Interesting article today from the ft on tone deafness in Westminster who are ignoring information from outside their own direct channels.
www.ft.com/content/05bcdeed-ce2d-4009-a3bc-cf9bb71c43d5
Will coronavirus break the UK?
Covid-19 has already driven a greater wedge between the four nations, testing the boundaries of power. But could it push them even further apart?
It was a planeload of tourists returning from Greece that perhaps did most to expose the strain Covid-19 has put on the UK and the uneasy balance of power between its four nations. Sixteen of those flying into Cardiff airport on August 25 from Zante tested positive for coronavirus, forcing all 193 passengers to self-isolate.
For the Welsh government in Cardiff, the conclusion was clear-cut: Zante was a coronavirus hotspot and urgently needed to be added to the list of destinations requiring quarantine.
Vaughan Gething, the Welsh health minister, contacted UK government officials in London. Like Scotland, which had already imposed a quarantine on Greece, Wales had the right to impose its own public health measures but wanted to maintain a united front. This view was shared by Mark Drakeford, Wales’s first minister, who admitted to being “surprised” that London had left Wales the power to diverge on this. Hehad assumed the government would act under border security law rather than public health legislation.
“My view was that unless there was a very good reason why we feel we should depart from what the UK government was doing, we should stick with the decisions that they made,” says Mr Gething.
But what followed tested that theory to destruction. Delays, unanswered requests to central government and finally an incident that seemed to sum up the fraying edges of the four nations of the UK.
The crunch point for Mr Gething came on September 3. The British government did not see the need to quarantine travel from the whole of Greece and was still resisting the idea of quarantining individual regions. Before taking any decision, Mr Gething sent a letter with his arguments and agreed to wait for a meeting with the transport secretary that was arranged for 6pm that evening — but at 5pm the UK government announced it was keeping Greece off the quarantine list for England anyway. “We didn’t get a response to our letter,” Mr Gething recalls. “And then the UK made its decision an hour before we were due to meet.”
Enraged, surprised and baffled, Wales then acted unilaterally, adding Zante to its own quarantine list the next day. The following week the UK government followed suit for England
The article is a long read and this is just part of it...
It just highlights the complete inability and lack of willingness to work with people outside Westminster and this utter arrogance in not listening to anyone else.
Its appalling.