Joanna Blythman: The jet set wants to cancel foreign travel for ordinary people. Are you OK with that?
WATCHING Tony Blair – war criminal and creepy message boy for Bill Gates – doing his world statesman act is never good for my blood pressure but his latest outing on the Andrew Marr Show enraged me.
The man looks orange. Like he’s been sitting around on a tropical beach for the last year. BBC make-up artists aren’t that incompetent, and the Trump sun bed look was never in fashion.
It’s infuriating to think that while most of us plebs missed out on a foreign holiday last year, and are now being conditioned to accept that we will be deprived of yet another this summer, the global elite, the Davos Set, those top-dog G7-eners who are hell-bent on imposing their technocratic Great Reset on us, are lounging in their hammocks under palm trees, swigging banana daiquiris.
If the public doesn’t kick off, loudly and soon, we’re looking at a world where foreign travel is only possible for the jet set.
The red, amber, green list is a Trojan horse trick that distracts from the real agenda. The Build Back Better brigade don’t want want us travelling abroad, full stop.
A moratorium on air travel is one of the “big ideas” circulating in policy circles, and these days, way-out, previously unthinkable measures have a habit of becoming law.
At the end of 2019, a bunch of academics from the universities of Strathclyde, Cambridge, Bath, Nottingham, Oxford, and Imperial College published their Absolute Zero report, citing the laudable aim of “delivering the UK’s climate change commitment with incremental changes to today’s technologies”.
They noted that electric planes “won’t be operating at commercial scales within 30 years, so zero emissions means that for some period, we’ll all stop using aeroplanes”. Their explicit target is that all UK airports should be closed by 2050.
Are you OK with that?
We all have our breaking point, and the prospect of no foreign holidays is mine.
No harm to domestic holidays, now rebranded as “staycations” to make them sound more enticing.
I went “doon the water” with my grandma and aunties to stay in a boarding house in Rothesay, which fun though the evening parlour get-togethers were, involved an awful lot of seeking refuge in bus shelters and never going out minus your Pac-a-Mac. The distinctive aroma of sodden socks and shoes, drying off on the kitchen range in our holiday cottage in Sutherland, still lingers.
But at least these family holidays were affordable, whereas nowadays, the permissible apex of our travel aspirations is a long drive to the traffic-clogged lanes of Cornwall, where £3000 and upwards per week is the going rate for a holiday let, and every booking has an invisible taunt hanging in brackets: “We have too many tourists here – so bugger off and take your business somewhere else”.
And let’s not forget the self-catering aspect, which in scenic rural locales generally means forming an orderly queue at a supermarket that invariably sells worse food than you get at home, and bingeing on fish suppers because the over-subscribed, more appetising alternatives are so bloody expensive.
I yearn for an all-inclusive week in Turkey, Croatia, Greece, Italy, where I can swim outdoors, appreciate the local architecture, hang up my cook’s apron and take a break from food shopping and the perpetual “What shall we eat tonight” dilemma.
READ MORE: Beware the vegan elite are stepping up their War on Meat, by Joanna Blythman
Now, I do get the climate argument. We had got into the habit of flying too much. But surely one yearly warm foreign holiday for sun and vitamin D deprived populations like our own is not too much to ask?
Excessive testing and isolation rules are systematically destroying the travel industry. Portugal’s abrupt downgrading to amber instantly wiped £2 billion off the value of airlines, putting countless jobs at risk, not only amongst UK travel workers, but also the millions worldwide who rely on tourism.
Lockdown zealots tell us to be patient. “Just another summer and normal service will be restored.”
But they would ruin whole industries at the drop of a hat. As the author CS Lewis remarked: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”.
The near veto on foreign travel is a real sickener for those who believed that vaccination would tick all necessary official boxes for a trip abroad. Putting it politely, they were misled.
For amber countries, they must also take at least three PCR tests for every trip. Prices for a package start, yes start, from £99 per person. Five-day ‘test and release’ clocks up £500 for a family of four.
Fill out your passenger locator form incorrectly, you could be fined £10,000 or imprisoned for up to 10 years – or both.
Strange, isn’t it, that when the UK Government pulls out all the stops to have us take up our limitless free Covid tests so that it can keep on inflating its case figures, these same tests are deemed inadequate to clear you for travel abroad?
This is not a problem for platinum class authoritarians, such as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, or Tony Blair and his craven crew, but beyond the means of a working class family who used to be able to look forward to a week in the Costas.
Chronomics, the company that does Covid tests for travel giant TUI, quantified the risk for Portugal. “The position the UK Government has adopted [to remove it from the green list] is indefensible. There is absolutely zero data to support [it]. The number of people returning from Portugal with Covid can be counted on the fingers of two hands.”
And still the UK Government refuses to disclose the methodology behind its whimsical traffic lights rating, doubtless because it is arbitrary and evidence-free.
There are so many potential foreign holiday countries that have little or no Covid, yet our governments still stop us travelling to them.
We would be slow learners if we didn’t infer the worst.
Foreign travel in the future looks to be cancelled for the proles. Protest now, and urgently, or get used to it.
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