It’s a bold move – but the right one

The nation deserves a holiday, so sort out this travel mess

THESE are tough days for Boris Johnson. Far too many people oppose or question his determination to give us back our freedom. The zero-Covid zealots, who want a permanent regime of restriction, don’t back him. Some of his advisers, who have no responsibility to wider concerns, don’t back him. The public, after 18 months of fear, are not sure if he is right.

But this is what happens to real leaders. Our Prime Minister is as worried as anyone else by the risks. He does not wish to harm anyone or cause disaster. But he has a high duty to do what is right for the whole country.

Britain needs its freedom to sustain and rebuild the NHS, forced by the Covid crisis to reduce many treatments and tests and urgently needing to cut down some of the longest queues in its history. It needs its freedom to open up the economy which pays for the NHS and for so many other vital parts of our advanced and costly civilisation.

Yet at every step towards revival, grim voices warn – so that the Government must shuffle, rather than stride, towards liberation. Actually our current policy is both cautious and responsible. The giant success of the vaccination programme, so far, makes it so.

Figures show deaths, hospital admissions, numbers of ventilated patients and bed occupancy rates are all lower than before, with the disease increasingly affecting younger, less vulnerable people. No, the crisis is not over. But it is, even so, quite reasonable, and indeed necessary, to open up the nation.

Leaders are supposed to lead. That is what Boris Johnson is doing, and we should wish him success for the country’s sake.

THOUSANDS of words have been written about how illogical the ‘pingdemic’ is, and rightly so. The postponement of urgent measures to pay for social care – because the Ministers involved are selfisolating – sums up the absurdity. It is yet another way in which government success is being clouded by confusion and pedantic pettifogging, the rigid imposition of rules often for their own sake, or on very weak grounds.

An equally egregious instance of this is the way we have made it so illogically difficult to travel. The Mail on Sunday has repeatedly pointed out that the families of the nation need and deserve a decent holiday, to help the country get over 18 months of gloom, confinement and separation from loved ones. Once, tight restrictions on travel were justified. But the impressive take-up of the vaccination should have transformed this. It is astonishing how little difference it has made.

Claims, later toned down, of dangerous new variants led to severe limitations on travel to France. Almost every European country has been subjected to a zig-zagging succession of bans, relaxations and new bans. This has caused misery to those who dared to travel. It has deterred many others from even trying, lest they too are forced to make a sudden dawn dash homewards to avoid long and expensive days in quarantine or isolation.

As for the incessant and overpriced tests demanded, they just add to the mental torture heaped on the heads of innocent people trying to take a badly needed break in the sun by the sea.

Ministers really need to act to ensure that, while necessary restrictions on travel are maintained, they are not discredited and made ridiculous by over-caution and needless rigidity.