The former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Dominic Cummings, said the reason UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson never closed the country’s borders at the beginning of the pandemic is he thought it might be looked at as racist.
- PM Johnson did not want the UK to be looked at as racist by closing down the country’s borders.
- Cummings called this lack of border policy “madness,” saying travelers are still arriving in Britain from infected countries.
- Direct flights from many red list countries to the UK are banned but some are allowed.
According to Cummings, at the time when the pandemic struck, there was a mindset that concluded it was “basically racist to call for closing the borders and blaming China and the whole China New Year thing…” adding “and that was basically nonsense.” Cummings worked under the PM from July 24, 2019 through November 13, 2020.
Prime Minister Johnson was worried that if border controls were implemented, it would ruin Britain’s tourism industry. To this day, there is still no real border policy in place even with grave concern over COVID-19 variants such as the Indian one. Cummings called this lack of border policy “madness,” saying travelers are still arriving in Britain from infected countries.
Instead the UK Government has instituted a traffic light system which categorizes the safety of countries as either red, amber, or green. There are more than 40 countries on the government’s red list, which has the strictest travel restrictions.
