Inhumanity of ‘red list’ airport checks
THe inhumane way passengers arriving at Heathrow are being treated is worse than one could expect from a Third World dictatorship. I went to India in February to spend time with my elderly parents (I am retired). My wife had to accompany me for the execution of a property-related matter. But we decided to return home after India was put on the ‘red list’, meaning most travel from India to the UK would be banned. We arrived from India via Dubai and France at Terminal 2 at around 9.15pm on Thursday, April 22. Only after a wait of five hours were we cleared by UK border control. There were only around 50 people ahead of us when we joined the queue for red-list passengers — five hours to clear 50-odd people in a developed country! Imagine every one of us standing all this time in the queue, with no place to sit and nothing to eat. exhausted kids and elderly people were sitting or lying on the floor. My wife, an NHS consultant, was exhausted after the long flight and subsequent wait, and was also forced to sit on the floor. No social distancing was being followed in these queues that I could see. Our ordeal didn’t end even after the horrible experience at the UK border. From there, we were escorted to another crowded waiting area to wait for transport to our quarantine hotel. There was just one lady from g4S, who was trying her best to arrange transport to the various quarantine hotels, where we have to spend ten days before being allowed home. But g4S seemed unaware of the quarantine numbers, even though all of us had pre-booked the hotels and provided the arriving flight number and timings on our passenger locator forms. It took us another three-and-a-half hours to be allocated transport to our hotel and another hour to reach it. So a total of nine-and-a-half hours to clear UK border checks and get booked into the hotel where we are spending ten days in quarantine. Once there, we discovered we could not even spend the time watching movies online because of woefully slow wifi, and the TV in the room shows only the Freeview channels. By the afternoon they stopped the supply of bottled water, too, and had the cheek to tell me either to drink water from the tap or to order bottled water through Amazon for next-day delivery. Is this all our government is providing after collecting a hefty £2,400 from me? There also seems to be confusion about when the ten days’ isolation officially starts. We arrived in UK on April 22, which is day 0, and the quarantine should end on May 3, 12.01am, according to the calendar given on the government’s website. Despite such clear instructions, the hotel staff have said day 0 is the day we checked into the hotel, i.e. April 23. A double whammy for us because of the delays getting through border control. Are our Home Secretary and PM aware of the ‘worse than animals’ treatment meted out to its citizens, whose human rights and dignity they are supposed to uphold and protect? Or is it simply that they don’t care?