Quarantine talk could kill off tourism
It is heartening news that the latest figures from the National Records of Scotland reflect the continuing fall in the number of Covid-19 coronavirus deaths in this country, with the number having now gone down for a total of nine weeks in a row.
However, Nicola Sturgeon warned this week that she could not rule out the possibility of quarantine for visitors from south of the border in future.
The First Minister also said Scotland was not yet ready to accept “air corridors” which would mean that people could travel to Scotland from other countries with low infection rates.
She said there are “no plans” at the moment to introduce quarantine from people entering Scotland from the rest of the UK, but added the authorities must be alert to cases “coming into” the country and the measure could not be ruled out.
Not only would resort to such a measure effectively kill off what is left of our tourist sector but implementation
Public Works Administration that would both better coordinate federal public works and expand them.
Familiar? Arguably this is a more fitting analogy for Johnson – a Conservative administration in a time of unprecedented crisis turning to big-state, high-spend, interventionist measures.
But it not just the grandiose comparison with the FDR era of the 1930s that is bodged, but the all-too-familiar promises of urgent, transformative government action. Reading his speech, it was hard to avoid a numbing sense of deja vu – or deja lu – that set in on hearing the PM’S recital of transformative, “bounce forward” Britain.
“Shovel-ready infrastructure projects” ... have we not heard these announced by Chancellors before? More money for schools and hospitals – of the sort proclaimed in budgets over the past 30 years. Accelerated road repair and improvement? Sorry – so many previous budgets have announced action on potholes that there can hardly be a road in the land that has not been raised three feet by multiple layers of fresh tarmacadam. and policing would bring colossal problems.
As it is, the mere mention of the possibility of quarantining
“Build, build, build”? But this has been the mantra of the past five Chancellors – Brown, Osborne, Hammond, Javid, now Rishi Sunak. Little wonder construction industry critics were quick to point to shortages of steel, bricks – and skilled building labour.
What’s different this time is the pledge to overhaul and simplify planning procedures. But this, too, is problematic. Central government may want to fire up the bulldozers. But local opinion in many parts of the country is wary of poorly considered development, bodged, overrun projects, green spaces lost and gardens disappearing under concrete.
In any event, is the construction industry capable of pulling off the economic transformation that Johnson urges? “The harsh truth about the construction industry,” wrote one commentator this week, “is that it has been blighted for decades by an adversarial attitude, outdated working practices, a chronic lack of investment and an ageing workforce.”
It faces issues such as low-profit margins and lagging productivity compared to other would be enough to deter many visitors.
Clarification on this cannot come quickly enough. sectors of the economy. The Office for National Statistics pointed out that over a ten-year time horizon, construction’s contribution to productivity has been “relatively insignificant”.
And is the repeated call for ever-more building as relevant to the immense problems that face us today – the decimation of the service sector and tens of thousands of lost hospitality jobs, the urgent need for workforce re-training and the imperative to rapidly expand a digital economy fit for the 21st century?
The speech itself was no vaulting feat of Rooseveltian oratory – more akin to a primary school teacher enthusing on the virtues of Lego.
Within central and local government there is much bureaucratic inertia to overcome for the Lego bricks to be deployed. However, perhaps the July budget may do what Boris failed to do this week.
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