Skip to main content

The colour of passports

Is this what it was all about?

Andrew Rossindell M.P: "it's a matter of identity, having the pink European passports has been a matter of national humiliation"

Now, leaving aside that my passport is a fetching shade of maroon, rather than pink (and that Rossindell's recoiling from that colour, imagined as it is, speaks to lengthy and expensive analysis required), and leaving aside the observation that I really don't understand why it matters what colour a passport holder is, given that it's the information inside which is important, and leaving even further aside the fact that we were already free to choose the colour of our passports (EU member Croatia's is a perfectly pleasant blue) I am forced to ask:

National humiliation?

Going cap in hand in the seventies to the IMF was a national humiliation. Our spiralling rates of child child poverty are a national humiliation. The fact that cancer survival rates in the UK are lower than most other comparable countries is a national humiliation. Hell, I'll even throw in losing to Iceland (though I'm aware that's a strictly English humiliation)in the euros if you like.

But the colour of my passport? I don't care. and I don't think Rossindell does, either. I think he just wants to be different from Europe. It doesn't matter how, or why, just that it happens. He's chosen passports.

Meanwhile, over in the Telegraph, Simon Heffer writes yearningly of bringing back imperial measures, to differentiate ourselves from the hated metric system of everyone else. Now, this strikes me as nothing more than exercise in nostalgia. In much the same way as the Brexiteers sneer "we won, get over it" I would respectfully point out that in the battle between metric and imperial, imperial lost quite a long time ago. Besides, we still have pints and we still have miles, can't you just enjoyy those Imperial relics Simon? And get on with your life?

Is this what it's been about? Bringing back things lost to the ages? Or is it a subconscious yearning for their own youth? I've never had a blue passport. I'm comfortable working in kilos. I'm also a lot younger than Rossindell and Heffer.

There are arguments made that that Brexit is symptomatic of a war between the generations. Broadly speaking the young broke against it, the odler in favour. Nothing is ever that simple, of course, and the idea of a war between the generations is as laughable as the idea of a competitive football league in Scotland. Celtic will win, the baby boomers already did.

But all this wistful harking back to the past is a dangerous basis on which to run a country, and this idea of exceptionalism, of things just being different for us Brits, is the sort of blinkered idiocy which leads inevitably to perpetual failure (I refer readers back to Gareth Southgate's bracing honesty about the England football team), we sail confidently on until we come up against someone more competent than us and then, bewildered, we fail.

Symptomatic of this is the frothing about Gibraltar. This reacting with confused indignation to a situation which was going to happen from the very second we voted out. The idea that the EU would act in favour of its members, not in favour of those who aren't, should not be a surprise. If it is a surprise, then you are remarkably dim.

It's okay though, because here comes Michael Howard. Invoking the Falklands: “Thirty-five years ago this week another woman Prime Minister sent a task force half way across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country".

You're kidding, right? War? With Spain? do you know how many Brits live there? It'd be like going to war with Essex.

These dreams of Empire, this nostalgic sabre-rattling, this misty eyed harking back to mythical days of yore. Brexit seems little more than old white men wanting to be young again, refighting the battles of their youth, or at least early middle age. Is that what it was all about?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi

Genius loci

 At the back end of last week, I heard a sound which told me Autumn had truly arrived. It seemed out of place, as we sweltered in unseasonable warmth, but it is as reliable an indicator if the seasons turning as leaves browning. A slightly comical, slightly mournful honking, early in the morning then again at the turn of the day The pink-footed geese are back. It is one of those sounds which is part of the fabric of this place, the siren being tested at Ashworth Hospital means it's Monday, Bringing practice means it's Tuesday, and the migration of the Pinks to their wintering grounds at Martin Mere means it's time to dig the jumpers out. It is one thing I do think I'd miss if I moved away. The arrival of these faintly ludicrous birds, strung out loosely against the sky in their rough v formations is something which seems to have burrowed its way deep into my consciousness, a sign that yes, things are definitely not all they could be, but some things are still working. T

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&