Another pandemic-dominated year has ended, and a demoralized and fragmented British socialist left remains embattled, to say the least. A bipartisan establishment backlash has seen a relentless drive to return socialists to the margins of political discussion; one all the more determined because, in 2017, we came far closer to a socialist-led Labour government than Britain’s ruling class had expected. The Left’s efforts to regroup after the defeat of Corbynism, meanwhile, continue to be hampered by the coronavirus.

Though governments around the world were forced to take unprecedented action in response to the pandemic, the initial hopes that it might herald a new political paradigm appear to have been misplaced. The UK government has been careful to ensure that the economic support it provided could be withdrawn relatively easily; the furlough scheme ended in September, while the £20 weekly “uplift” to Universal Credit was spitefully cut in October. The government also continues to refuse to hike Britain’s miserly rate of statutory sick pay, even though most employers would appear to support such a move.

Moreover, the UK government has continued to shield profiteering pharmaceutical firms clinging on to their COVID vaccine patents, once more riding roughshod over the needs of the Global South in what has been dubbed “vaccine apartheid” by critics. The emergence of the Omicron variant in late November again emphasized the rich countries’ selfish shortsightedness in hoarding vaccines and their patents, and though Omicron has been reported to cause less severe illness than earlier coronavirus variants — at least in people with some previous immunity — this is much more down to luck than judgment.