The Daily Mail are whipping up a huge storm of nationalist outrage that their beloved blue passports will be manufactured in France, but if you look at the root cause of this issue it turns out that the Daily Mail and their readers are heavily responsible.
The reason that the production of UK passports was put out to competitive tender in the first place is that the production of passports was privatised in 1996. Before that British passports were produced by a state owned company.
This privatisation was one of the last acts of vandalism of John Major's dead duck Tory administration. And who supported these Tories back into power in 1992 despite knowing all about their obsession with hard-right privatisation dogma?
The Daily Mail and their readers of course.
Then there's all the other Tory privatisation scams the Daily Mail and their readers have enabled through their unyielding support for the hard-right privatisation obsessed ideological dogma of the Tory party.
Here's some of the other stuff the pro-Tory propaganda rags and their Tory-voting readers are responsible for:
- As the result of the Tory privatisation of British Rail in 1994 an incredible 74% of franchises on the UK rail network are operated by the state rail companies of other nations, while Britain is the only nation that is barred from participation!
- In 1995 Britain's nuclear energy infrastructure and expertise was privatised by the Tories. Eventually the private owners figured out that they'd make more profit by flogging the whole lot to the French government than by running it themselves, so that's the reason we now have to bribe the French and Chinese into building our new nuclear power stations rather than building them ourselves.
- As a result of the Tory privatisation of the UK water supply in 1989, huge chunks of it have fallen into the hands of foreign states including China.
- As a result of the Tory privatisation of the National Grid in 1994 our electricity distribution network is now owned and operated by the Chinese and Qatari governments, with the British government having no stake at all.
- The pre-1997 Tories were bad enough, but the post-2010 Tories are even worse. They don't just hand British infrastructure and services to their private mates and then let them gradually fall into the hands of foreign governments. They've decided to cut out the middle man and flog off our national silver direct to foreign governments. Perhaps the most egregious example being the sale of the GPSS underground aviation fuel pipe network to the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates for £82 million, followed immediately by a ten year £237 million contract to use the system we owned until the Tories flogged it off.
If having our passports printed overseas is the grotesque affront to our national identity that the Daily Mail are making out that it is, then surely the distribution of our rail services, nuclear expertise, national grid, water supply, and airport fuel supply network are also affronts to our national identity?
But the Daily Mail and their readers have relentlessly backed the political party that inflicted all this crackpot privatisation dogma on our nation. And what's more is that they continually hate-monger against Jeremy Corbyn because he wants to undo the worst of the damage and return core British public services and infrastructure to British ownership.
So if the Daily Mail really wanted to "stand up for Britain" they'd ditch the toxic Tories and throw their weight behind Jeremy Corbyn and his economic repatriation policies.
If they had any sense of perspective at all the Daily Mail (and their readers) should have a good long period of self-reflection about their role in creating the passport situation they're so furious about ...
But we all know that they won't, and that they'll be back to Corbyn-bashing and their outright refusal to describe hard-right Tory privatisation mania as the profoundly anti-British agenda that it actually is.
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