THE last couple of years can seem a bit of a blur, a depressing sequence of semi-lockdowns and partial reopenings. 

The virus casting its shadow over all our plans, as in the background the Conservative government assiduously strips away rights — to protest, to vote, to freedom of speech, to seek refuge from persecution, even to receive warning if it decides to remove our citizenship.

This monotony should by now have exploded any notion that Covid is a temporary emergency after which we can go back to “normal.” 

As the left economist James Meadway points out, it has long been obvious that “the period of time over which the virus would be an acute social problem [is] likely to be measured in years rather than months.” 

The same is true for the Morning Star itself. The first lockdown caused an immediate crisis from forced adaptation to home working to the collapse in shop sales, sales to trade union offices and advertising for inevitably cancelled events.

We weathered these thanks to the hard work of staff and the extraordinary commitment of our readers, who met two special fundraising appeals on the trot.

As time went on, improvements to our web operation and e-edition boosted online subscriptions, while a new home delivery service is also taking off, allowing easier daily access to the print edition. 

But it has become clear that print sales will not simply bounce back during reopenings — a precarious title marginal to most vendors’ takings is vulnerable to being taken off the shelves, while shoppers’ habits are changing as are union office working arrangements.

At the same time soaring inflation affects our costs too. For the Star like the broader left, 2022 must be a year of “hard miles” — steady work to rebuild sales in whatever format to secure the future of our newspaper.

It continues to play a unique and irreplaceable role on the British left and we plan to hold a major Morning Star conference this year because of that.

The reason for the virus’s especially severe impact on Britain — whether measured in the number of deaths or the economic fallout — is linked to the nature of the neoliberal state, the extent of privatisation and outsourcing in our public services, their chronic underfunding and understaffing especially in the NHS, the prevalence of poverty pay and insecure jobs and housing.

Yet as in some previous national dilemmas — that over EU membership springs to mind — the ruling class’s domination of the airwaves, print and social media shapes a debate in which working-class interests barely get a look-in. 

Take the discussion on “protecting the NHS,” which is often restricted to how far we ought to impose lockdowns and seldom touches on the deeper structural reasons for NHS fragility — most prominently understaffing, with tens of thousands of vacancies across the health service now regarded as the norm.

While trade unions are raising these questions, the defeat of the left in the Labour Party means they are not being fought for at a national political level.

The government is clearly not prepared to “protect the NHS” by raising pay to reward existing staff, attract new staff and reduce workloads which are becoming unsustainable. 

By voting in favour of whatever Covid powers it asks for without making these conditional on specific demands that address deeper problems — raising NHS pay, raising statutory sick pay, restoring the universal credit uplift — Labour helps to normalise both the degrading of our public services and the state’s right to impose highly intrusive restrictions on ordinary people not as an emergency measure, but as a means of covering up for its refusal to invest in our health service or its workers. 

This problem will only become more serious the longer Covid remains a fact of life — which it seems sure to be for the indefinite future, given the effectiveness of British and EU support for big pharma in blocking a vaccine patent waiver. 

The channelling of “anti-system” anger into the anti-social opposition to vaccines and Covid precautions is only likely to grow. 

Currently, both Labour and Tory policy is to ignore the social causes of these phenomena and make up for the lack of public confidence with heightened authoritarianism.

Labour’s bid to ban anti-vax disinformation online is reminiscent of its calls for a ban on the RT channel for allegedly spreading propaganda ahead of the EU referendum — both show a tendency to ascribe popular discontent to the work of malign agitators and a complacent belief that increasing state power to police communications is a solution with no downsides.

In the process they make the underlying problems worse. Mandatory vaccination for health workers does not address the particular reasons why people from some communities (particularly certain ethnic minorities) show higher levels of vaccine hesitancy. 

It smacks of contempt when health workers are being denied a proper pay rise.

It is likely to exacerbate understaffing if it drives more health workers away, especially in particular sectors.

The British Dental Association has warned of a “devastating” impact on NHS dentistry, already a service reduced to the point of non-existence across large parts of the country, as the Communist-led Toothless in England campaign has demonstrated.

That campaign — which began when a couple of comrades in Leiston noted the closure of the town’s only two dental practices that provided NHS services — is an instructive one.

The speed with which street stalls, social media and petitions attracted support was impressive.

The campaigners have built a high profile and won significant local media coverage. It has spread beyond Suffolk and secured meetings with the East of England NHS commissioners.

All because campaigners were finally taking action on an issue which concerns millions of us — the extortionate cost of privatised dental care — but about which our established politics is silent.

Many people see the inability to afford a dentist as a fact of life. Toothless in England says it’s one we shouldn’t have to put up with.

That’s an attitude we need to build across a whole range of issues, because it is clear by now that rather than “levelling up” the Tories are intent on levelling down, and using the disruption caused by Covid to permanently inure us to lower living standards.

For all their heady promises on climate change, Conservative policy is, as in the health service, making things worse: passengers face the biggest price rises for train tickets in a decade while from London to Scotland hundreds of routes are threatened.

A drop in revenues caused by the pandemic and lockdowns is being used to permanently degrade our transport systems.

In London, headlines suggesting hundreds of bus routes and entire much-used Tube lines could be axed — the Bakerloo and Jubilee Lines have been mentioned — are met with scepticism.

The prevailing attitude is that they couldn’t get away with such a blatant downgrade to the capital’s network.

The truth is of course that they can get away with anything unless they are stopped.

For much of Britain the axe looming over Londoners did its dirty work years back.

Our transport network was much more extensive, much more reliable and much cheaper a few decades ago than it is today.

Yet because of the pro-privatisation, pro-car consensus at Westminster, we have usually lacked a political movement prepared to say, like the Toothless in England campaigners, enough is enough.

The defeat of Corbynism in 2019 has left us without such a movement on a national scale. But the necessity of rebuilding one is clear. 

Aside from a pandemic whose impact underlines the urgency of taking greater public control of the economy, we face a climate catastrophe that politics as usual is simply incapable of addressing and an increasingly tense new cold war with the nuclear powers Russia and China. 

Nor does the logic of capitalism’s constant need to break open new markets and exploit to the end every last resource make it amenable to gradual reform.

The half-hearted calls for a more “responsible capitalism” by Ed Miliband in 2015 resulted in a media savaging only tame by comparison with the attacks on Corbyn which followed. 

Similarly, Keir Starmer’s leadership of Labour aims not at offering a more “electable” form of the politics Corbyn stood for — though this was the false prospectus on which he stood for leader — but at the systematic removal of all socialist content from the party’s offer.

Every shift, from abandoning the Green New Deal to ditching support for energy nationalisation, and every shadow cabinet reshuffle have marked this consistent march to the right.

Starmer is not the candidate of reforming the capitalist system, but of restoring its unquestioned supremacy.

We face a serious assault on living standards. This takes multiple simultaneous forms: the attacks on public transport, the refusal to take action to strengthen the NHS despite the pandemic, soaring utility bills accompanied by cuts to social security and below-inflation pay offers.

Industrial resistance has already begun in the transport sector but has got off to a rockier start in the health service.

But alongside the organising to be done in workplaces, workers need the confidence of knowing the public are on their side.

It is all of our responsibility to make it clear that we see what is going on here and that we — though not the health contractors or the rail profiteers or the majority of our representatives in Parliament — are truly “all in it together.”

We cannot shy away from political demands — the case for energy nationalisation is obvious and it commands majority support.

With unions, campaigns like We Own It can raise the profile for such demands, but we need to put politicians on the spot at local level, which means building effective local activity whether through trades councils or branches of the People’s Assembly or other bodies.

At the same time, the immediate response we see from unions in multiple sectors is the right one. Rising energy costs are one aspect of rising living costs and the answer must be higher pay.

The wave of workplace militancy we are seeing in several major unions is key to this. Fighting and winning regardless of Westminster is our only option. But understanding the context of these attacks is also crucial.  

As with the attacks on our public services, the long-term plan to force down living standards for the majority of people in this country is down to capitalism’s inability to satisfy the “take the money and run” demands of a tiny elite while meeting ordinary people’s expectations of life and work.

The same dilemma prevents meaningful action on climate change and a rational, global approach to handling the pandemic, while the refusal of the world’s dominant imperialist power, the United States, to countenance a loss of hegemony is behind dangerous tensions with China that could yet erupt into a catastrophic war.

It is more than a century since Rosa Luxemburg said the choice we face is between socialism and barbarism. All the crises threatening our world today demonstrate how right she was.

There is only one daily voice in the British media fighting that corner — thank you for keeping the Morning Star shining in 2021, and let’s build a wider readership and a higher profile through 2022.