Britain’s passport blues
Some passports are more powerful than others, but all grant some kind of rights and privileges based on your citizenship.
For many people in Britain at the moment, a more superficial aspect of the passport has become a topic of national debate: its colour.
Last week, Britain’s Home Office announced the British government is planning to spend £490 million (roughly $813 million) on a redesign of its passports. Politicians and right-wing tabloids, such as the Sun, are making one big demand of any new document — the colour of the passport’s cover should be changed from its current deep burgundy to a dark blue.
From 1920 until 1988, the British passport was blue. Burgundy was introduced in 1988 as the country adopted machinereadable passports. These passports followed a common format that had been agreed upon by members of what was then the European Community and is now the European Union.
Now that Britain is marching toward its post-EU future, some view the current burgundy passport as a reminder of its decades of servitude to Brussels. Weeks after last summer’s Brexit vote, the Sun began its campaign to bring the blue passport back, while Member of Parliament Andrew Rosindell said it was a “hu- miliation” that Britons were forced to have a “pink” EU passport.
Changing the colour of a nation’s passport isn’t totally unusual, of course. The Economist notes that in the 20th century, the United States changed its passport colour from beige to green to red to green again before settling on blue in 1976.
As such, perhaps you could argue that a British move to a blue passport would show that the country was looking toward transatlantic relationships over its previous ties with Europe. However, such a move would be entirely symbolic. In fact, one of the few practical benefits of changing colour would be that anyone holding the blue passport in an E.U.-nationals line at immigration control could be advised to enter the line for other passport holders.