Can the left survive covid?

Chartist demonstration, Kennington Common, 10 April 1848. Source: William Edward Kilburn, via Wikimedia Commons

We should be very clear about what happened in the last week. The British left, with some rare exceptions, collectively flunked the central challenge of covid politics. Failing, in its great majority, to oppose both mandatory vaccinations for NHS workers and vaccine passports was not only an offence against good public health management in favour of knee-jerk authoritarianism. Offering political support for the Johnson government was a significant political error that yet again revealed the extent to which covid-19 has found the British left intellectually, organisationally, and politically lacking. And since the politics of covid now constitutes politics as such, failure here is of a profound character, raising the question in the title. Can the left survive covid?

Sitting this one out

For socialists and social democrats to effectively sit the debate on restrictions out, allowing both sides of an argument to be dominated by versions of the right – the reactionary government voicing the statal logic of passports, the reactionary protestors acting as its plebeian opposition – was and is a mistake. The latter are gaining in strength and, since both passporting and mandatory vaccination will be ineffective in restraining the Omicron variant, have been gifted a powerful political argument against future restrictions. The space in which covid politics operates is not some temporary aberration: it is where politics now actually happens. (This ought to be obvious, after nearly two years.) The British Querdenken are moving rapidly to occupy that space. And yet the radical left appears to be acting as if, at some point in the near future, the terrain we operate on will return to its familiar, pre-pandemic shape and we can get back to railing against “Tory austerity” or “neoliberalism” or whatever familiar monster we prefer to fight.

Labour’s prior opposition to vaccine passporting, stated with some clarity over the summer, into support “in the national interest”, has a similar flawed logic. From a tactical point of view, Labour’s flop into unconditional support for the Tory government reduces its room for later manoeuvre on the question. With covid cases rising rapidly, the government is likely to request more restrictions – they are being openly discussed - and, were Labour to object or raise conditions on support such as improved sick pay, ministers can turn around and make the (not