The quarantine is pure folly – that’s why Boris must say: Let them f ly

WE HAVE said it before and we will continue to say it. The plan to quarantine travellers arriving in Britain is pure, undiluted folly. It is, as we recently declared, ‘hard to think of a more ill-timed, ill-thought-out policy’.

It might have been designed to throttle, before it can even begin, any revival in our very important airlines, airport and tourism businesses.

The question continues to be vitally, bitterly urgent. Aerial photographs of our great airports show them to be turning slowly into graveyards, crammed with silent, empty jets which cost huge fortunes to buy and maintain.

British Airways, still a source of national pride and concern, is burning through £20 million every day, while running only five per cent of its normal services. This is unsustainable and must, if not soon corrected, lead to appalling job losses. These are individual tragedies for those involved, which should distress us all. But they will lead on to general damage to the whole economy. The decline of major businesses has effects far beyond the suffering of their own direct employees.

In the midst of this, it is sad to see the hard-Left leader of Unite, Len McCluskey, following concrete-headed tactics and refusing to engage in serious discussions with the airline about saving as many jobs as possible. BA says his union has turned down more than 150 requests for meetings. And while this is extraordinarily foolish at a time when we should all be striving for the common good, it is not wholly unexpected from the type of union leader who mistakes loud noise for eloquence and inflexibility for negotiating skill.

By contrast, the quarantine scheme goes against everything we think we know about Boris Johnson, a man of flexibility, quick wit and sympathy.

Yet despite strong dissent in his own Tory Party, and a growing feeling on all sides that the quarantine scheme is unworkable and months too late, we still see little sign of a serious attempt to abandon it, or at least modify it. A blanket rule, forcing arriving or returning travellers to isolate for a fortnight, makes no sense when conditions vary so much from place to place. Worse, it will be impossible to enforce, bringing the law into disrepute and triggering an avalanche of malicious denunciations

At the very least, the creation of quarantine-free corridors with major European and Asian holiday and business destinations would mitigate its worst effects, and allow the start of a revival of both airports and airlines, crucial as they are to any full economic recovery.

The industry is more than willing to take all reasonable steps to prevent the further transmission of coronavirus, if only it helps business to get going again. Nobody seeks to take foolish risks. On the contrary, everyone involved knows very well that doing so might bring about an even worse crisis in the future.

Governments and Ministers make mistakes. Especially in times like these, with fastmoving events and a frightening disease spreading across the country, it is understandable if they sometimes go too far in seeking to protect us. All of us can sympathise with the process which led to this error. But it is much harder to tolerate flat refusal to admit to a mistake, and to put it right.

The Prime Minister is the only person in the Government who can slice through this knot with the simple instruction ‘Let them fly’. He should do so without further delay.