Watch: Tory Minister defends not closing border with India sooner as policy called ‘absolutely pathetic’

This morning minister of state for health Edward Argar was grilled by Kay Burley over the government’s attempts to control the spread of the Covid from India.

She asked him: “Can we at least accept that if we closed the border with India 14 days before we did, like we did with Bangladesh and Pakistan, we may not be in this position?”

He replied: “That’s a hypothetical, that wouldn’t necessarily have stop the variant coming.”

Burley hit back: “The figures were twice as much in India as they were in Pakistan.”

Argar said it wouldn’t have necessarily stopped the variant coming in, he then said: “This disease maybe endemic for years. We will have to live with Covid.”

Also today Labour leader Keir Starmer slammed the Government’s border policy on LBC.

He said that June the 21st was supposed to be freedom day and the reason we are not going to hit it is because of the government’s ‘absolutely pathetic border policy, absolutely pathetic.’

He then lays into the green, amber and red list scheme for travelling abroad, which led to confusion for many people looking to leave the UK.

Watch

Angry

Professor Anthony Costello, global health and sustainable development at UCL, questions why there has been so little investment in infection control by the government.

“Our failure to do that three times in the past has led to three national lockdowns and 150,000 deaths,” he tells Sky News.

“I’m quite angry about this because where is the money from the £38bn going in to Test and Trace for local public health? Why are the test results so slow? Why haven’t we got an adequate army of contact tracers?

“We’re in a war, we should have an army on the ground and we should protect our airspace from invading infections. We haven’t done that. And most of all, the failure to invest in isolation.”