UK travel rules are another example of Northern hegemons’ disingenuousness on Covid.
Anyone who has survived British government-mandated quarantine after returning from a so-called “red list” country will admit the same thing: it’s the pits.
People have likened the experience to incarceration, but while convicts’ civil liberties are severely curtailed because they break what we might deem a social contract, the only “crime” people like me have committed is that we remain at the receiving end of a geopolitical race to the bottom. From refusing to grant South Africa and India intellectual property waivers to manufacture affordable Covid-19 jabs to hoarding vaccines, hegemons of the so-called Global North continue to play a disingenuous game of might makes right.
The UK’s travel rules are another example. Under the pretext of safeguarding public health, the UK has conjured up a scam that enables it to recover Covid-era financial losses. It does this while stigmatising countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and extorting money from their citizens on a massive scale. Britain responded to international censure by “simplifying” its indefensible traffic light system beginning yesterday, but my experience in quarantine demonstrates why its red list must be completely eliminated.
