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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Lucky the public sector is amazingly productive and these pensions are so well earned.
I was thinking it is good they retire so soon in order to limit their damage.
Then the only damage they do is financial…
Public sector pensions are no different to state pensions in that they have always been unfunded. Successive governments have continued to kick this can down the road hence the mess we are now in. It is inconceivable that the Prime Ministers of the last twenty odd years or so have not been aware of this looming disaster so the question is why go so public on this now? It’s enough to make a conspiracy realist believe that the grand sale of UK PLC is not far off and we are simply being prepared for it.
Yes, all forms of state pension are Ponzi schemes.
Theywere bad enough when the working age population greatly exceeded the retired population but with baby boomers now retired there are nowhere near enough earners to fund state pensions. The triple lock was a disgusting and cynical electoral ruse but any politician principled enough to abolish it will suffer the electoral wrath of the baby boomers.
I’m sure all politicians have been aware but continued to kick the can because it suited all sides.
I’d suggest 2 things have/are changing though,
1. It’s becoming harder to kick the can. In some areas more than 20% of council tax goes on pensions and it’s only going to get worse.
2. We’re facing a change in government so why not draw attention to it to force them to deal with it (and take the political hit) rather than allow the status quo to continue
Actually, I forgot to state the obvious – no Prime Minister and certainly not MP’s are going to push for the reigning in of State pensions when for most of them it’s the reason they sought election in the first place
Exactly, Politicians do things to promote themselves and to stay elected regardless of cost. Comfortable in the knowledge in that what they started will be paid for by someone else, and that someone else will carry the can for their decisions. Consider for a moment, the source of most of the problems of today, and the origins.
The scale of public sector pension liabilities is another illustration of the importance of economic growth. Annual average economic growth in excess of 2% is essential and eminently achievable if the right policies are adopted.
Liz Truss grasped this but lacked the political skills to implement a pro-growth agenda. Her successor pursues anti-growth policies as did her predecessors back to Blair.
The size and scope of the state need to be reduced radically with cuts in state spending, taxation, and regulation. Cheap and reliable energy is also essential along with incentives to save and invest rather than borrow and spend.
The state is far too large, far too powerful and headcount must be cut (either figuratively, or literally – I’m open to persuasion). Let these parasites find a real job in the real world where people (mostly) progress by competence rather than long-service.
Also, growth isn’t simply a case of ramping up GDP as most of our so-called leaders appear to believe. If GDP per-capita is falling (as it is currently) then we have a mirage.
Fixing the latter is far harder than pretending to fix the former, especially when inflation is eroding the value of money.
“Our” public services.
LOL
The country is divided into two: the private sector, mostly small businesses who pay the taxes; and the public sector administrative state that lives off it. They dictate the rules that maintain their supremacy over the entrepreneurs,and will never willingly yield this power.
The private sector now works up to half a year to pay for it. Time for change.
The blob is parasitic and ‘progressively’ killing the host. There is no symbiosis.
No doubt that this is a preliminary to discussion of assisted dying, completely voluntary of course. Has its appeal but I would avoid it given the ghouls that we have in charge. I heard an estimate that human productivity globally is less than one percent of what it could be if we didn’t have the parasite on our back. There would easily be enough abundance to care for the old in their dotage. Tha parasite sucks more and more and gets you used to it gradually so that they normalize the unthinkable and make you forget that you ever thought otherwise.
Ideally they don’t need to be cared for because they’ve set enough aside to take care of themselves.
Yes that would be far better. But the reality is very different. I read something recently that said that the average Brit doesn’t even have a few hundred pounds put away for a low level emergency like buying a new washing machine for example.
The Labour Party is campaigning on the basis of it ‘has a plan to get your future back’. They don’t have a plan and even if they did it would be doomed to fail. This time that we are moving into has nothing to do with getting your future back, quite the contrary. It will be a time when you will have no familiar foundations, no retrospective glories to appeal to. Essentially as new and alien as stepping onto another planet. In terms of politics you will already see that. The important thing is that the people see that there is no restoration or renewal of the old. What comes next hasn’t been forged yet but it has nothing to do with those power structures. They know that they are dying and so they engage in last gasps attempts. Where we go from here is going to look entirely different to anything that went before.
We talk about how difficult it is to financialize care work. Perhaps we shouldn’t be financializing. Like the editor of the FT said, financialisation is like a species of parasitic wasp which lays its eggs in the body of a host and then takes it over and destroys it. Anyone with any nous can see the doleful future that awaits if financialization isn’t recognised. I don’t even like saying it because it behoves a people to understand it.
There is a real battle up ahead and I don’t know if this is a conscious avoidance mechanism or genuine naivete. Just be are of the situation.
There is a lot of confusion here. Describing the pension liability as a “bill” is incredibly misleading. The best way of thinking of it is how much the government would have to pay a bank to take responsibility for meeting pension commitments under current arrangements. These commitments stretch many decades into the future so it is not as though the government has to pay them now or even in the short term. Comparing it to GDP is comparing capital liability with a single year’s income. It is dramatic but fundamentally irrelevant.
It is also worth noting:
I should add:
I have never worked for the public sector and therefore my pension is private sector.
I do think we will have to reduce government pension payouts .
I don’t suppose it helped when Labour’s Gordon Brown and the Cons George Osborne raided the pension pots.
Not to mention some private sector company ‘raiders’ like the Mirror Group and Marconi – these stole millions from many thousands of people just to prop up share prices.
We’ll get rid of the Conservative Party this election but unfortunately it’ll be 5 years of depression until we get rid of Labour. New beginning in 2029. But will it all be too late. God help us
In the absence of any government savings on the behalf of the public sector employees who ‘contributed’ to their pensions all their working lives; these pensions can’t even be ‘cashed out’. They depend on tax income from those currently in employment.
The UK Government is therefore running a Ponzi scheme.
China, Russia, Norway, Saudi Arabia all have sovereign wealth funds to invest on behalf of their citizens.
Montenegro also has a sovereign wealth fund.
And the Tories have increased the size of thePublic sector over that of Labour (no fan of either being politically marooned).Whilst we in the Private sector had our pensions ruinedand plundered by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the Tories continue the theft, the parasitic politicians and the civil servants, DEI workers in public sector get to continue the leeching whilst they work from home and produce NOTHING which grows the economy.
And they wonder why people have lost all faith in so called “democracy”