Basseterre, St. Kitts, April 28, 2020 (Press Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister): St. Kitts and Nevis’ Prime Minister, Dr. the Honourable Timothy Harris, gave another excellent interview today, Tuesday, April 28th, 2020, this time with Sky News. Last Wednesday, April 22nd, Tim Willcox, Chief Presenter for BBC News, interviewed the Prime Minister on BBC World News.
This morning, Adam Boulton, Sky News’ Editor at Large and Presenter of All Out Politics, interviewed Prime Minister Harris live. Prime Minister Harris conducted the interview from his home in Tabernacle Village in St. Kitts while Adam Boulton was on set in London, England.
Adam Boulton is renowned for interviewing “political big hitters” and “asking the questions the public want answered” on All Out Politics, his widely watched weekday morning programme.
Much of the interview focused on the impact of the coronavirus on the tourism industry.
“If you look around the world, the outbreaks are still very much close to peak in Europe and in the United States, so when do you think you are going to be wanting to welcome visitors from those countries?” the All Out Politics host asked the Prime Minister of St. Kitts and Nevis.
“That is something that is a moving target,” the Prime Minister said, adding: “There is no vaccine, the safety of our people must come first, and that must come before every other consideration.”
Prime Minister Harris went on to note that the global crisis “behooves that all of us do what we can” and he pointed out that even if the country “continues to do as good as we are doing, and the rest of the world is lagging behind, then there will be no tourism – and so all of us globally have to be working in hand to achieve the goal of getting our societies back to normalcy or as near normal as soon as we conveniently can, and that is a priority now in St. Kitts and Nevis.”
The Prime Minister said the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis is also using this time to “deal with the health imperatives of a new brand of tourism – a new brand of tourism product, which we now have to offer – and to prepare our people, reorienting them…”
Prime Minister Harris said that, in this new tourism landscape, “health is going to be a principal concern as we open our borders in the future to the arrivals of guests who come to enjoy and experience our culture and all the other assets that we have.”