Netherlands’ Covid crackdown blamed on ‘English variant’

It is more than two centuries since the last Anglo-Dutch war, but our neighbours across the North Sea are once again fearful of an English invasion.

Last night, the Dutch parliament voted for an unprecedented restriction on personal freedoms, a curfew between 9pm and 4.30am, because of fears that the new B117 variant of the coronavirus discovered in the UK, will flood the Netherlands.

While infection levels seem to be creeping down to around 5,400 a day, after a spike over the Christmas break, the Dutch public health institute reckons that ten per cent of new cases are what they variously (and carelessly) call the ‘British’, the ‘English’ or, ‘the UK’ variant. This number is expected to rise. 

It’s this fear that led caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte – whose government collapsed last week over a childcare benefits scandal – to call for a controversial curfew. Although he conceded everyone, including himself, is ‘sick of corona…we have to brace ourselves once again as the British corona variant and other more contagious variants come our way’.