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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, and what some are describing as Freedom Day.

Today, all legal restrictions have gone. I'm joined by James Seif and Isabel Hardman to discuss. But before we get there, there was quite a big U-turn on

Sunday. Isabel, we had a situation where after Sajad Javid tested positive for COVID, we heard

that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunik had been contacted by

Test and Trace, but they wouldn't be isolating because they are part of that special

elusive pilot scheme. Only after, I think, just under three hours and a heavy backlash,

they U-turned. So what was going on there? Yeah, that was a real communications failure there,

the Prime Minister and the Chancellor,

who have been very anxious, particularly the Prime Minister, about the implications of this

Freedom Day, who, you know, Boris Johnson has been urging people to be cautious, he's been

putting a real emphasis on people not using the full extent of the freedoms that they're being given today.

For him to then basically suggest that he wasn't going to abide by the rules that everyone else was having to abide by on self-isolation,

was just a bizarre mistake by ministers. And the reason Boris Johnson was able to do this was because

of this special pilot scheme that basically means that if you are in contact with somebody who

tests positive for COVID, you can avoid self-isolating and carry on carrying out essential work and then just continue self-isolating

at home for the rest of the time, as long as you get a negative test every day during that period.

The thing that really annoyed a lot of people and that led to the U-Terms that no one knew that

...