The complications of easing lockdown

STEERING a country out of lockdown creates the difficulty of explaining changes as new guidelines were built around people’s ‘common sense’, it was claimed this week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced changes coming into effect on July 4, and a nation said ‘cheers’ to the news that pubs would be able to open their doors once again, said political commentator Nick de Bois.

Restaurants, pubs, hotels and hairdressers were the headline service industry areas immediately benefiting; but gyms, health centres, theatres and cinemas and nail bars were for the moment still off limits.

“As you come out of lockdown, you see contradictions that are not easy to understand, that, for example, I can get my hair but not my nails done,” said Nick - who admitted he was not a frequent visitor to a nail bar.

The former Conservative MP for Enfield North said in March as the pandemic hit the UK ‘the bottom line’ was to tell everyone to stay at home: “A simple command and easy to understand.”

Nick said heading for the new normal was ‘quite a difficult message’. He added: “Firstly, we are seeing guidelines for the first time; what we have seen until now were changes in the law. There are quite a lot of variations.

“And the second point is social distancing will be relaxed to ‘one metre plus’; these are guidelines based on the common sense of the British people.”

Speaking on the Costa Blanca’s Bay Radio, Nick said the government promised everything was constantly under review. “My guess is come July 16 to 18, we will start to see relaxation in things like nail bars, gyms, and so forth.”

QUARANTINE

The controversial two week quarantine for anyone arriving in the UK - including people returning from a break abroad - remained. Nick predicted it would soon be scrapped in favour of ‘air bridges’ to certain countries, including Spain.

“No. 10 is not keen to have another U-turn and you can understand that; one can be seen as a listening government but when you get a few of them, it makes people nervous about the government’s effective control.”

He said the introduction of air bridges would allow travel between the UK and a number of name countries without barriers, with Spain ‘top of the list’.

Nick said the ongoing negotiations were the reason the Spanish government was quick to reassure 400,000 British holiday home owners they would not face any quarantine restrictions as they travelled south - a move recently mooted in a ‘tit for tat’ response.

He said there was logic in the policy; the epicentre of the pandemic had moved across the Atlantic to the USA and Brazil and while some people were still ‘nervous’ about infection rates in the UK, the statistics were ‘very much going in the right direction’.

And Nick said Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was right to question the government’s lockdown changes in the House of Commons - ‘scoring points’ over statistics of the vital test and trace policy.

It was ‘not credible’ to simply claim the country should remain shut down but the opposition had a duty to raise concerns about coming out of lockdown.

“There are questions still to be asked; the details still to be hammered out; Sir Keir is quite right on that score.”