Pending any drastic changes to the U.K.’s coronavirus regime, it won’t be worth your while to travel there any time soon.
The complete and total dearth of any appetite for civil liberty here in the United Kingdom (whence I write) is a sorry sight to behold. The government’s unilateral abridgment of the freedom of association, which was understandable at the outset of the pandemic over a year ago, has still yet to relent in spite of the fact that over half of the British population has now been fully vaccinated. Included in this half of the citizenry are, naturally enough, those most vulnerable to serious illness and/or death at the hands of the virus. There is really no reason for there to be any COVID restrictions at all in the United Kingdom anymore.
And yet, Boris Johnson’s government persists.
One of the valuable lessons that the free peoples of the earth have learned from this pandemic is that we should expect our political leaders, when faced with any domain-specific crisis, to totally abdicate their judgment and their responsibilities to technocratic specialists with expertise in the given domain of concern.
No doubt a case can be made that our leaders ought to perform this kind of recusant self-lobotomy when a crisis arises: After all, it makes sense during a pandemic for government policy to be proposed, seconded, debated, and passed by epidemiologists, doesn’t it?
Well, no, not really. The coronavirus pandemic might be a domain-specific crisis related to the field of epidemiology, but the challenge of governing lies precisely in the fact that there are always many different interests and areas of concern at play in society that have to be balanced. Arguably the most important idea for the statesman to grasp is Aristotle’s notion of competing goods: There can be mutually exclusive courses of action in government that are both beneficial in different ways and to different parts of the population. It’s the job of a leader in times of crisis to listen to advice and entreaties from all quarters and then attempt to strike a balletic policy balance that does the most good and the least harm to all parties involved.
Boris Johnson has decided not even to try to live up to this vocation. He has ceded his duties to public-health apparatchiks and commissars who appear to be intent on pursuing a zero-COVID strategy. That they have decided upon this course of action should surprise no one. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to the public-health expert, every human interaction looks like nothing more than a potential site of virological transmission. Other stakeholders in society — the priest who might look upon the same interaction primarily in sacramental terms, or the parents in terms of their child’s mental health, or the small business owner in terms of their livelihood, all appear to be excluded from the prime minister’s considerations.
His negligence extends to foreign travelers, too. Readers who might have a mind to visit the U.K. this summer as we emerge out of the pandemic might be interested to know what awaits them. As of last month, everyone entering England from abroad will be subjected to self-isolation compliance checks for the ten-day period following their arrival. During this period, an agent of the National Health Service Test and Trace service may turn up at your door at any moment (you are required to provide the agency with the location of your self-imprisonment.) The agent will read out your name, ask you to confirm it, and then demand to see your papers (in the form of an ID or passport.) The agent will then ask a series of questions to determine if you are in adequate obeisance to the agency’s will. You could receive follow-up visits at any time and are liable to be referred to the police if you break the rules. As the government website says,
if the police have reasonable grounds to believe that you have committed a criminal offence in breach of your duty to self-isolate, they may issue you with a fine (fixed penalty notice). Fines start at £1,000 for a first offence and can increase up to £10,000 for repeat offences.
What this does in practice is to make travel to the U.K. the preserve of the wealthy. Who else can afford to take ten days off at the beginning of a trip abroad to hole up in self-isolation and do nothing at all? This policy may have been reasonable when the U.K. was home to a whole host of unvaccinated vulnerable people, but that is no longer the case. This is just wanton tyranny, the only purpose of which is to protect the Johnson government from criticism for being lax on COVID. Given that Great Britain has long since forsaken freedom for security, it’s unsurprising that the prime minister’s party went unpunished in yesterday’s local elections.
The British government is expected to announce more policies on travel to and from the U.K. this afternoon, but unless the announcements include the abolition of this new department of NHS Secret Police, it won’t be worth your while to travel to the U.K. any time soon unless you have a particularly pressing reason to do so.