Vaccine Passports – ID no one wants

Kier Starmer in the Daily telegraph says vaccine passports are un-British as he seeks to make a stand against Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson and Michael Gove want to trial vaccine passports. What happened to Tory libertarianism and its refusal of a British ID Card? Does Starmer look like he may gain strong support from people who will find vaccine passports a civil liberties issue and avoid establishments that demand them – go home or to the park and drink rather than pubs and restaurants?

Fraser Nelson reckons Labour may not vote against such measures in parliament and are in effect second guessing that the Tories will drop the policy in the Autumn when most of the population will be vaccinated? There will be significant societal kickback on this so why play political games and instead challenge bad policy? Is the idea being tabled now by Tories as a nudge theory to get the whole population vaccinated?

There are concerns about using vaccine passports as a stick. As well as the bureaucracy involved in every establishment having to police it – if you have paid to see an event then the social disruption caused by turning people away without vaccine passports is going to lead to high profile civil crowd control problem that official organisations don’t want to deal with. This is the last problem police need after the Everard fiasco.

There is vaccine hesitancy in some groups in particular afro-Caribbean, who will in effect be discriminated by this rule. This will cause more civil strife.

When there is so much goodwill from the UK population in getting vaccinated, in that over half the population is already vaccinated, in that the infection rate and death rate are both down to a safe level, and staying there despite the return of the lockdown and a third wave in Europe, why then impose a freedom of restriction that is both unpopular and undemocratic?

This new form of passport may have its own app – if the government persists in having a go but it may go down the path of other Government’s previous failed efforts with a COVID app, and track and trace. Boris has a love of grand ideas, many of which sink without trace (garden bridges in London) and this may well be another white elephant for him.