The Price of Freedom
I had a bit of a scare last night. I was at a concert, and realised during the interval that I didn’t have my passport with me (I usually carry it with me everywhere in case I end up in another country), and of course this worried me. It wasn’t the fact that I’d lost an important document that was worrying, but rather the cost of replacing it. In 1995 a British passport cost £18, today it costs £72. It is a sad fact of life that to be free to travel one needs to hold one of these documents, and of course a British one is more useful than many passports from around the world. It will get you into most places. But how can the government justify a 300% price increase in 12 years? When the government seems to believe that £45 is enough to live on each week, how do they justify charging over one and a half times that for a document that simply gives us the right to identify ourselves as British citizens?
A quick bit of searching on the internet shows that the price of a passport vary massively, and aren’t linked simply to usual measures of wealth such as GDP. Just looking in the euro-zone, you can get a passport for the following price (for 10 years): €70 in Austria, €22 in Czech Republic, €10 in Estonia, €60 in France, €85 in Italy, €97 in Netherlands and €17 in Spain. This looks to me like the sort of thing the government could move on. Now, the last price increase here in the UK was a couple of years back and it was, according to the government, on the basis of increased costs in consular work. I’m not being funny, but do these costs vary so much between different countries? There remains no subsidies for buying a passport, so pensioners and people on benefits still have to pay the full amount. One of the few areas of government provisions where this is still the case, despite the fact that a massive majority of the population (approx. 45m people) have passports, suggesting this isn’t really a matter of choice.
Part of the expense seems to be a result of the introduction of “biometric” passports, and of course the cost has been landed on the public. Whilst many members of the public do not really care whether their passports now include a chip with some data on it, they still have to pay the cost, and it seems like an extremely expensive one for reducing a bit of identity fraud. Within a few years we’re going to have the new national identity cards introduced, and British citizens will find themselves having to shell out even more cash. Travel shouldn’t be seen as some luxury that we keep for those who can afford it; we should be pressuring the government to keep the price of passports as cheap as possible and should be arguing for subsidies for those who cannot afford the extortionate price in the first instance. There is no way the cost of Brits being abroad has quadrupled in less than 15 years, and the expense to the citizen is far greater than the expense to the state of having low-level identity theft being committed. As for me, it turned out I was just being daft and had left my passport on my desk.
Reader Comments
Do you really think ID cards will go ahead? I’m not so sure. The Tories under Cameron have always opposed the scheme and when they win the next election, I expect ID cards will be quietly forgotten about. Even if Labour manages to win the next election, I can’t see Brown making the case for the public bearing the high cost of an unpopular scheme in the current economic climate.
Agree. Not only that, but you should see the price of obtaining a full driving licence these days-essentially a prerequisite for anyone with children living outside of London. An implicit state monopoly on travel seems to be emerging on an unprecedented scale, and subsidies are sorely, sorely lacking.
You address this problem through the lens of a British national, but the ‘problem’ of procuring a passport is surely greater to those whose (non)provision of a passport produces their status as ‘illegal’ in states to which migrants come seeking a share in the perceived social capital of countries such as the UK and USA. They may be seen as modalities of inequality on a global scale. They impose a dominant model of citizenship as a criteria for obtaining physical freedom. While wealthy tax-haven seekers can literally buy citizenship for thousands of dollars, the freedom of the majority of people in this world is far lower than the mobility afforded, say, bottled mineral water. Passports, in their short history, have always been more than a document whose price reflects the sophistication of production technology. The modern form dates back merely to WW1, a fossil of anti-espionage strategies that were supposed to be temporary. We now live in a world that is simultaneously global and national. Yet the majority of todays subjects are not citizens and we are lucky to have the right to travel at all. The price increase is not merely a headache for pensioners off to Madeira but reflects a growing suspicion and paranoia about attempts by people seeking the non-monetary value a passport represents (right to bequeath citizenship, permanent employment rights etc). I may be fleeced but I am thankful for the small things- that I can read the forms allowing me access to this mindboggling bureaucracy. That I happened to be born here…for me, the dehumanisation of being reduced to a microchip is less than the fear faced by those who would risk their life savings on a raft ride to the grillings, incarcerations and non-promises of the journey for those who aren’t so lucky.