Just days after the government minister who implemented Britain’s long-running lockdown was sensationally caught ignoring his own rules, the UK has implemented a new exemption for “senior executives” to ignore coronavirus quarantines as well.
On Tuesday, the Tory government announced that business elites who have travelled to Britain for “business activities which are likely to be of significant economic benefit to the UK,” will be exempt from the coronavirus quarantine diktats which have been imposed on ordinary travellers.
“This exemption is designed to enable activity that creates and preserves UK jobs and investment, while taking steps to ensure public health risks are minimised,” the government claimed.
The “significant economic benefit” clause will apply to elites who present a 50 per cent chance of creating or preserving at least 500 UK-based jobs in either an existing British business or to open up a new business within the next two years.
Heritage Party leader and prominent lockdown sceptic David Kurten said that the announcement on Monday proves that it is time to end the lockdown, saying: “If there were a deadly killer virus that needs travel restrictions for all, there would be no exceptions.”
The Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham said that it is the “wrong move at the wrong time. It can’t be one rule for the rich and another for the rest.”
The revelation comes just days after Health Secretary Matt Hancock was forced to resign after it emerged that he had breached the very draconian lockdown restrictions he pushed over the past year through having a romantic affair with a top staffer.
Despite being caught on film violating the lockdown restrictions — and his marriage vows — the Metropolitan Police have said that they will not investigate Mr Hancock, stating: “As a matter of course the MPS is not investigating Covid related issues retrospectively.”
The alleged prohibition on not investigating lockdown breaches “retrospectively” was apparently not heeded by officers who came to the doorstep of a woman and threatening to arrest her for alleged involvement in organising an anti-lockdown protest in May.
Other government officials have seemingly been given a pass for skirting lockdown restrictions, including ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Fergusson, who has been brought back into a government advisory role after resigning following the breach of his own lockdown restrictions when he visited his married lover, who was herself self-isolating at the time.
Earlier this month, Cabinet Minister Michael Gove — one of the men in charge of rolling out vaccine passes in the UK — was able to avoid the mandatory ten-day isolation after travelling to Portugal to watch Chelsea in the Champions League final. While the average citizen would have been prohibited from leaving their homes, Gove was quietly entered into a ‘trial scheme‘ under which he was allowed to skip quarantine and freely move around as long as he took a daily coronavirus test.
The response to the Chinese coronavirus has consistently seen the ruling Conservative Party carve out exemptions for elites, for example, by allowing 1,812 private planes to land in the country during the first month of the national lockdown all without health screenings, while the rest of the population were effectively imprisoned in their homes.
The largely open borders policy during the initial phases of the pandemic also saw a “big increase” in the number of superyachts docking in British ports, as Mediterranean countries shut down their borders.
Last week, the government was again accused of rank hypocrisy after it reportedly decided to let football VIPs attend the Euro 2020 finals without quarantining after Uefa threatened to move the tournament finals to Hungary.
Tory MP Henry Smith said of the move: “I welcome the fact they are beginning to realise that people don’t have to quarantine and the precedent that sets. But I think it looks awful that there is one rule for the elites and another rule for the rest of us. You either end quarantine for those who are fully vaccinated or not at all.”
The government has also come under criticism for allowing G7 leaders to skirt restrictions such as social distancing, mask-wearing, and quarantining during the globalist summit earlier this month in Cornwall, despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson extending the lockdown restrictions on the British public to supposedly slow the spread of the so-called Indian variant of the virus.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka