AS the days get longer the Health Security Agency has suggested that the latest coronavirus variant, omicron, appears less likely to cause a serious illness or result in hospitalisation than the previously dominant variant.

One conclusion reached on the right of politics is that the threat from Covid is overblown and infection is now no more serious than a minor affliction. This is the unstated but underlying thinking of the “no constraints on business” faction.

If omicron has a reduced effect on some of the infected than earlier variants then this is good news for those individuals.

The government’s confused messaging in the days before the Winter Solstice break was that limited measures of personal protection should be taken, but that most economic activity should be maintained.

This, almost exclusive, focus on the individual effects of this variant rather than the social effects fits neatly into a worldview which sees everything in terms of the individual subject and measures everything from the standpoint of an abstract “freedom” of the individual just as long as these coincide with the “freedom” of capital.

In British politics this approach is most closely connected to the post-war followers of the Viennese economist Friedrich von Hayek. Given the currency of his thinking and its derivatives among present-day Tory politicians it is easy to overlook the context in which his idea — that tyranny is the inevitable consequence of state control over economic policy-making — was rooted in fear engendered in the ruling classes of Western society that the victory over fascism would result in a decisive change in the balance of class power.

Hayek contested the idea that fascism — which had so recently been defeated — was the natural emanation of a capitalist system in economic crisis and a reaction to the challenge of working class state power embodied in the USSR and buttressed by the growing bloc of socialist nations.

It is no accident that the present- day revival of the Cold War is accompanied by a fierce ideological assault on the memory of the wartime anti-fascist alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union, China and the US. This accompanied by a campaign to deny the profound distinction between Nazism and the forces that defeated it.

The principal obstacle to Hayek’s revisionism lay firstly in the recent experience of millions of people throughout the world that fascism in general and its most destructive variant, Nazism, was in fact a continuation of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

This arose not just from the simple observation that wherever fascists came to government they did so with the support of big business, the banks and capitalist media owners but from the experience — in every country where Nazi Germany invaded and occupied — that the local bourgeoisie made an accommodation with the occupiers.

Having successfully rebuffed invasion, mainland Britain was spared this (although local experience in the Channel Islands confirmed the general trend). Consequently Britain’s ruling class did not openly fracture and the — at one point almost dominant — appeasement trend was able to obscure its efforts to ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union with a tardy recovery of a patriotic defence of nation and state.

Even so, this only came about when the more perceptive elements in the bourgeoisie, represented politically by Churchill, saw Germany as the most present and immediate threat to the empire and a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union as a necessary expedient.

The conflation of individual freedom with the “free” operation of capitalist markets, in the present moment, finds its most perverse expression in the idea that the mobilisation of the state’s resources to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the degree of planning and control entailed and the necessary measures of personal protection to free people from the real danger of infection constitute an infringement of personal freedom.

In the thinking of a substantial section of the ruling class and expressed by many Tory MPs, this “loss” is the reflection, in politics, of their resistance to any policy that limits the operation of the market, the exploitation of waged labour, the exchange of commodities and the accumulation of profit that is the precondition of their continued existence. They have favoured “herd” immunity responses from the start.

The more rational element in any ruling class is represented by those who understand that the future operation of their system depends on protecting society as a whole and the labour force from a rate of infection that might compromise the accumulation of profit.

This is coupled with an understanding when faced with the prospect of an uncontrolled proliferation of constantly mutating viruses that this, in a globalised economic system, is a global problem.

Am I being pessimistic to suggest that our future health security rests upon the defeat of the most regressive and reactionary trend among the global bourgeoisie?

Optimistically, what contribution can we make to this project in our own island state?

We are indebted to the ruling class’s house organ, the Times and its polling partner YouGov, for the intelligence that Labour has a six-point lead on 36 per cent of the vote (down one point from the poll before Christmas to the Conservative’s 30 per cent (which is down two points).

The Liberal Democrats are up two points to 12 per cent, while the Greens have 8 per cent (+1) and the Brexit irreconcilables in Reform UK are down one point to 5 per cent of the vote.

Asked to choose between Johnson and Starmer on who would make the best prime minister the clear majority thought “neither” — with a larger margin of opinion convinced that Johnson wouldn’t.

As we celebrate Toji, the problem for Labour is that more than twice as many people (55 per cent) think Starmer doesn’t look like a prime-minister in waiting than the 25 per cent who do.

Labour’s lead rests on the shaky foundation that a number of Conservative voters think they would abstain, or they don’t know who they would vote for, in an election held in the immediate future.

Labour’s lead this Dongzhi is coupled with the uncomfortable fact that a clear majority, 56 per cent of the British public, think Labour is not ready for government (while less than a quarter, 24 per cent, think they are).

How the government is handling the health crisis is not the only factor driving these figures, but the data is revealing. One the eve of Hanukah 64 per cent thought the government was doing badly and 28 per cent thought well.

Not since late spring, at the peak of confidence that the vaccination programme was decisive in combatting the pandemic, has confidence in the government’s handling of health approached parity with those who lacked confidence.

Since then confidence in how the government is handling the issue of health has dropped to 28  per cent.

Johnson’s conviction that the success of the vaccination programme would deliver a decisive political advantage has turned out to be mistaken. He was adroit early enough to see that the original conception — that uncontrolled exposure to infection would result in herd immunity — was politically risky. In his revised thinking vaccination would enable the normal operation of the capitalist economy to proceed with relatively little disruption.

But viruses operate in a decidedly more dialectical fashion than do the thought processes of politicians in thrall to the market. As we mark Shab-e Yalda, omicron, just the most recently successful of a whole host of viral variants, has the potential to prove more disruptive precisely because it has adapted to keep more of its human hosts alive and thus its opportunities for growth relatively extensive.

The encouraging spike in people seeking first, second and top-up vaccinations is a sign that the reservoir of passive potential support for Covid-conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx sentiment and plain stupid thinking is diminishing.

But there is still a pool of unvaccinated people who are without the resistance to infection that the vaccinated possess and it is these who make up the overwhelming proportion of people admitted to hospital with Covid symptoms.

Their behaviour is a threat to anyone who needs a bed in intensive care. Trade unions could play a major role in a workplace-based campaign to get workers talking and win over the anti-vaxxers.

The consequences of the failure to vaccinate is the price exacted on society as a whole by the persistence of anti-scientific thinking, plain reactionary ideology and the rampant individualism which characterises every capitalist society.

Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Treasury spokesperson, has welcomed the lengthening days with a tortured version of “magical” thinking to translate the latest polling figures into a celebration of Starmer’s policy-lite strategy.

The polling lead comes as the consequence not only of the government’s serial incompetence and self-inflicted injury, but a period of unnaturally benign media coverage for Labour.

As each of the policy positions by which Starmer convinced Labour’s membership to elect him leader has been abandoned the media have found very little to criticise.

Labour’s much reduced membership, the consequent demobilisation of the demoralised rump of members, the collapse in income and the sense that oppositional politics is once again marginal is the price the Labour right wing sees as the necessary accompaniment to its consensus politics.

The government wants to undo its previous policy of fixed term parliaments. This would allow some tactical flexibility as when to call an election. Sunak, keen to maintain austerity, talks about economic prudence. But this is an election when the pandemic may be as important as the economy.

The Conservatives are failing over both and may have to present the promised inquiry into Covid before the polls. This is a government with a large majority at risk of appearing as weak as its official opposition.

Starmer’s strategy rests on the assumption that if Labour does nothing to alarm the ruling class and the Tories prove unable to recover a decisive polling lead, it may be allowed a chance of gaining office.

But if, beyond office and a ride in a ministerial motor, Labour wants to gain power to make deep changes in the way we are governed, it needs progressive policies powerful enough to impose policies for the many and not the few.

As the long, long nights are over, the local elections later this year may provide an opportunity for the left to create a more compelling vision of change than can Westminster Labour.

Nick Wright celebrates Hanukah, Christmas, Toji, Dongzhi, Shab-e Yalda and the Winter Solstice spirit of kachina at 21centurymanifesto.