Suffering from the passport blues
Does Britain’s ruling class “hate our country?” asked the in an editorial. That’s the only possible explanation for “a decision that is as perverse and imbecilic” as any made by our government in living memory. Late last year, officials announced that a new U.K. passport would be introduced to mark our impending exit from the European Union. The burgundy passport cover used by most EU nations would be replaced with one that’s dark blue—the color of British passports from 1921 to 1988. It was a highly symbolic gesture, proof that our nation had regained control of its sovereignty from the bureaucrats in Brussels. So Brexit supporters were understandably shocked last week when the government revealed that the new passports would be made not by a U.K. company but by a Franco-Dutch one. What a farce, said The Daily Telegraph. Ministers insisted they were still bound by EU competition rules, which prohibit them from favoring a U.K. firm. Yet France bans foreign companies from producing its passports on national security grounds. Britain is leaving the EU precisely so it can decide its own trade regime; “to begin that process with an act of grand acquiescence does not look good.”
What a delightful display of hypocrisy, said George Eaton in NewStatesman.com. Pro-Brexit members of the ruling Conservative Party have been left sputtering with outrage. Former cabinet minister Priti Patel said the decision to award the $690 million passport contract to the Franco-Dutch firm was a “national humiliation.” Yet pro-market Conservatives such as Patel have no qualms about selling off essential chunks of our national infrastructure to European firms. The Dutch stateowned transport giant Abellio owns several U.K. rail franchises, and its lamentable performance “has been widely condemned by British passenger groups.” The major U.K. power provider EDF Energy, meanwhile, is a subsidiary of the French state giant Électricité de France. What’s especially amusing is that the pro-Brexiters argued Britain needed to leave the EU so it could embrace truly free trade, said James Moore in Independent.co.uk. But if we’re to become a “Global Britain,” then we’ll have to accept all other nations—including the French—“having carte blanche to bid for British government contracts.”
For us Scots, this passport farrago has laid bare “the innate folly of England’s Brexit misadventure,” said Marianne Taylor in The Herald. Other nations used to consider our southern neighbor “a model of fair-mindedness; the nation’s inherent arrogance was tempered by it.” But in the 21st century, England lost its way and was “tempted by the malign forces of petty nationalism.” Its residents—a majority of whom voted in favor of Brexit, unlike the Scots—now cling to symbols that remind them of their past imperial might, like their little blue passports. Who knows where this will end. “Perhaps England’s embarrassing midlife crisis will run its course,” and our neighbor will “return to staid dependability and abandon all this Brexit nonsense.” Let’s hope so, “because until then, the joke’s on Scotland too.”