Redesigning UK passports will cost more than cutting Housing Benefit for 18-21s. Why even propose it?
The old-style British passport. The Home Office said no decision had been made about the colour of the passport under the new contract [Image: C Squared Studios/Getty Images].
Some damn fools have called for the UK passport to be redesigned back to the old blue model from its current EU-style burgundy (not pink!) version when Brexit happens in 2019.
But the cost is £490 million – many times more than will be “saved” (a very poor choice of words by Conservative politicians) by depriving people aged 18-21 of Housing Benefit.
The HB cut for unemployed 18-21-year-olds will save just £25 million in the first year, rising to £40 million by 2020 – totalling less than one-fifth of the cost of the proposed passport change.
Here’s The Guardian on this story:
The UK passport could turn dark blue again after Brexit under a £490m contract to redesign and produce a new version of the document.
The passport is routinely redesigned every five years and Eurosceptics view the new contract as a way to ditch the EU burgundy cover in favour of a return to the colour of the past.
The current contract expires in 2019, the year the UK is set to leave the European Union after Theresa May began the formal two-year withdrawal process last week.
And here are a few different perspectives, courtesy of our old friend, Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AbiWilks/status/848454416822829056
£500M Blue Passports for Wealthy bigots, whilst cuts to the most vulnerable will cause homelessness, starvation and cost lives… despair
— Isobel_Waby we NEED a COALITION (@Isobel_waby) April 3, 2017
Would you prefer your tax money to be spent on Tory jingoism and bigotry? Or would you rather it was used to give a young person a home?
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Our passsports will all need to be replaced anyway – as they’re EU passports to which we will no longer be entitled. Which is a cost which should have been part of pre-referendum Brexit costing. Re-design is a minor part of it.
I feel a touch of déja vu here. As I was getting more and more frustrated in the endless corral to get through security at the airport the other day, I joshed the comment “they’ll be changing the passports to blue next”.
Who the hell cares what colour passports are. Personally, I have been the possessor of a passport since 1961 and, just as long as it gets me through immigration, I really don’t care a fig what colour it is or what it has stamped on its cover.
We’ve got a Government motivated by nostalgia. The past was never as good as nostalgia makes us feel about it.
Well why redesign it, after all we had a perfectly good design with the old blue ones just use that design as they are replaced after 2019 after all the printing will be cheaper by not having to have the awful words European Union embossed and printed throughout the document.
I like the idea of blue passports-but not at the cost of either making people suffer, or having to get a visa to go to Europe.
I would agree to the change on one condition that it states my true nationality and NOT CLASS ME AS UK I’m Scottish, and I’m sure the English would want their true identity too They should state everyone’s true nationality..
You’re a citizen of the United Kingdom.
So they keep telling us. If I was a citizen of a “union of 4 countries” then I might agree with the idea. As long as the UK government acts like a school playground of 4 kids, with one being the bully, I cannot. “A union of equals” they said in 2014. Even their own Brexit committee is telling the Tories that they have treated the devolved countries with disdain and disrespect.