From today (Friday 1 October 2021), most EU, EEA and Swiss citizens will need a valid passport to enter the UK as the government stops accepting national identity (ID) cards as a travel document.
These ID cards are some of the most abused documents seen by Border Force officers and, last year, almost half of all false documents detected at the border were EU, EEA or Swiss ID cards.
They can be easily abused by people attempting to come into the country illegally and by stopping accepting these forms of ID, the government can prevent organised criminal gangs and illegal migrants using them to enter the UK unlawfully.
I mean, I assume that most people in the EU have passports.
And while I can imagine that Malta or Ireland, both EU members, might be fine with using an EU ID card to prove identity, I’m sure that we in the US aren’t, any more than an EU member is going to let someone from the US in if they just show up with a state driver’s license (the closest analog we’d have to a national ID card).
There was a point when we and Canada used to let people from each other’s countries in just with just driver’s licenses, but that was ended as part of the post-9/11 security changes. Gotta have a passport (or equivalent) now.
Also, a lot more Americans have passports these days. Used to be quite unusual, like, single-digit percentage of the population not many decades back.
Come on. Few people are as angry with our society as it stands as I am but the United Kingdom is fit to burst with amazing cultural heritage which we should share with the world (some of it we didn’t even steal!).
Furthermore, for as regressive and bigoted as a lot of our media and politicians are, a very large proportion of British people are tolerant, curious, and kind-hearted.
The United Kingdom is much more than our current and historical governments. If we are ever going to establish ourselves as a force for good in a worsening world, we need people to realize that we genuinely are more than Brexit, Rwanda deals and Partygates.
Getting the Tories under 100 seats at the next GE and encouraging the Labour party to not be afraid of being a tolerant, democratic socialist party are the first steps towards that.
Well said. Brexit happened and now we need to move on. Wallowing in this constant self-flagellation is doing no one any good, and blaming Brexit instead of the incumbent government making all the decisions isn’t helping either.
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