COVID-19

1. Because they already have one.
2. The travel decisions are made by individual countries, not the EU.

 

1. You might want to tell them that - seems they're wasting their time https://www.ft.com/content/3339f3a1-69e8-4c46-bd33-c777a4c5c922
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-india-revive-stalled-trade-talks-draft-statement-says-2021-05-04/

2. True. They're still trying to affect it though - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_2461

 

Trying to see any figures - can't find anything concrete but it seems extremely small numbers all around.

Still, nice to know we were one of the most proactive countries isn't it.

 

that is same for all red countries and they are trusting people being honest and/or travel data shared by airlines. When Pakistan was put on the red list people found it cheaper to travel to Turkey, stay there 10 days and then fly into UK.

 

Well I have been to the pub for lunch. Every table taken and a very nice meal was had.

Might aswell enjoy it before those 1000+ deaths a day in July come along as per Sage modelling.

 

"In the Commons, Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs committee, says that on 7 April 5% of people arriving in the UK from India had Covid. That was 50% higher than the rate here. She asks how high it reached before India was placed on the red list, and what proportion of the Indian variant cases in the UK were linked to travel.

Hancock says at the start of April the proportion of people arriving from India testing positive was relatively low. He says it had gone up by the end of April, and then India was put on the red list. He accuses Cooper of saying decisions should have been taken on the basis of evidence that was only available afterwards"

Yes, you utter fecking moron, Hancock. It's called taking reasonable precautions based on the experience of the previous fourteen months. Actually having the gonads to make a proactive decision. Not shutting the stable door after the horse, cart and all the tack are long gone. The definition of madness - doing (or in this case, not doing) the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

 

Sorry, my bad on the trade deal.
Of course the difference is that, as the largest trading bloc on the planet they are negotiating from a position of strength. Their absence of desperation means they don't need to suck up to Modi and take the risks that Johnson & co do.

 

Such a position of strength it's taken 10 years and been called off twice!

But yeah, that's not the most important thing on this thread I suppose. Everything that could be said about Johnson keeping the border open to to gain favour can equally, if not more, apply to other European countries.

 

NHS App has updated to allow you to share your vaccination status via a QR code either on the app or on a PDF version

 

Of course the EU very much wants a deal with India (just as India does with the EU, because it's a huge market for them). But the point is that its collective strength makes it nowhere near as desperate for an India deal as we are.
If our deal with India takes ten years or more to negotiate then we are probably up shit creek without a paddle - hence our risk-taking sucking up to Modi - whereas the EU is able to afford to bide it's time to get the right deal.

 

Strange how the same exact situation brings about a positive response to of the EU and a negative view of the UK isn't it.

 

Strange how you can't grasp the obvious differences. They can afford to wait and we can't. They're not sucking up to Modi and we are.

I couldn't find any more recent figures but in 2017 air traffic between Delhi and London was over 1.1 million flights per year. The top three air routes with India were all with Dubai (presumably as stopovers to US & Canada where there are big Indian diasporas) and Heathrow was the fourth. There's no reason why Indians would fly to Dubai to get to mainland Europe when they can fly direct, nor via Heathrow, since it's further. I think we can deduce from this that air traffic between India and Britain is significantly higher than with any EU countries, as you would expect given the history and migration pattern.
It was bloody obvious that we should have shut down flights between India and Britain, for all but returning nationals weeks before we did so, and enforced hotel quarantine for all returners. Instead we let people arrive at Heathrow, bringing the variant with them, and waved them onto public transport for hours on end to take the variant up north and spread it amongst fellow passengers. Brilliant.
Anyone who thinks the decision to delay red-listing India wasn't linked to Johnson's planned schmoozing visit to Modi is in cloud cuckoo land.

 

That is a good article - balanced, and positive. Let's hope it's correct.

 

I don't get your comments with regards Modi, they will be a massive economy in the near future, do we suck up to China you bet we have in the past, have we sucked up to Saudi Arabia they shout jump and we reply how high, it has gone on all my life we've sold arms and our military expertise to countries like Libya, Iraq and many more countries in the past an the majority have terrible human rights records, yet we turn a blind eye to suit ourselves because they bring billions into the exchequer, and if we didn't supply what they want someone else would, and the world goes around and life goes on.

 

Why are the flights from 2017 relevant? But yes it will be higher than any other EU country (The UK is a pretty important transport hub with something like 10 of the 90 busiest airports in Europe which shows the continual point about the difficulty of stopping the interconnectivity that we have globally) but it will be a tiny minority of the 1.1m irrelevant figure quoted.

But that's not really the point. Nobody said that we shouldn't lockdown the Brazilian and South African transport links because we only had a minimal historical link with them. It's just moving the goalposts to be critical.

My point is really about the perception.

The UK shut down travel from India on the 23rd of April - 6 days before B.1.617.2 even became a 'variant of interest' and two weeks before it became a 'variant of concern' (follow the science remember) and the received wisdom is that we shut down "too late" because of trade deal negotiations.

On the continent many EU countries still haven't stopped travel from India and those that have (Germany & Italy 26th, France 24th, Belgium and Holland 27th, Spain 28th) made the decision after us, despite them also trying to achieve a trade deal at the same time and all we get back is denials that they're even negotiating!

Remembering that anything that lands in the Europe will eventually make it to these shores anyway it shows me that even when we act first and infront of the science there will only be criticism of the UK for acting too late and no criticism of our European neighbours for acting even later or not at all. No matter what happens there will always be people who want us to act sooner but in that instance we're going to end up being locked down again every time some one sneezes.

If we'd shut down on the 1st April the variant would still have got here. People who wanted to travel from India to the UK would have just used the open air links into Europe and then come here once allowed, as they still probably are.

 

Actually love that article, think that's a much more helpful tone than the usual extreme direction. Two bits in particulr;

"There have been plenty of experts questioning whether Monday's unlocking was worth the risk, including members of Independent Sage and the British Medical Association.But it is worth noting that these are the same critics who warned against the full re-opening of schools in March, saying it would lead to a surge. They also said the January lockdown was not tough enough to bring cases of the UK variant down and objected to delaying the gap between vaccine doses to 12 weeks."

Great point, it's so easy to be critical, avoid ownership when they're wrong but hope to eventually be right. Nobody will get 100% right but the critics only need to get one bang on to shout "Gotcha!"

Prof Mark Woolhouse, an expert in infectious diseases, at Edinburgh University, agrees. "This situation was entirely expected. In six months time I'm sure we will be talking about another variant," he says. Variants, unfortunately, will be a fact of life in this pandemic until the virus is brought under control across the world. But that does not mean there is no way out or that the UK, with its progress with vaccination, cannot keep moving towards a more normal way of life.

Finally an admission that this is going to keep occurring and if we don't strike a balance we'll be continually over or under reacting.

 

I've no problem with our government negotiating a trade deal with India. I do have a problem with them delaying closing the border to all but returning UK residents in order to keep Modi sweet.
Having postponed one visit, Johnson clearly didn't want to upset Modi by cancelling two, even when it was blindingly obvious that he shouldn't be going to India. I know this for sure because I have a contact at the British Embassy in Delhi. As soon as the government bowed to the inevitable and cancelled Johnson's trip to Delhi, they red-listed India. I've no doubt they'd have done it earlier had they not wanted to keep Johnson's trade trip alive.
The government chose to prioritise trade schmoozing ahead of sensible precautionary action to stop the Indian variant of Covid getting here.

 

As I posted the other day whats to stop people traveling from India or any other countries on the red list to get a flight back to France and get a connection flight to the UK, if they want to find a way around it they will.