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U.K. Official Throws Cold Water on Dreams of Vacations

The British government is being pushed to relax travel restrictions and not budging so far.

It looks like stir-crazy Brits hoping that the U.K. would ease overseas travel restrictions in time to salvage summer vacation plans will have to wait a while longer. Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said on SkyNews that “normal” holidays were “never going to be the case”—remarks that will surely anger travel industry bosses who have been pushing for border re-opening. “We’ve tried to strike the right balance between the natural need in some cases for international travel, but also the imperative of making sure that we do everything we can at home to contain and prevent inadvertent spread of new variants,” Buckland said. The Delta variant has swept the U.K., and overseas travelers are required to quarantine, even if they have been vaccinated.