This is what a Scottish passport will mean for our freedom

The new passport is not something that most of us in Scotland are particularly thrilled about, despite the gushing adverts on social media being produced by the Home Office, featuring the perma-smirking Priti Patel. Most people in Scotland would prefer a maroon passport to being marooned with a blue one on a small island with Priti Patel.

Priti Patel is the perfect British Home Secretary, however, in that she combines stupidity and vindictiveness in equal measure while always managed to appear as though she’s extremely pleased with herself. You’re not allowed to smile or smirk in a passport photo, which at least gives us the small consolation that Priti Patel will never be allowed a passport.

The Home Office has hailed the new blue passport as the most technologically advanced passport it’s ever produced, as you might expect of a document that’s been commissioned from a Franco-Dutch company which is getting the passports printed in Poland. Is there a tariff on passports imported from the EU? The Home Office hasn’t said. It would be an appropriate irony if the new Brexit passport was held up in a long queue of lorries as it was imported into the UK.

READ MORE: UK passports will change to blue colour this March

The Home Office also claims that it’s the most environmentally friendly passport. This is presumably because now Brexit has happened you won’t be able to fly anywhere without first applying for a visa and then standing for hours in the airport at Riga in order to be interviewed by a surly immigration officer who has special latex gloves, which means more people will be put off travelling.

Of course, other passports are also technologically advanced, such as an Irish passport, which is so technologically advanced that it allows you to live, work and study in 27 countries. But hey, it’s not blue.

These new blue passports will show Johnny Foreigner that true blue Brits can stand on their own two feet, as they will be doing in the long queues at immigration every time they want to travel to Europe.

Boasting about the new blue British passport is like boasting that you have got yourself a new car, having traded in your top-of-the-range Porsche for Del Boy’s Reliant Robin. I don’t care what colour my passport is, I care about what it allows me to do.

It was a decision of the UK Government to use the same coloured passports as every other EU country. If the UK had wanted to, it could have retained the old colour of the UK passport, which was more black than blue. Croatia is an EU member, but Croatian passports have a black cover. The new blue British passport is a meaningless symbol which gets Brexit supporters all excited, in the same way that some of them hanker for the return of imperial measurements and pre-decimalised coinage.

There are those who would try to confuse us with the deceit that Scottish independence can be equated with Brexit. That the loss of status and power represented by the humiliation of the blue Brexit passport would be replicated by the new passports of an independent Scotland. It’s a lie.

Scottish independence would allow those of us who choose Scottish citizenship to exercise it. Upon independence, Scottish citizenship would automatically be available to every Scottish resident with a UK passport, and to everyone born in Scotland who resides elsewhere. It would not be compulsory. Those who choose to retain their British passports and British identity would be respected.

Independence would allow those Scots who identify as British to continue as British. Scottish independence would allow anyone who identifies as British in Scotland to retain their British citizenship, their British passport, their British identity.

It’s an important and crucial point that if any of those things were to be lost to British people in Scotland as a result of Scotland becoming independent, this would be as a result of decisions made by Westminster, not by Holyrood.

An independent Scotland, whether it decided to rejoin the EU or not, would certainly seek a closer alignment with the EU and would respect and recognise the right to freedom of movement.

A country doesn’t have to be an EU member to be a part of the zone allowing freedom of movement and recognising the right to settle, work and study. The European Economic Area (EEA) countries – Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein – are all outside the EU, but all of them recognise the right to freedom of movement.

Switzerland doesn’t directly recognise freedom of movement as part of the EEA, but has a bilateral agreement with the EU which extends the right to all citizens of EU countries. During the negotiations leading to independence, Scotland could seek a similar status which could come into effect upon the moment of independence. That would immediately make a Scottish passport a more powerful document than a British one. I don’t care what colour a Scottish passport is, I care about the rights it gives. It could even be blue.

Brexit strips European citizenship from every Scot with British citizenship, whether we want it or not. We are not given any personal choice in the matter. Brexit imposes and commands, it lessens and diminishes. It tells us who we have to be whether we recognise ourselves in the Brexit mirror or not. It foists a blue passport with its loss of the ability to live work and study in the other EU countries plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland upon us whether we want it or not.

We are not given the option to retain EU citizenship if we prefer it as individuals. Brexit amputates Scotland from its European self and gives us a Great British shortbread tin in its place.

Independence adds options and choices, Brexit takes them away, that’s the difference.