Saturday 31 March 2018

Reader's Letter Of The Week

It was in this week's City AM, but those have already gone to recycling so I can't give credit to the original author.

The gist of it was that there's no point squealing (The Guardian and The Daily Mailexpressgraph making common cause for once) that the UK government has decided to allow a foreign-owned business to print UK passports instead of British business De La Rue.

De La Rue don't just print UK bank notes  and passports. As the self same Guardian points out:

De La Rue also prints money for Qatar, Kuwait, the Bahamas and the Seychelles, among others...

As well as UK passports, the company manufactures identity documents and e-passports for countries as far apart as Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar and Afghanistan. On occasion it also uses its printing presses to make special-edition bank notes. A Star Wars note issued in support of the Together For Short Lives charity raised more than £185,000 in an eBay auction in November.


If all those countries followed the preferences of their own Guardian/Daily Mailexpressgraph protectionist tendencies, then De La Rue would be in real trouble.

5 comments:

Bayard said...

Stop using logic to upset my prejudices!

Graeme said...

De la Rue even claims to have 32% market share in global passport production! I sent the link to a Facebook friend who had claimed the decision to go to a much cheaper but foreign supplier a "Brexit own goal" The level of discourse on Brexit is horrifyingly low

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, protectionism isn't logic. How can you say exports = good, imports = bad? It's exactly the same thing, depending on your point of view. In fact, to illustrate, if Germany sells stuff to Italy, is this, from a UK point of view exports or imports or neither? How can this sale be simultaneously good and bad?

G, indeedy. I fail to see what this has to do with Brexit.

Bayard said...

Mark, by "logic", I meant your last para, so yes, I agree with you.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I know you were being ironic. I was just illustrating.