Yahoo Finance Evening Standard Comment: The UK travel green list expands (a bit). Time for a holiday?
It was not the big reopening of international travel that industry or sun-starved Britons were hoping for, but the addition of Malta, Madeira, the Balearic Islands and several Caribbean countries is propitious news.
The cautious welcome from airlines and holiday firms was accompanied by a warning that the expansion of the green list “fails to go far enough”. It is easy to see why.
Ominously, all additions to the green list apart from Malta immediately joined the “green watchlist”, signalling that these countries are at risk of being downgraded to amber.
The question is therefore whether holidaymakers will be prepared to take a risk on booking flights and hotels to places that could at little notice require them to quarantine on return.
With regard to long-awaited hopes that the rules could be relaxed for fully vaccinated Britons coming back from amber list countries, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps only noted it was the Government’s intention that this could happen later in the summer.
Once more, the rise of the Delta variant has placed a hefty tax on Britain’s vaccine dividend.
And there is a question hovering over this process that ministers will not get to decide — what does Europe think? Angela Merkel this week called on fellow EU members to join Germany in enforcing quarantine on visiting Britons due to fears over the Delta variant.
Indeed, with the rolling seven-day average of UK Covid cases above the European average, the question is whether British holidaymakers will be allowed easy access to more countries in the near future, green list or not.
Still — and we may be biassed — but with the football, theatre and long evenings ahead of us, there are worse places to spend a summer than post-lockdown London.
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