The nature of travel controls in dealing
with a pandemic is that the logical priority is to stop travel from higher risk
areas into low risk areas. Why anyone would want to travel from a low risk area
into a high risk area is one of life’s little mysteries, but there is no
obvious reason for preventing them from doing so as long as they expect to be
quarantined on their return. It should, therefore, be no surprise to anyone
(although it does seem to have come as a surprise to
some) that any list of countries from which a high-risk country like England
will accept travellers will be longer than the list of countries prepared to
accept travellers from that high risk country itself. And indeed, of the 59 or more (a number which keeps changing) countries
considered ‘safe’ by the English government, 32 are still imposing some sort of
restrictions on travellers from England. The only surprise in that, for me, is
that 27 are not – I wonder who’s doing their risk assessments.
There is a problem for Wales and Scotland
in this, of course – although the guidance on who may enter the country legally
without a period of self-isolation applies only to England, the countries named
in the English guidance are inevitably applying their rules to the whole of the
UK. I can’t blame them given the lack of control over movement between those parts
of the UK committed to eliminating the virus on the one hand and England on the
other which is committed only to keeping infections at a level with which they
believe that NHS can cope. That situation has been unnecessarily confused by
the English government’s lack of discussion and consultation with the devolved
administrations. The leader of the very best (but entirely non-nationalistic, of course) country in the world in every respect simply doesn’t see any need to consult
anybody. Even, or
perhaps especially, his own toadies cabinet. Discussion is for
wimps, not world kings.
The English government has also added
to the confusion with its unwillingness to spell out the unavoidably one-sided nature of its advice
(presumably
for fear that doing so would reveal the true extent to which England’s handling
of the pandemic has been so poor compared to other states), almost encouraging
people to think that the problem isn’t with England’s handling of the virus,
but with those pesky foreigners declining to reciprocate. From an Anglo-centric
perspective, if ‘they’ won’t accept ‘us’, that’s evidence of ‘their’ mean-spiritedness
rather than ‘our’ utter incompetence.
But reciprocity in such circumstances is a
ludicrous idea – it amounts to demanding that because ‘we’ assess your country
to be low risk on the basis of the number of cases and the rate of spread,
‘you’ must state that you consider us to be equally low risk and ignore all
hard numerical evidence to the contrary. It’s English exceptionalism at its
very worst; a demand that the rest of the world believes the lies and spin and
accepts the overall greatness of England. It doesn’t help puncture the bubble
when the official opposition seem to have bought into the same exceptionalism
and unreasonableness – Labour’s transport spokesperson criticised the
government this week saying "Now we see a plan to let residents of 60
or more countries into England without any reciprocal arrangements". English
exceptionalism knows no party boundaries.
It’s an open question whether countries
signing up to any lessening of quarantine restrictions are acting too soon –
only time will tell. The English government’s decision looks more like a
short-term economic one (which, if they’ve got it wrong, will actually turn out
to be much costlier in the end) than anything related to public health. Seeking
to arrive at mutual or reciprocal arrangements is about politics and spin; it
has nothing to do with disease control.
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