It may be tempting fate to say it, but Britain is perhaps the best place in Europe to spend this Christmas. Bavaria’s winter markets have closed, France’s bistros won’t let anyone in without a pass sanitaire, Belgium has banned private parties and Ireland’s pubs are all under curfew. But in Britain, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can walk, work, eat and drink where they like. Unless the omicron variant changes everything, we may well see in the New Year having overcome the virus and upheld the basic values of liberty.

Things are rather different in Germany, where hospitals are filling up and the government is planning to lock down the unvaccinated. Olaf Scholz, the incoming chancellor, favours making vaccinations compulsory and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is suggesting that all 27 EU members consider doing the same. Freedom should not mean freedom to infect others, runs the fairly clear argument. So it’s time for governments to take back control.

This would be an easier argument if science backed it up, but studies so far make this a hard case to defend. Vaccines offer strong protection against serious illness but no guarantee against either acquiring the virus or passing it on. This makes it impossible to declare that a restaurant full of jabbed diners is “safe”. The no-jab, no-job argument also comes up against the case of the unjabbed who have had the virus. An Israeli study of 750,000 people showed that natural immunity was far stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity. So, on what grounds can someone with post-recovery immunity be fired?

In France, vaccine passports have had some success in narrowing the uptake gap between young and old. But in Scotland they have proved a flop, with vaccination rates rising no faster than those in England after Nicola Sturgeon’s scheme was announced. Anyone proposing to make life harder for the unjabbed also needs to be honest about who they tend to be: ethnic minorities, the poor and the otherwise-marginalised.

The unvaccinated that Angela Merkel is now squaring up against, in her final act as chancellor, are far more likely to live in her old East Germany where Alternative for Germany (AfD), the populists, are strongest. One poll found that half of unvaccinated Germans voted AfD in the recent election. This fits a trend. Across Europe, the anti-lockdown cause has tended to be picked up by Eurosceptic populists who find blunt ways of making their objections known. This has complicated the debate, with politicians often seeing the face of their political opponents in the various protests.

The arrival of booster jabs makes the idea of compulsion harder still: if top-ups are needed every three to six months, how will this affect vaccine passports? Will people have to receive every top-up for the ongoing right to enjoy their liberty? Otto Schily, a minister in Gerhard Schröder’s government, yesterday pointed out that even Communist China isn’t considering mandatory vaccines. So where, he asked, will Merkel’s idea lead? Will Mr Scholz now yield to the activist lawyers advocating prison sentences for vaccine refuseniks?

The politics of all this is just as divisive in Italy, now in its 19th consecutive week of anti-restriction protests. Next week, it will bring in a “super green pass” where a negative test is no longer enough. Austria will start issuing fines for the unvaccinated from February, as Greece will do next month (but only for pensioners). Even Sweden, having defied the world for so long by rejecting mask-wearing and lockdowns, has now succumbed to vaccine passports. Britain is starting to look like the new Sweden: keeping calm and carrying on.

Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, has flatly ruled out compulsory vaccination, seeing it as not just illiberal but counterproductive. “If you make the vaccine attractive, people will want it,” says one senior official. “If we start to threaten people, it all changes very quickly.” Right now, Britain has face masks on public transport. And non-binding advice from one minister to go easy on “snogging under the mistletoe”. And, so far, not much else.

This shows Javid’s difference in style. Rather than leaping to worst-case hypotheticals, he’s keeping his eye on the data – and they show virus levels still under control. Among pensioners, vaccine uptake is 93 per cent and antibody levels are at 98 per cent: figures unlikely to be pushed much higher by restrictions. The omicron variant could put everything back to square one – and if so, there are no end of emergency buttons to press. But so far, there is no cause for alarm.

Javid and others took plenty of political heat in the summer when they ended lockdown. The idea then was to face whatever Covid had in store when the health service was better able to take it – and specifically to be ready for winter. That’s why there is such reluctance to follow the rest of Europe into lockdown now. Why take the hit on the economy and the health service in anticipation of a variant that might not be so bad?

Prof Philip Thomas, who predicted the third wave with modelling for Bristol University, envisages Covid steadily petering out over the next few weeks. Omicron has not (yet) changed his mind. Against this come studies – one from South Africa yesterday – saying there’s a decent chance that omicron has “substantial” ability to reinfect. It will be weeks, most likely, until anything is known for sure.

Nothing is ever certain with Covid, and bumps (like yesterday’s case spike) are a reminder of how quickly things might change. Inside No 10, there are plenty of people ready to reach for vaccine passports, given half an excuse. But even Sturgeon had to give up on her plan to roll them out when the evidence showed they didn’t work. There are plenty in Government who think ending lockdown in summer did enough to “save Christmas” and don’t want it imperilled now.

Last time around, Britain locked down longer and harder than anyone else in Europe. This time, Javid’s instinct is the opposite: not to jump too soon, trust the boosters and see what happens. Quite a gamble. But this time, it’s one the Government is willing to take.