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Plans to ease lockdown restrictions at Christmas will go ahead, Boris Johnson confirms
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Plans to ease lockdown restrictions at Christmas will go ahead, Boris Johnson has confirmed today.
The prime minister has said that all UK nations have reached a ‘unanimous agreement’ to go ahead with the proposals, Sky News reports.
This means the planned ‘Christmas bubble’ rules will be put into place over the festive period, meaning three households will be able to meet and form a bubble over five days, from December 23rd to the 27th.
However, he added that everyone should ‘exercise a high degree of personal responsibility’ if they do choose to spend time with family at Christmas.
Mr Johnson said at Prime Minister’s Questions: “Although some things are unquestionably going well… we must remember that transmission takes place asymptomatically in so many cases.
“We should exercise extreme caution in the way we celebrate Christmas – we can celebrate it sensibly, but we have to be extremely cautious in the way we behave.
“We don’t want to criminalise people’s long-made plans but we do think it’s absolutely vital that people should at this very, very tricky time exercise a high degree of personal responsibility, especially when they come into elderly people and avoid contact with elderly people wherever possible.”
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Yesterday the prime minister came under increasing pressure to revise the plans.
According to the Independent, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for the government’s emergency Cobra committee to meet up and review the proposed relaxations of the rules.
This followed a joint editorial piece from the British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal which called for the PM to ditch the Christmas household mixing plan.
The two medical journals came together in a rare joint editorial which calls for Boris Johnson to scrap plans that allow household mixing over Christmas in order to protect the NHS.
The first joint editorial in 100 years, the British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal have called for the prime minister to change tactics due to the rising cases in England.