It’s lockdown three. We’re almost a year in and active restrictions are virtually certain to last until the end of March. Chris Whitty has speculated that we will need restrictions into the winter of 2022. And yet, the borders of our nation are still wide open to international travel. Does no one see the total and utter pointlessness of enforcing restrictions on migration within the nation, while allowing migration in from without? Our Covid policy has become a Kafkaesque nightmare in which we are collectively brigaded by force of law into pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. We cannot meaningfully supress the virus if we are actively importing it. If it wasn’t clear in December that borders ought to close, and I’m talking 2019 here, then it ought to have become clear by February or March of the following year, and that’s being charitable. We are now in January of 2021 and speculation grows in the media that the UK ‘could should its borders’. Could? Has this idea only just occurred the government? We are an island, and our geography affords us the ultimate defence against disease, yet this government who were elected on a mandate to take back control of our borders, have left us wide open and exposed.
Last year at least 8700 migrants illegally crossed from Calais into Dover. The vast, vast majority have been housed in hotels. In 2019 only 2000 persons succeeded in crossing, and in 2018 only a few hundred did so. Our government has presided over an increase in illegal crossings of 1700%, vis a vis just two years ago, at a time when they should be doing all in their power to bring that number down. The coast guard ought to be guarding the cost, not facilitating its infiltration. The Navy ought to be policing our waters, not aiding and abetting human traffickers. Yet all of our institutions are working flat out to make the illegal journey to the UK plain sailing, literally. And this in the middle of a pandemic.
But illegal migration is the tip of the iceberg, as planes are landing near constantly at our airports, and from all over the world. See for yourself at https://www.heathrow.com/arrivals that dozens of passenger jets are arriving in Heathrow every few minutes. Of course, the government says there are regulations in place to deal with foreign arrivals, such as quarantine. But there have been 1400 travellers suspected of quarantine breaches, who could not be fined because they could not be located at their given address! Since June, a mere 233 people have actually received a fine, a drop in the ocean, a token gesture. We don’t have the manpower to enforce quarantine on foreign nationals, so we shouldn’t be letting them in.
Our Covid response has gone from being a comedy of errors, to a tragedy. Insanity, as Einstein defined it, was to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result. Though the prospect of vaccination is now on the horizon, the failure to close the borders has a taste of the insane to it. Every day cases and deaths rise, as our government watches on as planes and boats land and dock, their occupants alight to do as they will. We have an army that protects the government of Afghanistan but is not deployed to defend our own nation. We have police busily facilitating protests and getting down on one knee, taking a break only to fine easy targets to make the jobsworth bosses happy, while turning a blind eye to the crime of illegal migration. If anyone was in any doubt, Boris is not a populist, he’s not some right-wing fanatic, he’s a liberal, and always has been. Pandemics don’t retreat in the face of liberalism. Wake up Boris.
