Actually, I’m not dreaming of a blue passport just like the ones we used to know. At some point I must have had one, before the Thatcher government introduced the burgundy European passport in 1988, but if so I have no memory of it. I can remember the 1980s holidays, or glimpses of them, as if seen through a haze, with swimming pools and Pegasus Bridge and the Mulberry Harbours, and encountering French food and tasting wine. The colour of the wine was white; the colour of my passport was irrelevant. What mattered was to be there in Normandy and Brittany with family.
This may explain why the specifics of today’s final crap row of the year in Brexit Britain leave me completely cold. The government has announced that from October 2019, after the UK leaves the EU, British passports will be blue again.
Not caring much about this new policy probably makes me a bad Brexiteer, but the fury and the condecension of those who object to the switch to blue is a final reminder this year that the ultra-remain crowd really, really cannot stand their fellow citizens who disagree with them. Not only are these pesky Brexit voters taking their time dying, now they are getting a change in the colour of passports thus demonstrating their retrograde tendencies and shaming our society. Truly, the snobbish intolerence of the self-proclaimed tolerant liberal elite is a wonder to behold.
The passport row played out on social media, of course. Twitter is not real life, ‎it is often said. Although we have all seen, surely, enough of the impact of social media in recent years to know that falsehoods and fury take a hold so quickly that it does influence what large numbers of people think in real life.
In that vein, a serious person – I will spare him the embarrassment of naming him – tweeted that this passport change is costing ÂŁ500m. He was not alone. Others piled in. Just think what the country could have done with that ÂŁ500m! What a waste of money, all to satisfy the imperialist fantasies of the thoroughly racist Brexit racist movement of imperialist racists. For the full flavour, say it slowly in your best London media Remainer voice: Oh. My. God. These Brexit people.‎ They think it’s 1940. What have they done to our country? Now it’s racist blue passports. Not. In. My. Name. I’m applying for an Irish passport, I went to Dublin once, and so on.
On the passport sneering went, with a few people trying ‎to point out that the current passport contract is up and a new hi-tech one is being commissioned. The cost is for a long contract to provide and run the new passport. The colour change adds no cost.
It is just that some people like the old blue passports and in a binary choice want something a little distinctive. Can’t see the point myself, but so what? It’s hardly the apocalypse.
At root this isn’t about the money, of course. When it became clear that the money is not a factor, the row moved to the heart of the matter, that is the culture war and intense upper middle class left loathing of the other Britain. The passport decision is a symbol, for ultra-Remainers, of the horrors of Brexit Britain. Attack blue passport people and you send a message of ultra liberal virtue about class and social attitudes: I am, it signals, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, post-nation state, modern, international, European ‎and superior. Blue passport people, in contrast, are ghastly. Sneering about death and the supposed trauma of Britain having blue passports seems unlikely to ever win round Brexiteers, but knock yourselves out. It’s been a tough year for the Stop Brexit crowd, because a deal seems to be happening, and they now cling to these rows.
I repeat, the colour matters not a jot to me. Make it orange, for all I care. On second thoughts, orange could be problematic in Nothern Ireland and west central Scotland.
What is to be done? How can we heal the divide? Philip Collins pointed out that we could keep both colours and run the battle between blue and burgundy, when people make their choice and renew passports after 2019, as a rolling neverendum on Brexit.‎ He was joking, but I expect to see this policy idea suggested early in the new year by Nick Clegg.
