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29-03-2018

British bomb under Brexit passport

The mood is high among the British. Their printing industry is fishing behind the net. The order for the after-Brexit passport goes to a French-Dutch company. Trade unions and a national newspaper are taking action to block this.
Those high spirits in Britain are understandable. The island is just heading for independence from the EU, looks forward to reintroducing their own familiar blue passport and then it appears that 'their' printer seizes next to the order.
Back to the British; the printer who is most obvious according to the islanders is the British secured-printing producer De La Rue. The order seems to go to, as French company described, Gemalto. It has a Dutch touch, because it is an NV in Amsterdam with an AEX listing. Gemalto is known as a company that produces chip cards and passports. It is an order of 570 million euros.
In the British press, this development by Brexit advocate Priti Patel is called a 'national humiliation'. On 23 March, the Daily Mirror newspaper describes the state of affairs even as betrayal and an action has begun to block the process to a 'foreign' printer. The campaign is being conducted together with Unite and GMB trade unions, which expect outsourcing to Gemalto will cost hundreds of hundreds of jobs in the UK. 

“Over the last few months, we have heard ministers happy to come on the media and talk about the new blue passport and the fact that it is an icon of British identity,” the chief executive of De La Rue, Martin Sutherland, told the BBC on Thursday.

“But now this icon of British identity is going to be manufactured in France,” he added.