Felix SalmonOvjeren akaunt

I was in Piccadilly Circus at 11pm London time, when the UK officially left the EU. The big billboard was a huge sign saying "London is Open". But who were they trying to kid.

It was just hours after the Trump administration announced that the entire USA was closed to any foreigner who had travelled to China of late. (Citizens can come back, but only if they can find a flight, and they face 14 days' quarantine if they've been in certain areas.)

In the Senate, an historic impeachment trial ended the way that everybody knew it would: with clean-break factionalism. All Ds voting one way, all Rs voting the other. The Senate aisle might as well be the iron curtain.

Oh and did I mention that 6 new countries, including all of Nigeria (pop. 190 million), were added to the US travel ban?

Today was the day that closed won and open lost. Freedom to travel internationally might not be the world's most important freedom. But it's going away, and it's going away because a lot of Brits and Americans and others want it to.

I am not an epidemiologist, and it might well be the case that radically curtailing travel from China makes good prophylactic sense. But it still feels like a key moment in a broader trend. And not a good one.

I look forward to a day when Brits can live and work anywhere they like in the EU, when Chinese and Nigerian citizens travel freely around the world, when international migration is treated as presumptively good rather than bad. But I'm not holding my breath.