ALLOWING travellers to still enter the UK, quarantine hotels and the need for a progressive alliance were the issues raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Express

Helen Wemyss said if she had a child ill with a contagious disease she would stop people visiting her home and, if any other child was contagious, she would stop them visiting too.

“Take that one step further and, instead of a sick child, we are talking about a sick population,” she said. “Would it not make good common sense to stop visitors from entering our country until it is safe to do so?”

But Boris Johnson has failed ‘over and over’ to take this action, she said.

“He has been allowing passenger flights into the UK since the beginning of the pandemic. The Prime Minister has only recently realised that perhaps visitors flying into the UK may just be bringing in more than their luggage.”

She said Australia and New Zealand had closed down their borders early on and enjoying the benefits of that.

“Our Prime Minister needs to instil a big dollop of common sense into his decision-making process, stop relying so much on scientists and if all else fails, he could ask any busy mother with school-age kids how she would have done it.”

The Daily Mail

Sarah Vine said it appeared that the hotel quarantine plan was not exactly going to plan.

“Wouldn’t it be cheaper — and easier — simply to place an electronic tag on all arrivals from so-called ‘red zones’ — and let them quarantine at home, having arranged for private transportation?,” she asked. “Admittedly they might feel as though they were being treated as criminals, but since Covid has deprived us of most of our liberties anyway, how would we tell the difference? Frankly, I’d rather that than be forced to spend two grand to be locked in some hermetically sealed dive at the end of a runway. “

She also asked that the Government stop updating about every new strain of coronavirus unless it was a serious threat as the constant news of ‘minor mutations’ was adding to the misery.

The Guardian

Neal Lawson, director of the centre-left pressure group Compass, said Labour had to end its policy of rejecting power sharing to end Tory rule.

“The notion has surfaced before, often as the spectre of a hung parliament looms on the eve of an election,” he said. “This time, however, Labour’s path to victory is so fraught that the idea is gaining traction four years before an election.”

He said the biggest hurdle to a progressive alliance was Labour’s’ self-perceived monopoly status’.

“The party has to shift from a mindset in which it is the one and only tent on the centre-left to seeing the progressive terrain like a campsite of shared values and endeavour, with parties retaining their own identity.”