Passport e-gate outages are an embarrassment to Britain

Queues that stretch for hours. Technology that doesn’t work. And a system so poorly designed that this isn’t the first time it’s broken down. There appears to be a perfectly innocent explanation for the failure of the passport e-gate system across the UK’s airports last night – a ‘system network issue’ – despite the wilder conspiracy theories that immediately started circling on the internet. But one point is surely clear: the e-gates have become a national embarrassment – and if we can’t rely on them to work, we should get rid of them.

The scenes at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester were disgraceful. British citizens trying to return home were left waiting on airport floors for hours. Foreign businessmen and tourists, some of whom were coming to ‘Global Britain’ for the first time, were greeted by scenes of chaos.