Pro-Brexit politicians in the United Kingdom are heralding a small aesthetic change to the country's passports that will take effect in 2019.
Britain's Home Office announced earlier today that starting in the fall of 2019, after the country is expected to have completed its departure from the European Union, newly-issued passports will have dark blue covers, rather than their current colour of dark red. It will be a return to the original colour of British travel documents, which changed from navy blue to burgundy in the 1990s when the European Union adopted common passport standards across all of its constituent countries.
The change is being hailed by anti-EU politicians as a sign of Britain regaining its "sovereignty" when it leaves the European Union. Passports became a small but significant rallying cry during campaigning last year in the EU referendum, with anti-EU campaigners claiming that the red passports introduced in the 1990s are a sign of the European Union's bureaucratic overreach.