Priti Patel’s blue passports reveal worst of Britain – Yorkshire Post Letters

‘APRIL is the cruellest month’ affirmed T S Elliot at the start of The Wasteland. It’s a depressing thought that Priti Patel’s new true blue passports will start to drop through letterboxes as the beautiful Farndale daffodils are in their prime.

This is further evidence that the Conservatives have morphed into an English Workers Party (EWP). This Government is xenophobic, albeit not ethnically racist. It’s also shallow and anti-intellectual as Patel herself demonstrates by her fatuous claim that ‘leaving the European Union gave us a unique opportunity to restore our national identity and the British passport will once again be entwined with our national identity’.

Making the colour of the passport a totemic symbol of identity seems crass to all who care about this country’s standing in the world. Identity is about the languages we speak, the games we play, the literature we read and importantly the values we share.

Former Yorkshire MEP Edward McMillan-Scott, one of many Conservatives, correctly sees the blue document ‘as a symbol of the attitude prevailing in the Conservative party towards the rest of Europe that is isolationist, ignorant and self-destructive’.