What’s really behind these absurd and restrictive foreign travel rules?

Following the money seems like as good an explanation as any for the traffic light system

‘Leave thine home, oh youth,” urged the Roman courtier Petronius Arbiter in a poem made famous by the celebrated British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, “and seek out alien shores; a wider range of life is ordained for thee”.

In the homogenised sameness of today’s world, it is regrettably ever harder to find any genuinely alien shores yet to be explored, but just the chance to travel in the last year and a bit of on/off lockdown would have been a fine thing.

For some of this time, there has been an absolute ban on non-essential travel overseas; though the restrictions have now been partly lifted, the Government continues – to the dismay of a once thriving travel industry – to discourage it, and seemingly make it as difficult as possible.

At every stage, moreover, there has been the threat of bringing back more hard-line constraints. This in itself has been a major deterrent to booking an overseas holiday. Rumours of another crackdown this winter are already rife among beleaguered tour operators and airlines, many of whom won’t survive another year like the last one. The fault is not entirely with the UK Government. There is plainly not a great deal ministers can do about policy in the US, New Zealand and Australia, all of which have in effect banned non-residents, including UK citizens. Attempts to persuade the Biden administration to reciprocate on freedom of travel for the fully vaccinated have run into the sand.

As an aside, it is worth noting that when President Trump began the process of closing American borders by imposing a ban on travel from China in the initial stages of the pandemic, he was almost universally condemned. The World Health Organisation claimed that there was no evidence that border controls would halt the spread of the disease. Seemingly taking his instruction directly from Beijing, the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that because of the actions already taken by China, it was wholly unnecessary to interfere with international travel and trade. And yet when the saintly Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, similarly closed the borders, with the aim of going beyond suppression to complete eradication of the disease, she was hailed as setting a shining example to all.

What we now see is that failing to combine zero-tolerance strategies with an effective vaccination programme – only 14 per cent of Australians and New Zealanders have been fully vaccinated – condemns a country to never-ending isolation, and as in the case of Australia (where there is now a growing backlash against the eradication strategy) lingering and repeated economic lockdown. Once buoyant tourist industries have been all but annihilated.

In Britain, we have at least achieved success with our vaccine rollout, but little good does it seem to have done us, with policy on international travel stuck in the muddled, neither fish nor fowl, halfway house of the current traffic light system.

Britain’s most popular tourist destinations have all been left stranded at the amber to red end of the spectrum of continued restrictions. Even when those destinations are relatively open to UK holidaymakers, the conditions attached to returning home are costly, bureaucratic and off putting, seemingly deliberately so. The threat of a sudden change in status adds to the deterrent effect.

All this might be just about tolerable if properly justified on public health grounds; as it is, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the various categorisations. Infection rates in many amber designated countries are considerably lower than here; we are much more likely to give it to them than them to us.

Though it pretends otherwise, the Government would, it seems, much rather you stayed at home. “No, no, no,” say ministers. “We fully understand that these restrictions are bad for the economy, and we wouldn’t be imposing them if there were not good public health reasons for it. We cannot risk another wave.”

Well perhaps, but I can’t help but think that the Treasury would be rather more active in pushing the case for a further lifting of constraints were it not for one rather important fact.

Time was when international travel was largely the preserve of the rich and particularly intrepid, but that all changed from the 1960s onwards when the age of mass tourism arrived and overseas holidays started to become accessible to all. Today, Brits are more likely to holiday abroad than almost any other nation, if they could, that is. As a country, we take almost as many trips overseas as the whole of the US, which has five times as many people.

The upshot is that we run a huge trade deficit in tourism. In 2019, British nationals made 93.1 million trips abroad, spending an astonishing £62.3 billion. There were, on the other hand, only 40.9 million trips to the UK, with spending of £28.5 billion. If the money we spend abroad was instead disgorged in the UK, it would theoretically be a huge net boost to the economy, even if we lost all those tourist pounds from overseas.

That, in essence, has been the effect of the pandemic and the travel restrictions that policymakers have deemed necessary to counter it. Small wonder that Spain, Portugal and Greece are so keen to welcome us back. By the month, they bleed billions of British euros. Small wonder, too, that the Treasury would much rather we spent its furlough largesse here in the UK than a Benidorm or Mykonos nightclub.

From an overall economic perspective, it would, of course, be better if things returned to the way they were; hundreds of thousands of UK jobs depend on overseas tourism, both outward and inward bound. But the magically shrunken tourist deficit does at least provide some consolation as a positive both for the balance of payments and for tax revenues. It also provides support for the levelling up agenda: relatively rich southerners who would otherwise be splashing the cash abroad will be spending their money in the UK instead.

I’m not suggesting this is the underlying reason for keeping us all locked up. Yet it is ever harder to see any other justification. If there is one, please tell.