why are we talking so much about quarantining arrivals to Britain when the coronavirus is *worse* in Britain than almost anywhere people could travel from?

Australia and New Zealand quarantine travellers because they have had very low numbers of domestic infection and want to keep it that way (they also, especially Australia, have an extremely punitive immigration regime that we should be much more cautious about emulating)

And yes, I see the panic about foreign strains (although we also have a terrible home-grown variant strain). But I don’t get why so many srs policy people are talking about govt failures around foreign travel as opposed to... everything else.

Like all the suggestions to hand over medical records to the police (no! Absolutely not!), mandatory quarantine *paid for by travellers* feels to me a slippery slope, and I’m mildly surprised to see so many people in favour of it given the realities of Covid in the UK.

Obviously I hate lessons from history but I’m not sure anyone who has read about the 1905 Aliens Act could be cheerfully supportive of the British government using a fear of foreign disease to limit immigration. (Do not get me started on police powers in public health).

(I mean if I WERE to get started on this I’d point you towards the Contagious Diseases Act just to get started) (is it possible we are still in the long nineteenth century)

The last thing I’ll add to this: there are periodically right-wing moral panics about people with HIV coming to the UK, framed both around infection threat and NHS usage. Meanwhile, the Home Office was doing crude, invasive “virginity testing” as part of 1970s border control.

It is not a good idea, for all sorts of reasons, to encourage the Home Office and border control to be tied up with questions of public health, and I am surprised that so many people on the centre/left don’t seem to see any of the problems with this.

(People should certainly self isolate for two weeks when they get off a plane! Nobody is saying otherwise! I’m not saying lick all your fellow passengers and then go and work in a care home!)