Covid Security at UK Borders

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC) [V]]

It has taken over a year for the Government eventually to implement a limited form of quarantine at the borders—a glacial pace of decision making that we can ill afford as the pandemic continues. The recent announcement was yet another half-measure and an all-too-familiar fudge of a thing—half-done, and that badly.

The evidence, of course, speaks for itself. Countries that locked down comprehensively and promptly have so far had better covid-19 outcomes. The Prime Minister’s “softly, softly” approach prompts the question: whose interest does this Government serve? His alignment with select business interests has distorted public health efforts from the start, from the billions spent on dodgy private procurement contracts to the ill-fated eat out to help out scheme, which helped to raise the tide of the pandemic into the second wave.

Despite the great effort of the people of the four nations to endure another testing lockdown, the Prime Minister sees fit to allow most travellers to enter the UK without undergoing strict quarantine measures, overruling in the process the wishes of both his Home and Health Secretaries. This policy ignores the risk posed by people arriving from overseas while carrying existing variants from non-high-risk countries, and there is no guarantee that this approach will safeguard against other variants emerging in non-high-risk countries.

Not only are the new measures weak in their practical application, but they are morally weak as well. It was of course Edmund Burke of the Conservative party who first coined the phrase “geographical morality” to describe the impunity with which the British elite acted abroad in countries under the yoke of the British empire in the 18th century. Under the new broader measures, that concept has been reversed. It is now business leaders and the rich from both home and abroad who can act with relative impunity, free to travel in and out of the UK while the majority of us live on under strict lockdown. The Government cannot shake their commitment to the ideology of hyper-individualism. Whenever possible, they prioritise the liberty of predominantly wealthy individuals above the common good, stubbornly ignoring the truth that covid-19 has laid bare for all to see: the deep interconnectedness of our society and the planet.

As has been the case since the beginning, these measures are part of a wave of blinkered wishful thinking set once again to come crashing down on the rocks of reality. That reality being that the virus has no interest in notions of individual liberty, and these futile attempts to apply quarantine measures selectively equally mean nothing to the virus. Only strict quarantine for all arrivals and proper support for hospitality and business will see us safely through.