Lawful Aid And Protection

Are American passports manufactured outside the United States? That question answers itself. Only Britain would do this. Only post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain. Nowhere else would dream of it.

This French company, in which George Osborne's Blackrock is a major investor, does not make French passports. France does not contract out passports at all. It says that they are matter of national security, so the State does the whole thing in-house. Quite right, too.

We could have had blue passports anyway, and the new ones are going to bear no resemblance to the old ones. The short-term saving from contracting out their manufacture springs from the same mentality that is selling out the fishermen for the sake of the City.

The new passports are not to be made in Gateshead. And the North East now has no consular representation in the principal port of the Baltic, a problem that also afflicts every Trades Council and Chamber of Commerce from the Shetland Islands to the Isle of Sheppey.

Those ought all to be banding together to provide at least some sort of cover. But they are not. And the new passports are not to be made in Gateshead. I miss Davey Hopper every day. While he may be gone, however, you know what you have to do, brothers and sisters. You know what you have to do.