,
Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, responding to Dominic
Cummings’ comments on the Government’s Covid border policy, said:
"This admission is absolutely devastating for the Prime Minister
and Home Secretary. It lays bare the fact that under this
Conservative Government the UK was slow to lockdown borders, slow
to border testing and slow to hotel quarantine. The dangerous
mess over the ‘Amber List’ shows is right to say ‘look at variants...we still don't
have a proper border policy’.
"The Prime Minister and Home Secretary now have very serious
questions to answer about the dire failings they have overseen –
and must urgently get a grip of the dangerous border chaos they
have created."
Ends
Notes to Editors
- Asked about the Government’s Covid border policy at the
select committee hearing this afternoon, said:
Fundamentally there never was a proper border policy
because the Prime Minister never wanted a proper border policy.
Repeatedly in meeting after meeting I and others said - ‘All we
have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in
English and impose them here. We’re installing all these
restrictions on people domestically but people can see that
everyone’s just coming in from infected areas. It’s madness.
It’s undermining the whole message that we should take it
seriously.’ - And his basic argument… at that point he was back
to ‘lockdown was all a terrible mistake, I should have been the
mayor in Jaws, we should never have done lockdown 1, the travel
industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border
policy.’ To which of course some of us said - ‘There’s not
going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a
second wave. The whole logic is completely wrong. If we don’t
bring in a proper border policy now, and a bunch of other
things, we’re going to have a second wave in the autumn and
everything’s going to be shut, forget just tourism.’ But he had
the Daily Telegraph with their stupid campaign on the whole
subject, he had Tory MPs going crackers about it at the same
time, and essentially at that point he was in - ‘We should
never have done lockdown, I should have been the mayor in Jaws,
now I’m going to be, open everything up, get on with it.’ And
me and others just could not win that argument, we never won
the argument, as of today. Look at the whole thing about
variants, we still don’t have a proper border policy, in my
opinion.
