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Jul 5 at 19:11 comment added badjohn @phoog I wasn't trying to make any major point. Just that, for the moment, a blue UK passport won't have expired, just make sure it's yours. For a red one, check more carefully. As we both say, even though the old red ones say EU, they aren't.
Jul 5 at 15:23 comment added phoog @badjohn "of course, neither really is an EU passport": that is why the color is not relevant. Yes, the color is a rough guide to the expiration date of the document, but not much else. I have a green US passport somewhere that is definitely expired. The main reason I mentioned the lack of relevance in the color is that (for a while at least) there seems to have been s common misconception that the red passport continued to confer EU rights on those bearing it simply because it was red and said "European Union" on it. As you note, that isn't the case.
Jul 5 at 15:12 comment added badjohn I thought that the colour was due to whether it was issued pre or post Brexit. My wife's burgundy one looks like an EU passport and my blue one does not. Of course, neither is really an EU passport. So, colour is relevant in a way: burgundy means old and more like to be expired. Blue means new and, for the next few years, unlikely to be expired. Unless, it is really ancient and dates from before the UK adopted the EU style. I have one of these and I also have a similarly old green Irish one. However, the colour is just a suggestion: check the expiration date.
Jul 5 at 12:06 comment added Giacomo Catenazzi Looking in Wikipedia, colour is not like in Sweden: you can choose, but a way to identify series. The most red passport was a machine readable one (non biometric), and then one darker red biometric, the series A (now we are in series C), so read as "old passport" (or maybe "non-biometric passport" (which it is not more valid because it was last issued near 20 years ago -- Linguistically we use (Switzerland) the colour of driving license to say if it is the old one (blue) or the new one (pink), on how to interpret the categories.
Jul 5 at 9:14 comment added phoog @GiacomoCatenazzi the color is entirely irrelevant. How could it be relevant? Even your advice shows that the passport's expiration date is relevant, not its color. Sometimes people use color as a proxy for the passport's type, because countries tend to use different colors for diplomatic, service, official, temporary, emergency, etc., passports. But there the true distinction is in the type, not the color, and the red and blue UK passports are both of the same type, namely normal passports. They have the same legal status and effect.
Jul 5 at 7:20 comment added Giacomo Catenazzi I'm not sure the colour is not relevant. So to the questioner: check the expiration data of the passport and the issuing data (passport older then 10 years may not be considered valid)
Jul 5 at 5:40 history answered phoog CC BY-SA 4.0