Since 1988 UK travellers have been issued with a burgundy-coloured passport.
But there are now suggestions that the country could return to the traditional blue versions, following the expiration of the current contract to design the passports in 2019 – the year the UK is expected to officially exit the European Union.
A contract to redesign the passport - a move that routinely occurs every five years – has been put out by home secretary Amber Rudd, to update security features and help prevent counterfeiting.
The Home Office has apparently insisted there are “no immediate plans to change the format or colour of the passport,” but it reportedly confirmed that a return to a blue cover had not been excluded, the Financial Times said.
The new passport would go live in July 2019, just months after the UK’s official departure from the EU in March 2019.
The move is likely to be welcomed by many Brexiteers, with Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell branding the burgundy passports a source of national “humiliation”, the Guardian reported.
Rosindell told the Press Association: “The restoration of our own British passport is a clear statement to the world that Britain is back. Our British identity was slowly but surely being submerged into an artificial European one that most Brits felt increasingly unhappy about.
“The humiliation of having a pink European Union passport will now soon be over and the United Kingdom nationals can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling, just as the Swiss and Americans can do. National identity matters and there is no better way of demonstrating this today than by bringing back this much-loved national symbol when travelling overseas.”
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