The blue passport farce

The results of a recent YouGov poll about what people think the government should do in post-Brexit Britain creates a horrifying picture of the delusional post-Brexit fantasy land that huge numbers of Brexiters are anticipating.

A post-Brexit fantasy land where the colour of your passport cover is of more importance than the rights that your passport gives you!

What Brexiters want

The single most popular thing Brexiters want to bring back is the death penalty. It's been proven time and again that the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent (life sentences are much more of a punishment, that's why mass murderers and the like so often try to commit suicide in jail). It's also well understood that the death penalty creates appalling miscarriages of justice (many of the people executed by the British state during the 20th Century have had their convictions posthumously overturned). Despite all of the evidence an astounding 53% of Brexiters want the death penalty brought back.

42% of Brexiters say they want corporal punishment in schools brought back too, meaning that one of their top priorities for Brexit Britain is to give teachers the right to physically assault our children!

48% of Brexiters want things to bring back pounds and ounces. Firstly they never went away, it's always been legal to sell stuff in pounds and ounces in the UK as long as you include the metric conversion too. Secondly imperial measures are a ridiculously over-complicated anachronism. If Brexiters think that grams and kilograms are foreign unpatriotic muck they can avoid using them, but forcing the rest of us to abandon the sensible and easy to use metric measuring system so that we can all start dividing stuff by 14 and 16 again is ridiculous nonsense.

Blue passports

After pining for the return of the death sentence, the second most popular thing on the Brexiter wishlist is for the return of blue passports. 52% of Brexiters see this as one of the main priorities for Brexit Britain!

The hard-right tabloids and Eurosceptic MPs have fed into this nostalgic delusion that the colour of our passports is of such significance whatever and millions of Brexiters have lapped it up.

The Tory MP Andrew Rossindell has gone as far as describing the current burgundy passport as a "humiliation" and claiming that once the blue passport returns the British people "can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling"!

The idiocy of this stance is astounding. The current UK passport gives us all the right to travel, and work, and study, and retire in any of 27 nations across Europe. If the Tories insist on scrapping freedom of movement then it's obvious that the post-Brexit passport will not provide all of these rights, no matter what colour the cover is.

Over half of Brexiters are more bothered about the colour of their passport cover than they are about the fact that Brexit is going to significantly diminish the value of it!

The reintroduction of blue passports won't be a source of "pride and self-confidence" at all, it will be a constant visual reminder of the fact that the British passport has been reduced in value and rendered inferior to the Irish one.

Perspective

• Since the Brexit vote the pound has collapsed in value and not recovered. Millions of Brits living abroad suffered an instant 15% devaluation of their money, but people in the UK are much more insulated from the fact they're 15% poorer than they were before because price inflation takes time to seep through. It only becomes glaringly obvious that we're all poorer when we go on holiday and notice the shockingly poor exchange rates.

• The EEF manufacturing organisation has warned that hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost if Theresa May follows through on her ludicrous threat to flounce away from the Brexit negotiating table with "no deal". 

• The London School of Economics have calculated that a "no deal" scenario could damage the UK economy by 6.3% to 9.5% of GDP, that's an astonishing £4,200 - £6,400 per UK household.

• Dozens of major UK-based businesses (including swathes of the financial sector) have already announced that they're making plans to abandon Britain in order to keep themselves in the Single Market zone.

• Record numbers of EU nurses have been quitting the NHS which is already severely understaffed after years of ideologically driven Tory cuts.

• Various sectors of the UK economy are warning of severe Brexit-related recruitment crises. The services and agricultural sectors are particularly worried.

• Scotland is preparing to remove itself (and all of its oilfields and enormous renewable energy capacity) from the Brexit car crash.

• The Australian foreign minister has said that Brexit represents a great opportunity for them to improve their trade relationship with Ireland because they remain in the Single Market, and Donald Trump's trade adviser Wilbur Ross has described Brexit as a "God-given opportunity" for the United States to take business away from the UK.

But screw all that stuff eh chaps. Our passports are going to be blue again, and that's the fundamentally important thing. Hooray for the magnificent benefits of Brexit! 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR