British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is seriously ‘considering’ banning foreign leisure travel and barring nearly all overseas visitors from entering England under radical new plans being drawn up by the government to fight the Omicron variant according to multiple Whitehall sources.
The ban on flying abroad on holiday would be part of a wider package of lockdown measures that would see restaurants, pubs and other hospitality venues shut down, hotels closed and people banned from seeing their friends or family in indoor spaces.
Non-essential shops would also be shuttered, while gyms would be forced to close and strict limits placed on how many people could gather in outdoor public spaces. The restrictions could be brought in just after Christmas and last for the whole of January.
Government scientists have pushed for the restrictions to be brought in even sooner but Johnson is likely to delay the introduction of social distancing regulations until December 27.
The news was revealed by Pippa Crerar, a journalist for The Mirror. She has broken a series of embarrassing allegations of parties within the Prime Minister’s residence and offices at No 10 Downing Street and across Whitehall, all while the rest of the UK was in lockdown or subject to restrictions that prevented them from seeing their loved ones in person.
Foreign travel was defacto banned late last year when Johnson placed England into lockdown at the eleventh hour before Christmas. New regulations were introduced in March 2021 that specifically targeted foreign holidaymakers and it wasn’t until May that limited international travel was eventually allowed.
The resumption of international travel got off to a shaky start on 17th May but travel demand bounced back in the late summer as COVID-19 vaccines reached more and more people.
President Biden’s decision to lift the travel ban on European and UK visitors in November was a pivotal moment and one that the travel industry thought marked a sea change in how governments handled the pandemic.
The travel industry had already been demanding a bespoke package of financial assistance to help struggling companies survive the winter after new COVID-19 testing rules were introduced at short notice. Confidence was further damaged when South Africa and several other countries were placed on England’s ‘Red List’.
Along with financial support, airline bosses including British Airways CEO Sean Doyle, have demanded the government abandon pre-departure and post-arrival COVID testing for fully vaccinated airline passengers.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has even called for the unvaccinated to be banned from air travel instead of heaping restrictions back on fully vaccinated travellers.
The remarkably inconsistent approach to regulating International travel that has been in place since the beginning of the pandemic needs to be corrected. The airline and travel industry need to form a working group together with recognized experts in epidemiology and public health to develop a set of uniform recommendations regarding testing, masking and vaccinations that could be presented to the US, the EU, Japan, Canada, Australia and perhaps a few additional countries for adoption. As occurred with aviation security in the post-9/11 era, once a critical mass of countries back standard protocols, the industry can adapt to them with a degree of confidence that the rules of the road are not going to be constantly changing.
The aviation and travel industries are going to continue to be in crisis for months or years to come if they continue to simply react to the current international patchwork of rules and restrictions imposed by each country instead of working towards an agreed set of protocols and procedures. Wishing COVID away is not a strategy. We may all be done with the virus, but the virus is not done with us.