EXTRA TIME

🇬🇧 Best Place to Spend Christmas?

December 4, 2021 at 1:14 am 1 comment

Fraser Nelson writes in The Telegraph that Britain is perhaps the best place in Europe to spend this Christmas. Bavaria’s winter markets have closed, France’s bistros won’t let anyone in without a pass sanitaire, Belgium has banned private parties and Ireland’s pubs are all under curfew. But in Britain, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can walk, work, eat and drink where they like. At least until now…

Unless the omicron variant changes everything, we may well see in the New Year having overcome the virus and upheld the basic values of liberty. Britain is starting to look like the new Sweden: keeping calm and carrying on.

Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, has flatly ruled out compulsory vaccination, seeing it as not just illiberal but counterproductive: “If you make the vaccine attractive, people will want it,” says one senior official. “If we start to threaten people, it all changes very quickly.” Right now, Britain has face masks on public transport. And non-binding advice from one minister to go easy on “snogging under the mistletoe”. And, so far, not much else.

Last time around, Britain locked down longer and harder than anyone else in Europe. This time, Javid’s instinct is the opposite: not to jump too soon, trust the boosters and see what happens. Quite a gamble. But this time, it’s one the Government is willing to take.

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