Latest updates: Angela Rayner criticises Boris Johnson’s plan to let amber list arrivals who were jabbed in the US or EU avoid quarantine
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Labour has described the plan to let people who have been fully vaccinated in the US and EU avoid quarantine if arriving from amber list countries, which are expected to be approved by ministers today, as “reckless”. This is what Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, told Sky News this morning when asked about the proposals. She said:
At the moment, everybody wants to go on holiday and get back to normal as quickly as possible, but this is reckless.
We know that the Delta variant came into this country and delayed the lifting of some of the restrictions and caused infections here. We need to make sure that we’ve got proper data-driven analysis, and that we look at an international passport for vaccines.
So therefore we believe that at the moment the government hasn’t done enough to safeguard our borders, and we haven’t got an internationally recognised vaccine passport, which is what the government said they were working towards. So it does feel reckless.
For journalists, perhaps the most interesting part of Boris Johnson’s LBC interview was what he said about the threat posed to the media by the government’s revierw of the Official Secrets Act.
I don’t want to have a world in which people are prosecuted for doing what they think is their public duty …
What we want to do is make sure that we don’t do anything to interrupt the operation of good journalism and bringing new and important facts into the public domain …
I think, actually, editors and journalists, on the whole, do behave with great responsibility when it comes to stuff that they think should not be put into the public domain because of the damage it could do to national security or to public health or for any other reason.
A lot of the best and most important stories, whether they’re Watergate or Thalidomide or whatever, come from tainted sources, let me put it like that. Or come from a source that has no business in putting that out into the public domain … One man’s treacherous betrayer of confidences and irresponsible leaker is another man’s whistleblower.
Related: How a proposed secrecy law would recast journalism as spying | Duncan Campbell and Duncan Campbell
