The UK is creeping ever closer to the old Soviet Union. We are daily bombarded with the concept of an internal passport.
Pub goers could be asked to provide a vaccine certificate, Boris Johnson has told MPs, saying it “may be up to individual publicans”.
A review is looking into whether people should have to prove they have been vaccinated, as lockdown measures ease.
A government source told the BBC that the option of allowing people to show a negative test was also being looked at.
The fact that there is even a review should be cause for concern. Any decent, rational liberal person would reject the concept out of hand as being both authoritarian and deeply immoral. That they are having review means that there are scumbags who actually think this is a good idea.
Pubs and the rest of the hospitality industry have suffered this past year due to the malfeasance of our government and its advisers, and yet I have no doubt there will be publicans who will embrace this idea because they are fatuous halfwits with no understanding of history or morality.
But Tory MP Steve Baker said it was a “ghastly trap” and unfairly penalised those advised not to have a vaccine.
Regardless of those who cannot have it, it is wrong in principle. And before anyone mentions it, having to have a yellow fever vaccine to enter counties where it is rife is not comparable. Covid is not a comparable disease and once inside a country, you don’t have to wave your certificate around every time you enter an establishment. Internal passports are wrong on every principle. And, the yellow fever vaccine is well established. Many of us have eschewed the covid one for the simple reason that there is no long term data, ergo, it is still very much experimental.
Any publican who turns me away will lose that trade forever. I will not get a vaccine that I neither want nor need just to enter their premises. And even if I did feel the need to have it, I’ll be damned if some jumped up halfwit is going to be allowed to poke about in my medical details. It is none of their business. They have no moral right to ask and trying to coerce me is fundamentally wrong.
Landlords and brewers today revolted over plans for vaccine passports for pubs as it emerged hospitality venues could be allowed to bar customers who cannot prove they have had a Covid jab or a negative test.
Boris Johnson has told MPs that landlords might be given powers to impose tough entry requirements on drinkers – and Government sources confirmed this was part of an official review of ‘vaccine passports’.
But industry bosses said the idea was ‘absurd’ and ‘unworkable’ and signalled they would not ask customers for proof that they had been inoculated or were clear of coronavirus.
Among them was Jonathan Neame, chief executive of the Kent-based Shepherd Neame pub group, who said he would not make having had a coronavirus vaccine a mandatory condition for people to enter his pubs.
Looks as if sanity might yet prevail.
You are right of course. On the other hand, as far as I can remember, the last time that I was in a pub was 2014, maybe a couple of times since to have a meal. I should maybe remember that prison wall poem, they came for the pub goers and I wasn’t a pub goer…also they have the potential to apply this kind of crap to shops, theatres music venues and places that I do go to.
Precisely. However, the High Street is in decline. If they want to accelerate it, that’s the way to go.
First of all they talk about it and suggest that the onus is on to the pub. Then when they don’t do it they make it compulsory via legislation. The reason they don’t go straight to legislation is we have enough stalinists in charge of companies that it gets done and they don’t have to do any work at all.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Vaccine passports are a conspiracy theory and anyone who believes they will happen, a moron. The Government said so…
Within 24 hours of such a ruling, these certificates will be on eBay or Amazon.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but what is your proposal to allow the UK hospitality industry to reopen safely and with minimal COVID risk to the public?
Or should we just throw and entire industry that employs 4½ million people under the bus and refuse to let them reopen until the pandemic has somehow been completely defeated?
My proposal is obvious. There should never have been a lock-down in the first place and they should open without any restrictions. Vaccination passports will have no effect whatsoever on people’s safety. It’s time people stopped worrying about “being safe” and started living again. It is not the role of government to make us safe. That is a personal responsibility.
How do you define ‘safely’ and ‘minimal Covid risk’? And why are you obsessed with this particular infection?
Covid risk is infinitesimal, see
https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/4f114cde-f1c0-4752-8a9e-876426c5f3c8.jpg
You need to wake up, open eyes and look at facts, not propaganda. You’d be happier instead of living a life of Gov’t induced fear from their SPI-B unit
All businesses should be open and country keep calm and carry on as normal
Some Tory MPs have been on the TV saying that government should not be telling landlords which type of customers they allow into their premises – fair comment – but these are the same hypocritical twats who voted for the Smoking Ban. Some of us never forget.
Mud, smokers can still go into a pub, buy a drink, sit in the pub with their mates, have a meal etc. etc. They aren’t banned from the pub, just from polluting the atmosphere in the pub.
That’s not really the point though. Any bans should be down to the property owner, not the state. Let the market decide. I suspect that had we done so, it wouldn’t be hugely different due to the decline in smoking over the past couple of decades. The big difference being that if a landlord wanted to have a smokers pub, he could do so in a free, liberal society.
So, let’s bring in covid passports: the safe vaccinated people can sit inside the pub and the dangerous unvaccinated can sit outside in the rain and cold enjoying their meal and drink. They won’t be banned from the pub, just banned from being inside. This would be absolutely no different from the smoking ban from a smoker’s perspective.
The smokers could of course be inside the pub puffing their smoke into the faces of the others in the pub, stinking the place out and dropping fag ash all over the floor and tables. That was the status quo. Like I said, I totally agree in principle with giving the market the choice but the reality IN THIS CASE was that there WAS NO choice.
And as smoking has not been allowed in pubs for nearly fourteen years, isn’t it about time people stopped whining about it? Some of you are beginning to sound like remoaners.
I still object to the motorcycle helmet law and it was enacted before I had a driving licence. I object to it for the same reason. It is not the government’s role. In fact, it was the toe in the door of changing the law from protecting us from the acts and omissions of others to protecting us from ourselves. It didn’t stop there. It never does. The smoking ban isn’t about smoky pubs, nor is it about health. Never was. It’s about state control. When I object to the smoking ban, I am not doing so in isolation.
Longrider, I absolutely agree with the principle and specifically regarding pubs & smoking or non smoking you may in theory be correct, but in theory, theory is no different to practice. In practice, it is.
You have a point here that cannot be proved or disproved without a time machine and different decisions. However, smoking has been in steady decline for decades and attitudes generally have shifted regardless of government bans. Therefore, I stand by my hypothesis that the market would have resolved this one. Just maybe not as quickly, I suspect.