MADE IN FRANCE

Today the Mail has a question for Britain’ s ruling class: Why DO you hate our country, its history, culture and the people’ s sense of identity?

THE Mail today has some questions to ask those members of our ruling class who took the ludicrous decision to hand the contract for the manufacture of the new British passport to a Franco-Dutch company instead of to the Gateshead firm, De La Rue.

1. Do you hate your country, its history, culture and people’s sense of identity?

2. Do you hold in contempt the workers at the De La Rue plant in Tyneside who stand to lose their jobs, in a region with the highest unemployment rate in the country and where six in ten people voted Leave?

3. Do you believe that every EU diktat should be gold plated by the drones in Whitehall’s bureaucracy while countries like France and the U.S. produce their own passports on the grounds of security?

4. Indeed, do you prefer dealing with the unelected European Commission rather than with British voters who — every five years — have the chance to kick their politicians out?

5. And finally — do you loathe Brexit and all those 17.4 million people who voted for it — in the greatest democratic exercise in this country’s history?

How else but answering a firm yes to all these questions explains a decision that is as perverse and imbecilic as any to have emerged from Whitehall in living memory. And one which — to judge by the deluge of phone calls and letters received by this newspaper — the public regard with incredulity.

Yet this spectacular own goal was completely avoidable. Indeed, only three months ago the announcement of the restoration of the blue passport was a PR triumph.

While Remainers predictably sneered, ministers hailed the opportunity Brexit offers to ‘restore our national identity and forge a new path for ourselves in the world’. They gave the appearance, at least, of recognising the unique and emblematic importance of that blue passport, which stood for British liberal values around the world.

Have they now forgotten the place it holds in the hearts of Britons? Vandalised and homogenised by reams of successive Brussels instructions, the passport represented for a great many the endless leaching of powers to a remote superstate.

As the EU pillaged our sovereignty, it also decimated the symbols of our sovereignty. Weights and measures went the same way as the passport. And if arch-Europhiles like Tony Blair and the CBI had got their way, our currency would have suffered the same fate. So changing the passport back from burgundy to navy blue — the colour it had been from 1921 until 1988 — was a highly symbolic reversal.

But even putting politics to one side for a moment, the British bid had great merit. De La Rue — a company which has been operating since just after the Battle of Waterloo — has never missed a single delivery in the decade of the current contract, and also makes the new £5 and £10 notes, proof of its solid security credentials.

De La Rue argues, rightly, that cost should not be the only factor when producing vital security documents that cannot be forged — particularly in an age of terrorists and mass illegal migration.

So how significant and risible that French- Dutch giant Gemalto was successfully hacked by GCHQ in 2011 — but had no idea by whom until four years later — and has posted four profits warnings in the past 18 months.

Its imminent takeover by Thales — one-quarter-owned by the French state — means we are poised to hand a major contract to a country currently trying every trick in the book to thwart a good Brexit deal for the City of London, in a bid to drag bankers to a Paris riddled with high taxes and which significantly, yesterday, was paralysed by an all-out public sector strike.

Over ten years, the seeming cost difference between the bids — some £120 million — is peanuts, especially at a time when the aid budget is £13 billion, and growing so fast that officials struggle to find enough corrupt regimes to squander it on.

So why, if ministers understood the symbolism of the passport in December, did they miss this catastrophe in the making and not head it off? How did they allow the decision to be made, as it appears, by an obscure committee of mandarins and not — like the French — take advantage of an EU national security opt-out to ensure the British company was chosen, thereby safeguarding hundreds of jobs in the De La Rue factory in the North-East.

Perhaps Philip Hammond’s political tin ear — which saw him propose scrapping, in another grave misunderstanding of the public’s attachment to national symbols, the 1p and 2p coins — has become contagious. Has it infected the Home Office — where we now learn the decision was rubberstamped — as well? It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Home Secretary Amber Rudd (like her brother Roland, the head of a wealthy City public relations firm and a leading force in the Remain camp) was simply following her Europhilic instincts?

Perhaps this is the same deafness which has gripped the Business Department, which limply stands by while the Melrose predators threaten to break up the great British engineering firm GKN, which has vital strategic importance to our defences.

This brings us back to the five essential questions for our seemingly lobotomised bureaucrats, and the real roots of the passports calamity.

For 45 years, they have been in thrall to the EU, not just embracing its every rule and regulation, but gilt- edging them all. Meanwhile, other EU countries wisely adopted the rules they liked and ignored the others altogether.

In the run-up to the referendum, these mandarins behaved entirely predictably, falling in behind Project Fear and disgracefully throwing political neutrality out of the window.

Even after the vote, when the economic apocalypse they predicted failed to materialise, they clung on to their shameful forecasts, and continued to doom-monger.

So the inevitable conclusion the Mail must draw is that Whitehall, and much of our political class, are in denial about the reasons why people voted for Brexit (the greatest of which was the loss of identity, deeply felt by the majority of Britons).

And even now, as we approach one year before departure, which this newspaper wholeheartedly believes will eventually prove a great boon for Britain, they are yet to throw off the EU’s statist shackles and begin thinking for themselves, so corrupted have they been by decades of kowtowing to the corrupt, sclerotic, undemocratic behemoth that is Brussels.

Well, the Mail has a message for them: get over it. We’re leaving. And at this crucial juncture in our island’s history, symbols of our identity matter and the passport is one of them.

Fishing is another. Sold out by Ted Heath in 1973, Britain’s fishermen have seen their livelihoods slowly destroyed by the Common Fisheries Policy. Anyone in government who thinks this totemic industry can be cynically traded away is playing with fire.

And as for our passports, they are just that: OURS. And not some tatty bits of commercial paper to be produced by a firm subsidised by a country that wouldn’t dream of allowing another nation to produce their passports.

If our ruling class has one ounce of common sense or patriotism in its make- up, this decision must be reversed, and urgently.