COVID-19 AND OPEN BORDERS BRITAIN

Further to the earlier post (see here), the UK has been steadily blown off course from achieving zero-Covid, which was never Government policy anyway. Had such a policy been pursued with the same effectiveness as it has been in Australia, then zero-Covid would have been achieved by mid-April. It will be June next week. The daily infection rate, which had been reduced to around 2,000, has now jumped to more than 4,000. The reproduction rate, the R rate, is above one, which means the level of infection is once again increasing.

As early as March 2021, Mark Drakeford, the Welsh First Minister, pointed out that the second wave in 2020 was in large part due to people returning from their holidays abroad and ‘bringing the virus with them’. He warned: ‘Coronavirus is with us for the rest of this year. A fourth wave [in Wales] is baked into things now.’ Government scientists subsequently warned that there was a likelihood of a third wave of Covid-19, peaking in July and August once restrictions were lifted.

On the 1 April, scientists at Public Health England (PHE) revealed that only around 18 per cent of those with symptoms had said that they had requested a test and only 43 per cent had followed full isolation procedures and that: ‘With such low rates for symptom recognition, testing, and full self-isolation, the effectiveness of the current form of the UK’s test, trace, and isolate system is limited.’

On 6 April, Border Force figures revealed that around 20,000 people were entering the UK daily, of whom 8,000 were tourists. Yvette Cooper, chairman of the home affairs select committee, said:

‘It’s incomprehensible that almost a year into this crisis, basic Covid border measures are still not working. The Home Office can’t explain what’s happening, doesn’t have proper figures and doesn’t even seem to know if it’s true or not. As the vaccine rolls out and we hope to be able to get back to normal step by step, the Government needs to make sure they don’t derail the whole thing by making the same mistake at the border all over again.’

In mid-April, Airport chiefs complained as to the chaos at the airports, as passengers queued for up to seven hours. Social distancing was not being adhered to and flight passengers were intermingling. On the 17 April, there were a reported 73 cases of the Indian variant in the UK. That figure was soon revised upwards as the infection spread.

Official figures revealed that 20,000 people were allowed into the UK from India during the first three weeks of April. Before being placed on the red list, there were more than 50 flights a day arriving from India. By the 20 April Boris Johnson’s planned trip to India was cancelled and it was announced that India would be placed on the red list – but not with immediate effect. India was finally placed onto the red list on the 23 April.

On 14 May, PHE reported that those infected with the Indian variant had doubled from 520 to 1,313 in one week. By the end of May, the Indian variant accounted for 75 per cent of all infections. In other words, had the borders been secured and the variant kept out, then daily infections would be only one quarter of their current level.

Dominic Cummings, in his evidence to MPs alleged that the Government thought it was ‘basically racist to call for closing the borders and blaming China and the whole China New Year thing … and that was basically nonsense’. He continued: ‘Fundamentally, there was no proper border policy because the Prime Minister never wanted a proper border policy.’ He explained: ‘Repeatedly … I and others said all we have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in English and impose them here.’ Cummings also said ‘we should have shut the borders in January [2020]’. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: ‘We have some of the toughest border measures in the world and we have taken action whenever necessary to keep the public safe.’ If that was true, then the Indian variant would not be in the UK.

The Tories have not disputed two major parts of Cummings’s evidence, relating to the expectation of herd immunity or that their refusal to secure the borders was a part of an anti-racism stance. With the vaccines now available, the Tories have defaulted to a herd immunity strategy.

In reality, the Tories have an Open Borders Britain policy. They do not want to secure the borders. Consequently, they oppose a zero-Covid strategy. They are fixated with increasing mass immigration with people from the Third World. They have undertaken to promote millions to migrate to the UK from both Hong Kong (see here) and India (see here).

Repeatedly, we have been told by pundits and Tory MPs that securing the borders is impossible. We are told that a global country such as the UK is unable to secure its borders. The day after Cummings gave his evidence, a Tory MP was on television guffawing at the idea of securing the borders.

This is all bunkum and very many people have needlessly died because of it. Nor are we out of the woods yet.