Quarantine: a blow to tourism
“Even by its own increasingly chaotic standards, the mess into which the Government has got itself over its new quarantine rules takes some beating,” said The Times. The new regulations – which came into force this week – require travellers to Britain to self-isolate for 14 days on arrival. This is “the wrong policy at the wrong time”. A 14-day quarantine would have “made sense” at the start of the pandemic – but instead, over the past three months, Britain, “almost alone in Europe”, continued to allow new arrivals from anywhere in the world, including virus hotspots such as China and Iran, “without so much as a temperature check”. Now, “at the very moment that outbreaks in many popular travel destinations have been brought under control”, and restrictions are being lifted across Europe, the Government has finally imposed a quarantine of its own. It will heap “further misery” on British tour operators and airlines, and will deter much-needed foreign visitors from coming to Britain during the summer months.
Home Secretary Priti Patel wanted to impose a quarantine in March, but failed to win Cabinet backing, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. However, the policy was “brought back” last month by Dominic Cummings, who knew “tough border controls were popular” with voters. According to YouGov, eight out of ten members of the public support the proposed £1,000 fines for failure to self-isolate on arrival in the UK, with the highest backing (83%) found among the working-class voters who gave Boris Johnson his huge majority in December. So the measures appealed to a PM keen to “find some ‘good news’ to announce amid growing criticism of the Government’s response to the pandemic”.
But they have gone down like a lead balloon elsewhere, said Stephen Castle in The New York Times. The policy has “enraged airlines” (BA, Ryanair and easyJet are threatening legal action), “frustrated travellers” and “upset lawmakers” – including many Tory MPs “fearful of the economic damage”. Border officials say it is unenforceable: they will have no capacity to check whether addresses provided by travellers are genuine. Even so, ministers insist it is necessary to stop a new wave of infections from abroad, said Charles Hymas in The Daily Telegraph. It may be that a more “scientifically valid” policy of barring only those from high-risk countries would be politically tricky: it would anger the US and President Trump. Either way, it seems likely that, with so many ranged against it, the policy will be “watered down, if not scrapped”, in time “to salvage at least some of the summer holiday season”.