Simon Calder
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Aug
Simon Calder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But of course, Air Lingus, uh Ryanair, they absolutely insist that you have a passport before you um fly.
from um Dublin or indeed any other Irish airport to Great Britain.
Well this is very messy.
Really good question.
So the Calmden travel area was the original frontier free zone set up shortly after the Irish Free State, of course, and just to kind of organise travel within uh between um uh the Republic and uh Great Britain now includes the Isle of Man and also the Channel Islands, and the whole idea has been that if you're an Irish citizen.
and you can move freely, you can live in the in in the UK, you can work, study, vote, um, uh have health treatment and so on.
And the same for British people who come to Ireland.
And
Uh that that it seems to be that we're going rather in the opposite direction, but the Home Office here stresses that this is a decision taken by the ferry companies.
They're almost saying, Oh, nothing to do with us although I certainly understand from people within the uh ferry industry that this is because the Home Office is demanding more and more information from the ferry companies.
But of course at the same time every day in or many days in the UK we see boatloads of um uh migrants arriving in the UK undocumented, of course that is an entirely separate subject.
But um if you are talking about controlling borders, well i the two do not sit well together.
Well, look, actually, it's been going on for a couple of years in various parts of the world.
What's different about Dubai is that they are kind of looking at the whole airport holistically and working out how they can basically register your details so you don't ever need to show your passport or even a boarding pass to people.
But the idea that passport control can be done by using facial recognition, which is
fundamentally depends on AI, has actually been around for, as I say, a couple of years and is working extremely well, for example, in Indonesia, where an awful lot of people will go to the Hajj in
Saudi Arabia, they come back in their thousands.
Now, that would take a long time to process.
But if you've got facial recognition, then you can literally just let them walk through and the system is working out who's who and if somebody isn't identified.
um then they are kind of taken to one side but uh it's even been used across in manchester um just for flights involving british passengers and again um you know the government in the uk has all their uh passport photos so they know what they look like and if therefore if they sort of see oh here's simon calder yes we've got his um
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