that waiver document is ridiculous though. what does it cost to get a new passport at a british embassy? as a german i can get a temporary passport within a day at any german embassy for about 30€ or 60€. enough to travel back home.
Completely untrue. I have done so perfectly legally.
"Pissed off" here meaning that you were likely to get "randomly selected" for secondary screening.
It absolutely has been the convention that you use the local form of identity if you have one. This ETA issue is just them pushing that a bit harder.
This changed on Feb 25, 2026 for the UK. :)
UK citizens must now enter on their UK passport (or a citizenship certificate thing + foreign passport), and are not eligible for visa waiver programs (because they're only eligible for people using certain passports, which UK citizens obviously now can't be using).
I was announced in Nov '25, and has cause a mad scramble for lots of people as the passport office has been massively backlogged by the predictable queue of people needing passports suddenly, when they didn't need them before.
The law is 8 U.S.C. 1185 - "it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport."
In the past, the penalty for violating this has generally just been "a stern talking to," like you said. But no guarantees on that.
Bullshit. Each country makes their own rules on this (being a sovereign country) and there is absolutely not a “global convention”
A violation of what law?
She also had to go through a very expensive process to renew her British passport last minute.
Silly system.
Some of that, though, is a side-effect of the ubiquitous "Bank ID" identity tool - which suffers from the same dependency on Apple/Google that the article complains about. Given the current political climate I think the EU is going to have to figure something out to address this sort of thing.
Frankly it strikes me as being rather silly to not have a British passport as a British citizen.
Yes, I personally am not deeply inconvenienced by this, but that doesn't make it ok. Others are on much tighter budgets than me.
If obtaining a passport from a country where you are a citizen is such a hassle for you, you must focus on the only logical solution.
Also, I suppose that the complaint comes only from people who live in countries that have visa-free travel to the UK and/or EU countries and who were just saving a little/money hassle otherwise they would already have an up-to-date British passport.
I'm a dual US/UK citizen, and the US has always required citizens to present their US passport to enter the US. The UK is doing the same. It's not a big ask.
Note that this is an active change to the status quo. Up to and including today I had no need for my UK passport when entering the UK on my Swedish passport. From tomorrow I cannot do that and there's no reasonable explanation given for why this must change.
Edit: And while obviously this is not a big deal for me financially, there are a bunch of pensioners in the 3 million Brits living abroad and for many of them the £100 fee is a significant and unnecessary outlay.
Nothing to complain about, really.
As a dual citizen living outside the UK, to visit Britain I cannot apply for an ETA. Instead I must have a British passport, OR apply for a waiver document for an eye watering £500.
Obviously this makes no sense, because if the ETA is suitable for a non-British citizen it ought to be fine for a British citizen who happens to have a non-British passport, but objections have all received non-answer-answers that strongly suggest the bureaucrats didn't think of it and can't be bothered to implement support for the situation.
I hate paperwork...