Feeling Blue (and Feeling Good): U.K. Picks a Post-Brexit Passport Color<br />Andrew Rosindell, a Conservative Party lawmaker, said this spring<br />that the current passport was a source of national "humiliation" and that a return to blue would be "a clear statement to the world that Britain is back." Brandon Lewis, the British immigration minister, told the BBC that he knew many people who backed a British withdrawal and that they still had an "attachment" to the blue passports.<br />On Friday, the British government found something to celebrate: The Home Office said<br />that the color of the country’s passports would revert from burgundy, favored by most European Union member states, to the blue that once marked British travel documents.<br />passport’ is in fact a national passport established under the national laws of the member states<br />and issued to their citizens," the European Union’s migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, told the European Parliament in 2015.<br />pic.twitter.com/AOZjmQhsyf The debate over Britain’s withdrawal continues to polarize the country — even now, nearly nine months after the government<br />formally declared its intention to leave, there is no consensus on what Britain’s relationship with the European Union should look like.<br />They are meant to "symbolize our national identity," to say nothing of providing Britons with "one of the most secure travel documents<br />in the world." Prime Minister Theresa May praised the return of the blue passports as an "expression of our independence."<br />The UK passport is an expression of our independence and sovereignty – symbolising our citizenship of a proud, great nation.<br />https://t.co/fMnf3ayhGv Britain will start issuing the new passports in October 2019, the Home<br />Office said, about seven months after the country is scheduled to leave the European Union.
