For me, the easiest way to start is by recounting the story:
last week, the French-Dutch company Gemalto, a digital security company that also
manufactures mobile SIM cards and biometric scanners, emerged as the winner of a
blind auction held by the UK Government for the contract to produce passports
for ten years from 2019. The new passports will be blue in colour, but this turned
out to be the least interesting part of the story. Gemalto will replace De La
Rue, the British makers of banknotes and stamps, who themselves won the
contract in 2009 from 3M Security Printing and Scanning, although the originators
of Scotch tape and Post-it notes are no longer in this line of work.
Back to today: the “Daily Mail” newspaper, having fallen out
of its bath chair upon hearing that a foreign company – a French-ish one, no less
– may be awarded the contract to produce a symbol of British nationality, has
received over 120,000 signatures to a petition demanding that the makers of
British passports must remain British, regardless of the fact an American company
has done it before. The argument forced by the “Mail” includes how Gemalto are
to be bought by the French defence company Thales, which is partly owned by the
French state, and that the company had apparently been subjected to hacking
raids in 2010 and 2011 from the US National Security Agency, and from its
British equivalent, GCHQ, that were aimed at stealing the encryption keys that
could unlock the security settings in SIM cards, of which Gemalto is the world’s
biggest producer.
I used my hundredth article to point out how the circulation
of the “Mail” is falling, and I wish this story had broken then, for it clearly
explains why the eventual demise of this newspaper will not be mourned. As the “Mail”
pointed out, the information on the hacking raids came from documents released
by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who had been working as a contractor for
the NSA. In October 2013, when another newspaper, “The Guardian,” published
information on what Snowden had leaked, the “Mail” labelled it, “a paper that
helps Britain’s enemies,” that would put lies in danger. Another newspaper, “The
Independent,” also spoke at the time about choosing not to publish leaked data
that would have proved sensitive. I can only guess that, due to time having passed,
any leaked information that now helps prove your point is now fair game.
Then, there is headline for the “Mail’s” comment piece,
published in last Friday’s issue: “Today the Mail has a question for Britain’s
ruling class: Why DO you hate our country, its history, culture, and the people’s
sense of identity?” It is an extraordinary screed of bile and phlegm, which
includes this magical passage: “As the EU pillaged our sovereignty, it also
decimated the symbols of our sovereignty. Weights and measures went the same
way as the passport.” Those metric bastards! The piece also references how, “while
Remainers predictably sneered,” the new passport was announced to be blue in
colour, for the first time since 1988, a symbolic shift from the burgundy
colour adopted since 1988, when the UK voluntarily standardised its passport
colour with the rest of the European Union – as someone who has only ever had a
burgundy passport, this means absolutely nothing, but for others, especially the
“Mail”, the symbolism of a return to something imperial means the entire world
to them.
I thought the blue cover of the new passports was going to
be my main point of conversation, a symbol of longing for a time that exists
only in memory, as people only tend to remember the good things about the past –
using the colour of a book to indicate a distinct national identity being one
such thing, rather than hailing the less sexy fact that British citizens can
access more visa-free travel than anyone else on Earth.
Instead, I am stuck talking about awarding government
contracts. The prevailing argument since the news broke over Gemalto, propagated
by the “Mail,” is that despite the award being the result of the free-market economics
of which you imagine the “Mail” would be in favour, money should not have been
the major thought, even if the Government could save up to £120 million. While
De La Rue could lose jobs, Gemalto will create jobs, particularly at its
offices in Fareham, not far from where I live. However, even if Gemalto proves
it is secure in its management of data, just as De La Rue and 3M did, the simple
fact that allowing a non-British company to deal with British biometric data is
being considered as treasonous, giving a British national newspaper another
chance to be xenophobic about those bloody foreigners again: page 7 of last
Friday’s “Mail” carried a teaser for a later story, marked as “Mass walkouts
cripple France – quelle surprise!” It’s almost like the French right to strike
is part of their national identity or something.
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