O/T New British passports

[Romared]

Evening Roma...before I retired I used to work for Gemalto...the company that won the passport tender. There will be two production possibilities, either they will be produced in their specialised ID production site in Finland or they will be subcontracted out to the French national printing company. Whatever solution that will be chosen, given the labour costs I can confirm that they will not be cheap to produce. Gemalto are not in business to lose money...believe me, far from it...so their tender was certainly fair. How they can be 100 million cheaper than De la Rue is unreal. I don’t know if DLR have previously been put to tender by the UK government as they were the only supplier since passports were first issued and they probably thought is was a forgone conclusion but seemingly they seriously plucked up! Today it is estimated that half of the world’s population....that’s a lot of people....use daily a Gemalto product...Bank cards,Sim cards,passports,drivers licence,pay tv,security badges etc etc.

Evening Frenchlion , ithink you have summed up DLR well , Another firm just plucking any number out, and being greedy time after time , backfired this time though ,,

[Acido]

Ive absolutely no idea what your saying there Frenchie, but it sounds like you've got your head screwed on there lol.
These sort of political threads however, I stay well away from if I can help it.

[animallittle3]

I agree that it would be better to have the Passports printed in UK, but you do have to question how there was such a large variation in tender values.
Perhaps given the fact they have lost a few contracts recently might have something to do with it.

No government no matter what your political views are could back De La Rue purely based on patriotic reasoning .

Of course we want to see UK companies succeed and successfully tender for contracts but if they can't deliver then what can you do .

UK management need to start performing with the scenarios that lay ahead post brexit , productivity needs to rise and tenders need to be won .

[animallittle3]

Evening Frenchlion , ithink you have summed up DLR well , Another firm just plucking any number out, and being greedy time after time , backfired this time though ,,

I tend to agree although I'm speculating , possibly thought this one was in the bag and maked up accordingly .

[Jules88]

If you drive through France or Holland, you will see that every other petrol station is a Shell or a BP. If you look at the label in your underpants, you'll find that they have been made in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, or similar.

We live in a globalised economy.

If a Franco Dutch company can produce the new passports cheaper and at a comparable standard to a British company then so be it. What's the alternative? Should British people have to pay more for their passports to keep Exile and the editors of The Sun and Daily Mail happy?

Labour supporters should bear in mind that this sort of thing happens, particularly when increased regulation, taxation and labour costs make a country's industry uncompetitive in world markets.

I’d like to keep Exile and the readers of Sun and DM.. (I’m one) happy, but I don’t want to pay any more for a bit of card and a photo than I have to.
Put my photo and name on a bank card and I could travel with that....
Why need a passport? In fact, I would agree to be microchipped, like a dog..... Why not ? Provided everyone enteringnEurooe does the same .......

[animallittle3]

I’d like to keep Exile and the readers of Sun and DM.. (I’m one) happy, but I don’t want to pay any more for a bit of card and a photo than I have to.
Put my photo and name on a bank card and I could travel with that....
Why need a passport? In fact, I would agree to be microchipped, like a dog..... Why not ? Provided everyone enteringnEurooe does the same .......

Yeh remarkable journalism from the Mail , going nuts about the french / dutch company manufacturing UK Passports .

Fecking John Major and the Tories privatised UK passport production in 1996 ya right wing thicko's .

Dear me .

[KerrAvon]

That's actually a very interesting statement because by design the free market itself lends towards job losses .

No it doesn’t. A free market is entirely neutral towards jobs in the sense that they will be created when demand in the economy requires them and eliminated when falling demand renders them superfluous.

[KerrAvon]

UK businesses have a number of issues they need to address , productivity is very low , that needs to improve , massively .

Wage stagnation is also a factor , if money is tight then obviously consumers aren't going to be buying products .

Chicken and the egg situation , investment to kick start business or carry on cutting back ?

The electorate will have the opportunity to decide at the next GE exile .

There is a problem with productivity in the UK economy, but it’s ironic to see a TU man like yourself arguing for an increase. In a basic sense, productivity is calculated thus:

Productivity = Units of production/Number of workers.

It follows that to increase productivity the options are to increase output with the same number of workers or to maintain the level of production but with a reduced number of workers (or to increase production whilst reducing the number of workers – the capital owners preferred option). Given that demand (and hence the level of required production) is rarely under the control of the producer, the likely route to increased productivity is job losses – not the sort of thing I would expect to see you advocate, particularly as you support a party that favours the nationalisation of parts of the UK economy and the return of the bloated, overmanned, state owned monopolies of the past.

If Brexit operates to reduce the flow of labour into the UK then it may well be that business will be forced to try to maintain production on reduced staffing levels.

Wage stagnation will operate to reduce the level of demand in an economy in the short term, but the position isn’t the simplistic one that sometimes appears in these threads. Putting an additional sum of money in someone’s hand is of limited effect if it will be spent in an economy where the costs of production have been increased by that act of paying more. In other words, wage increases without an increase in productivity are merely inflationary. Perhaps of particular note for the purposes of this thread is that wage increases that increase the cost of production in this country will serve to make UK businesses uncompetitive in international markets.

As for the notion of investment to kick start business, the wheeze from Labour at the last election was to tax business to pay for their wish list of spending promises (including paying off the middle class with their tuition fees bribe). Do you think that would lead to investment – taking money out of business? It clearly wouldn’t.

The owners of capital expect a return upon it when they risk it in a business. If John McDonnell takes money away from them in increased corporate taxes, they will look to maintain their return by cutting costs (with cutting jobs being the easiest way), cutting capital investment and by becoming more tax efficient. When John takes enough, the companies that can will decide that moving their operations and tax base out of the country is the way forward.

[KerrAvon]

No government no matter what your political views are could back De La Rue purely based on patriotic reasoning .

Of course we want to see UK companies succeed and successfully tender for contracts but if they can't deliver then what can you do .

UK management need to start performing with the scenarios that lay ahead post brexit , productivity needs to rise and tenders need to be won .

See above. I agree that UK business needs to start to look to be more competitive ahead of Brexit, but you need to bear in mind that increased productivity and making more competitive tenders are going to create a burden that needs to be borne by more than management alone.

[KerrAvon]

I’d like to keep Exile and the readers of Sun and DM.. (I’m one) happy, but I don’t want to pay any more for a bit of card and a photo than I have to.
Put my photo and name on a bank card and I could travel with that....
Why need a passport? In fact, I would agree to be microchipped, like a dog..... Why not ? Provided everyone enteringnEurooe does the same .......

To be fair, we don't know what would make Exile happy as he has been keen to stress that he has not offered any opinion upon whether he thinks the passport contract going to a non-UK company is a good or a bad thing.