The Prime Minister is reportedly planning to remove up to 45 countries from the ‘Red List’ – including Mexico, Thailand and Brazil – this week, in time for the October half term. This move comes as the Government finally says it doesn’t want its overseas travel policy to be “unnecessarily restricted”. The Sunday Telegraph has the story.
The Telegraph understands that the 54 countries on the Government’s Red List will be slashed to as few as nine this week – with South Africa, Brazil and Mexico all expected to be opened up to quarantine-free travel in time for the October half-term break.
Cape Verde and Indonesia are also due to be struck off the Red List – which requires travellers to quarantine in designated hotels.
Thailand could also become a quarantine-free destination, but was said to be a “more marginal call”.
The changes, which will allow fully vaccinated travellers to visit each of the countries without having to self-isolate on their return, are expected to be announced on Thursday following a review of the current list.
The move would lead to a spike in bookings by business travellers and holidaymakers, as it significantly opens up the number of destinations offering winter sun.
The planned easing of restrictions marks a dramatic shift in the Government’s approach to foreign travel following months of protests by industry bodies and Conservative backbenchers over the restrictions.
In a particularly ferocious attack, former Prime Minister Theresa May warned in the summer that Britain was “falling behind the rest of Europe in our decisions to open up”.
Covid hospitalisation rates have confounded modelling which suggested that daily admissions could number 7,000 this month, when in fact they appear to have plateaued at 600.
The move comes as Mr. Johnson prepares to reboot the Conservatives’ domestic agenda in the wake of the devastating impact of Covid and the Government’s restrictions. …
A Whitehall source said: “We are expecting sharp reductions in the Red List. It could be as few as nine countries left on the list.”
The source said that ministers still wanted to keep restrictions in place to guard against Covid variants, but that the Government wanted to avoid a travel policy that “is unnecessarily restricted”.
“Targeted quarantine will remain, but in fewer places,” the source said. A second source confirmed that the red list was due to be cut back “substantially”.
Worth reading in full.
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Until no masks, no vaccination and no testing are needed for foreign travel I ain’t going.
I may be waiting a while.
Mrs Dent and the kids won’t be thrilled but travel abroad is supposed to be enjoyable, not a chore or something you can only do by putting your future health at risk with vaccines and masks.
Luckily there are lots of nice places to go to, and nice things to do in the UK. Long distance footpaths, steam railways, tiny lanes for cycling along, weather generally agreeable, old pubs. Travelling abroad now means wearing a face mask for many hours at airports and on the planes (or at harbour terminals and on the ships).
So everyone is free to spread the deadly and highly contagious virus around inside their own countries… but not allowed to travel to other countries (or only with great difficulty and expense)? There is no virus. Anyone remember how free we all were before March 2020?
Already children aged 1.5 years have been brought up in a world of face masks. They are becoming conditioned to it.
People create “workarounds” to deal with, say, ever-rising inflation. The more prices rise, the more things people cut out or cut back on or find some substitute for. You cut out paid subscriptions, drop out of a civic club or country club. You buy the less-expensive store brand instead of the name brand, etc.
With travel, you travel inside your own state or country, not internationally or not on airplanes.
Yes, people will adjust by coming up with more and more “workarounds,” but it’s sad and wrong that they have to do this in the first place.
I expect a lot more “workarounds” in the future.
Yes, indeed. And this is only possible if they don’t restrict our access to fuel, of course. If they do, even a low key camping holiday won’t be possible, unless you can put your pack on your back and walk from home.
“They” never needed to do ANY of this in the first place.
Note that our own & the WHO pandemic plans didn’t include border closures or mass testing, even for viruses much worse than the middling pathogen we allegedly have.
If Home Owners Refuse The Eco Con Job Drive They Will Enter Homes and Disconnect The Gas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97fYfG4_Gk
Saturday 16th October
MEGA Hold the Line Stand by the Road event –
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Saturday 30th October 2pm
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Stand in the Park 2pm followed by stroll to
Stand in the Town Centre around 3pm
About 2 hours in total.
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Exactly this 🙂
…but the unfit untermensch can sit in a rat infested cell eating gulag food and rot.
But what are the restrictions like in these countries. I don’t think I’ll be going somewhere I have to wear a nappy or be jabbed.
99-100% face mask compliance here in Finland. Trains full of the face-masked obedient. Buses, trams and the Metro in Helsinki full of the face-masked.
It’s such silly theater. Here in the States, most schools and many coporations or organizations require masks. Then after school or after work, you go to your kids’ soccer practice and nobody is wearing a mask. I’m a big American college football fan. Most of these games are on TV. Some have 100,000 fans at attendance. You see almost no masks at these events. Maybe 1 in 1,000 people
I’ll offer this: People would be wearing masks if they really thought they were in danger or at risk. The school teacher or principal playing Mask Gestapo during the school day is right there cheering on their team without a mask on Saturday afternoon at the game.
Florida is brilliant. Almost the only people wearing masks are the staff in shops & hotels. They’re apparently operating to CDC recommendations.
Well, that’s fine. Everything’s ok now. The regime has started removing some of the most obviously insane injustices, leaving only the whole edifice of insanity and injustice in place.
Soon most of us will be able to pretend it never happened and ignore, for now, the precedents set, the structures established, the small minorities still affected.
Until it’s time to turn the screw again.
The nanny state ratchet, writ small.
Preserving practises like mask wearing for shop & hotel staff as residual means people never really escaped all of their psychological reminder power, which was all the were ever for.
They will be back next week with a vengeance. People buy into this garbage and run to the travel agent. They deserve to lose their cash. Johnson makes my piss fizz.
I like the expression “Piss Fizz” I’ll be using that in the future. Worthy of an up tick.
Use away I will not claim copyright as I stole it from a friend!
Remind me again why there are quarantine and testing requirements here and abroad only for the unvaxxed, when the ‘vaccines’ now officially make zero positive difference with regard to immunity against infection, viral load and infectiousness?!?
Because the science! This is another bit of psy-ops, making people think they have a bit more ‘freedom’….of course the reality is that travel firms are only running at @ 15% of their usual capacity, we will be lucky if any of them survive.
Travel businesses are at a lot more than 15% capacity, mine included. The jabbed cannot wait to exercise their new found freedom.
I don’t want them to fail, and I’m really glad yours is doing well, that’s good news, but the reality is that holiday visitor statistics show that there were 79% fewer visitors to the UK and 74% fewer people from the UK visiting overseas over the last year. Of course that makes sense during lockdowns etc. Easy Jet, who fly from Leeds and who I use often reported they were at 17% capacity in comparison to 2019, and have lost 318 million pounds just in the three months to June this year. That’s not including the nearly one and a half billion they lost last year.
TUI lost nearly 2 billion last year, British Airways lost 6.4billion and had only a third of its capacity used in the last year. These are not small amounts of money, and I don’t see how they can be made up by the few people going abroad now…
I get constant emails from holiday companies, I would say they are desperate, and most of my family and friends, all jabbed, have no wish at all to go abroad currently.
So how do you feel about this discriminatory partial lifting of restrictions that should never have been imposed in the first place, Sarigan? Must be a bit of mixed feelings, at least.
‘Norwegian’ airline advertising on TV here that it’s up and running again. Although it’s not the same company really – now bought and owned by guess which country?
“Aircraft leasing company BOC Aviation, controlled by the Chinese state, has become a major shareholder in Norwegian Air Shuttle as part of the ailing airline’s rescue plan, Norwegian said”
to reward the vaxxed and punish the jab refuseniks at worst – at best to cajole them into joining the ranks of the vaxxed
Because no one hauls them up on the lies & inconsistencies?
Great news for those who have compelling reasons to travel to and from such countries
For the rest of us who refuse to get tested or show any kind of health pass, no change
Africa, Brazil and Mexico, maybe Indonesia? Of course, just the types of holiday destinations ordinary people flock to with their kids in half-term…LOL!
I suspect it will be the British seaside, buckets and spades and the amusements!..no masks..no testing…no hassle!
“Trust no-one, believe nothing”. It’s just another pitch-rolling for “variants” and the rest, and another mise en scene for the forthcoming lockdown.
People must be as dumb and naive as the proverbial “ox’s a**e” if they can’t see the implicit script(s), which couldn’t be more obvious if they were summarised on 96-sheet roadside billboards throughout the country. Come to think, it’s a pity the Government doesn’t hire some decent contemporary authors of renown, perhaps sci-fi, to write its propaganda garbage.
Heard on the grapevine that money changes hands if a country wants to be taken off the red list.
Rather than back down and end hotel quarantine they reduce number of red list counties to near zero
Look: this is so all those
MPsscumbags who ‘work’ in Parliament can go abroad for their half-term jollies.That’s undoubtedly part of the reason, but the more important dynamic is to give Johnson a softer ride at the Conservative Party Conference. Let’s face it, the country’s broke and the government isn’t exactly bursting its seams with innovatve new ideas, so they’ve had to come up with something positive for him to say that doesn’t cost money.
The fact our rulers created and now enforce these “lists” is really all we need to know.
It can be countries on lists or individual people. Or both.
Any time the State creates lists saying who can travel and who cannot – or any other list of proscribed activities – you have obvious creep toward more state control, which is totalitarianism or at least authoritarianism.
When people argue that they should or should not be on the list, they are actually accepting the premise that the lists themselves are appropriate. They are not.
”… the Government finally says it doesn’t want its overseas travel policy to be “unnecessarily restricted”.
Oh, that would never do in the middle of a deadly pandemic, would it?