will be a source of mounting resentment.

Finally, we are being frogmarched by governments into a far more risk-averse age, where almost any threat is neutered, whatever the economic costs. This is terrible news for innovation, productivity, wealth creation and collective advancement.

None of these things are inevitable, and no doubt I have exaggerated the scale of their impact, but they are a good sight more likely than the world of peace, love and happiness imagined in the "thank you coronavirus" video. I think I preferred the old, hectic, pre-COVID world, which, for all its faults, seemed to be heading in broadly the right direction.

Telegraph, London