47 countries have been removed from the Government’s ‘Red List’ in what has been described as one of the biggest reopenings of overseas travel since the pandemic began. The Telegraph has the story.
Only seven countries will remain on the list which requires travellers to be quarantined in a hotel on their return to the U.K. at a cost of £2,285 per person.
Ministers also abandoned plans to force holidaymakers to video themselves taking tests after a backlash from the travel industry, which argued that it would be costly and a logistical nightmare for families.
The Government is confident that the more expensive PCR tests will be scrapped in time for October half term, with families allowed to use cheaper lateral flow tests when they return to the U.K.
Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, said: “With half-term and winter sun around the corner, we’re making it easier for families and loved ones to reunite, by significantly cutting the number of destinations on the Red List, thanks in part to the increased vaccination efforts around the globe.”
Winter sun destinations including Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Brazil and Bali in Indonesia will be removed from the Red List at 4am on Monday, as will popular safari resorts in Tanzania, Botswana and Namibia.
The seven countries remaining on the Red List are Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Haiti, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
Nine of the 47 countries, including Argentina and Uruguay, remain closed to Britons unless they have exceptional reasons to travel to them. There are also growing fears the U.S. will maintain its ban on British holidaymakers until Thanksgiving at the end of November.
Mr. Shapps succeeded in killing off Department of Health proposals for fully jabbed travellers to video themselves taking lateral flow tests while supervised by a health adviser from a private firm.
Holidaymakers will now only be required to send a picture of their test kit result, possibly with ID such as a passport.
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The top comment after the article sums the matter up quite well:
by Rob Helliwell.
“With Ed in charge, it’s like being trapped in a car travelling at 120mph with a drunk, blind driver.Someone needs to rapidly deploy a stinger to this whole nonsense”.
”The results of the LSE analysis will raise concerns for Ed Miliband “
No they won’t, he doesn’t care about any concerns. He just doesn’t care. He’ll blindly steamroller over any objections regardless of who they harm, we don’t count.
Great minds
“The results of the LSE analysis will raise concerns for Ed Miliband…”
Oh no they won’t.
And this statement will provoke nothing but sheer glee…
“causing a loss in home values of around £19 billion.”
Remember the deleted Tweet by Tobias Ellwood….The days of low tax and high growth are over. Why the delete Tobias Mr 77 Brigade?
You really think they care about the value of people’s homes?
Isn’t that speculation in the T article? A degree of scepticism is appropriate there – anyway, brand new pylons don’t all look like that now – e.g. these have sprouted up in Somerset for the new Hinkley Point C project: https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-first-t-pylons
Oh thank goodness. That’s so much better! /sarc
If the push to eliminate gas and petrol/diesel consumption and replace it with electricity continues, all the energy that oil and gas used to provide will need to be generated and distributed via the electricity grid (minus whatever efficiency savings may become cost-effective as electricity prices soar). Recently the UK has been consuming around 2,000 TWh of energy per year of which only about 250 TWh was electricity from the grid. Fundamentally to distribute 2,000 TWh of energy per year the capacity of the grid must be increased by a factor of 8. This is required no matter what the source of the electricity is if it is to replace gas and petrol/diesel consumption.
For example: my house has an old-style 63A main breaker, we have two petrol cars and we use gas central heating (backed up by a log burner – ‘cos it’s nice). If we wish to ‘upgrade’ to an electric heat pump and electric cars the main incoming electricity bearer will need to be replaced and the domestic fuse/breaker board replaced. If everyone in the neighbourhood did the same the local substation and it’s incoming bearer will also need to be upgraded. If the whole town does the same then the main drop links from the grid will need upgrading. This is just for one relatively small town. But hey, we won’t be bringing in gas or oil.
Add the complication of intermittent energy generation from solar and wind with multiple small power stations and the need to import (nuclear generated) electricity from France and distribute it throughout the country, the grid has to have a major revamp…
…and all because we want to replace working gas and oil with ‘green’ electricity.
Oh yes, and this all has to be done and dusted by 2050. It’s just not going to happen.
Sorry for preaching to the converted.
Don’t be sorry – the point needed making.
Appreciated your post.
Any professional electrical engineer could have advised comrade Ed of the ludicrous nature of his proposals and the obvious need to do a thorough forensic impact assessment on the current infrastructure before doing anything. Common sense in a real world environment. But then………
For Ed, contemplating basic common sense is a worse experience than eating a bacon sandwich.
OK, well when the time comes, I will ask for the pylons due for my area to be moved to yours.
But that means your electricity will be going to @JohnK too.
Maybe I won’t get any anyway – I don’t have a “smart” meter!
Yes, all carefully designed by ‘experts’. We had the threat of T-pylons marching around the countryside to serve the Bird-chopper Empire off the Cumbrian coast a few years back. It emerged that these newfangled Magnificent Machines have the same fundamental in-built problem as that other contemporary electrical fantasy invention – the Electrical Vehicles.. The fundamental practical matter of having to service the damned things!
At a local public meeting, a local power line service engineer with years of experience working on the soon-to-be out-dated lattice design pylons, took one look at the new absurdities and shook his head in disbelief. He put his finger straight onto an elementary and absurdly simple practical problem – servicing them is an entirely different kettle of fish compared with servicing the existing old-fashioned designs when things go wrong.
“We can climb the old design pylons in any weather,” he said, “but we can’t climb these damned things!” Indeed. When we have an all-too-common power line outage here in the wilds of the Lake District, in the middle of a freezing winter and a howling gale, it’s still possible to climb the existing pylons and get the problem fixed. To do the same on the newfangled T-pylons will need a large mechanical cherry-picker to get to the invariably remote site and enable the service engineers to get up to the cables, with all of the essential support infrastructure and confusion that that will take, out on the sodden and windswept fells.
For God’s sake, get some practical field workers onto designing so-called ‘improvements’ to long-established designs, before letting the soft-handed luvvies in on the design game. Close down those worthless ‘universities’ and bring back the old Polytechnics, where we taught real-life skills and our students found real jobs that ensured an income for life.
But, of course, there’s the same problem as in this example – where now would we find the practical experts to staff new Polys. They’ve become redundant themselves, as our kids shy away from menial practical work in favour of soft academic ‘mind-work’. Looks like we’re stuck with pylons for T after all.
Excellent post. Much appreciated
Indeed.
And no comments about wind turbines, as yet.
I used at one time work in an office on a business park with two modest ( by modern standards) wind turbines, about 500m distant.
Much of the time, like all wind turbines, their primary function was virtue signalling and subsidy farming.
But when they were working, the working environment in the office became intolerable. Both the noise and, when the sun was low, the shadow effect were like the old Chinese water-torture. As soon as it started, I remembered some urgent task “on site” that I had to attend to.
I would certainly not buy a property anywhere within sight of a wind farm.
There have been a lot of complaints about these new pylons as they are extremely noisy.
Nobody wants to live near pylons. There are well documented health implications for starters
https://emfinspections.co.uk/health-risks-associated-with-living-near-electricity-pylons-in-the-uk/
Has there been no environmental survey?
Has no one told Miliband about the conclusive scientific evidence that electromagnetic emissions are a health hazard generally and also that some people suffer badly who are particularly sensitive to them.
The entire energy strategy of the UK is a greenwash clutter of impracticality, impossibility, ideology and all at astronomical cost. Added to the eco socialism of our pretend to save the planet governments, we also now have the rabid Marxism of Miliband added into the mix, and once our energy bills have skyrocketed and our properties have been devalued, along will come the commie Labour Government to seize half the profit from the sale of our houses, especially all those pensioners sitting in “million quid properties”
Did they give a 4X about the value of properties blighted by the HS2 rail line?
No.
Will Ed Minibrain give a 4X about the value of properties blighted by massive pylons?
No.