EARLIER this week Teesside MP Simon Clarke co-authoured a piece in which he argued that Brexit offered the region a golden chance to rebuild its reputation as a global manufacturing hotbed.

“The opportunities are huge and can restore the North to its glorious past as the makers, creators and exporters,” he wrote.

Someone should have told Theresa May. 

We are a shadow of the region that was once a workshop to the world but the North-East still makes things: from the world’s best known faux meat product to security scanners which help protect the US president from terrorists.

Our car industry is so vital to jobs and exports Mrs May made a point of meeting Nissan bosses in the wake of her "Brexit means Brexit" speech to reassure them that Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the Japanese car firm, which includes hefty financial incentives funded by British taxpayers, will continue after the UK leaves the EU. 

No doubt a similar behind-closed doors deal could have been struck to ensure that the soon to return British blue passports would be made by current supplier, the De La Rue factory at Team Valley, Gateshead. Instead a French firm tendered the lowest bid and is set to win the lucrative and symbolically important order. 

This is the second slap of reality felt this week by hard Brexiteers after it emerged the UK wouldn't be taking back control of its fishing rights when we quit the EU next year.

Compared to the devastating impact which Brexit could wreak on our fishing industry in the next few years, to say nothing of the future of peace in Ireland, the passport deal is relatively small beer. But it exposes yet another lie that we were sold about Brexit giving us the freedom to reassert ourselves as an international power. Britain didn't have to leave the EU to change the colour of its passports from burgundy back to dark blue. The Home Office has already admitted that the UK voluntarily adopted the common passport design when it joined the EEC in 1973, but had not been obliged to keep it.

De la Rue has invested heavily in its Gateshead passport plant in recent years. Being able to boast that it has been entrusted to makes passports for its home nation has been a key selling point when the firm bids for contracts to make them for other nations. Post Brexit it won't be able to make such claims and there are genuine fears that jobs could be lost at the Gateshead factory in the wake of this week's announcement.

"The North of England and its economic power will prosper in the post-Brexit world, as we form strong trade relationships and export our home-manufactured goods across the globe," was the stirring conclusion of the piece written by Callum Crozier, policy director at think tank Policy North and Simon Clarke, MP for Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland. 

Invoking past glories, nationalistic slogans and symbols continue to be the stock in trade of Brexiteers. But in the rush to get our borders, waters, and passports back this crazy leap in the dark is so far succeeding in nothing more than putting British jobs at risk.