Quarantine decison is another low for this incompetent government

Apoplectic is the wonderfully onomatopoeic word to describe how I felt on hearing Home Secretary Priti Patel’s announcement last night of the Government’s decision to introduce a 14 day quarantine rule for people arriving from abroad.

It’s now over four months after the first UK cases of coronavirus, nearly three months since the lockdown and two months since the peak and now, only now, our Government decides to all bit kill off the Great British people’s summer holidays.

Now when on some days last week there were just a handful of recorded new cases of coronavirus in London, now when deaths are at the lowest since March, now when every other European country is opening up. With some such as Greece, Portugal and Croatia crying out for British tourists to spend their euros and save the livelihoods of 100,000s of hospitality workers.

Except it’s not even now, nor next week, it’s the week after, from June 8^th. That means another 15 days of arrivals to add to the 20 million who have flown into the UK since the pandemic began.  This decision is totally inexplicable, surely the quarantine should have started three months ago, not in two weeks when virus deaths in hospitals are in steep decline.

Of all the ridiculous decisions this incompetent government has taken during the pandemic from forcing care homes to take patients discharged from hospital to its failing to procure sufficient amounts of PPE,  this really does take the biscuit

Unsurprisingly other European countries, including France this morning, are already hitting back with their own 14-day quarantines.  At the same time, of course, we are doing nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigrants entering the country via the English Channel.  We also look set to cave in to the bullying of the teaching unions and not re-open primary schools on June 1st, after all.

I used to be a fan of Boris Johnson and was pleased to see his Government elected just six months ago after the three years of humiliating and incompetent Brexit negotiations.

Now this Government, which I felt could at least be trusted to defend our freedoms and to do all it could to support our free market economy, has plumbed further depths.