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Comment by gertrunde | Hacker News Reader

One of the more fun related items...

You are not eligible for an ETA if you are a British citizen.

On first glance, that sounds fairly common sense, as if you're a citizen, why would you need/want one? But there's a wrinkle...

It means that British citizens with dual (or more) nationality must have a UK passport, and must travel into the UK using it, and cannot use their other-nationality passport(s) like they used to be able to do.

Which means paying for a British passport if you didn't have one before.

(There is an alternative, but it's silly money, £589 vs £95 for an adult passport).

And IIRC, the whole thing is because of the new electronic border system that's being introduced or something like that.

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Some British women now find themselves in a Kafkaesque situation where the UK home office refuses to renew or grant them a UK passport, because their foreign passport is under a different name. (Greece and Spain are mentioned in [1], but I know people in France affected by this)

Where previously these women could at least travel to their birth country to visit dying relatives on their foreign passport, they are now locked out waiting two months for a £600 entitlement certificate. Meanwhile, non-British visitors can just pay £16 for an ETA on this whizzy app.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/16/border-rule...

While this is a real problem and I do have relative who had this issue like this there are ways to get new UK passport without paying £600 or changing legal name in other country.

It's just take digging in government rules and arguing. As long as it's not the first UK passport it's doable.

I'd love to hear any advice on that!

My friend went round and round and sent many documents back and forth for over a year trying to renew her British passport, to no eventual avail. UK authorities were extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful. The offending "misnamed" foreign passport was long expired and French authorities required a valid British passport to renew it - she was left without any passport at all for over a year, until the French took pity and provided an alternate path to renew her French passport.

Hey. I will ask how exactly it was solved and try to reply here in a day or two. My relative is woman so problem was that she had her original name in a passport from country of origin and UK passport had her name after marriage.

> It means that British citizens with dual (or more) nationality must have a UK passport, and must travel into the UK using it

This is a pretty common practice for most countries.

Sure, but it was a change that was slipped through under the radar without any proper justification for it (the situation wasn't even clarified for dual nationals until quite close to the deadline).

I'd have thought the justification was fairly obvious in that they can keep a better eye on British passport holders

Amazingly obvious to jamespo is not normally the standard by which new immigration rules are introduced.

Amazingly != fairly, but I doubt any civil servants responsible for drafting this are going to reply to this thread just for you

Isn’t one of the use cases to help determine tax domiciles?

UK isn’t the only country that does this.

eg South Africa allows dual but you’re not allowed to use the other passport at border or within country.

I can kinda understand it from give perspective. Harder to track people when they switch constantly. People flying in on one passport and out with the other etc

Most countries require their own dual-nationality citizens to enter on their local passports not foreign ones, Britain was an exception before. It's not unreasonable to ask for the British passport, and I say this as someone affected.

ok, did not know that, every day is a school day!

But hey the sensationalist comment you originally posted gets your lots of upvotes…

> It's not unreasonable to ask for the British passport

Why? What legitimate purpose does this serve?

Keeping track of which of your citizens are outside of the country. Ensuring the state knows you are a citizen and should be treated as such.

France had a weird issue recently about the media talking for ages about someone who committed a crime while the state had asked for him to be deported months before on the basis of his foreign passport and it took weeks for someone to finally notice that the guy was actually French. It made the police looks clownish.

That's your guess. The UK authorities have never given this reason.

You were asking for legitimate purposes. That's some of them.

I asked for the purpose. You guessed at the purpose. those are different.

Counting the sheep in the herd.

Even if one takes this as legitimate, the "foreign" passport gives enough information already (otherwise they couldn't prevent me from acquiring an ETA with it).

I've read the issue is that some countries require you to renounce your previous nationality to get citizenship, and people have taken advantage of not needing a British passport by lying about renouncing their British citizenship.

I've seen claims this technique was actually recommended by the British consulate, no idea if that's true.

> I've read the issue is that some countries require you to renounce your previous nationality to get citizenship, and people have taken advantage of not needing a British passport by lying about renouncing their British citizenship.

Oh that's an interesting little loophole that might be a[nother] reason. A handful of EU member states disallow dual citizenship, so those taking advantage of "EU and British" might be impacted by this.

Found the article, it was Spain specifically that requires it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/dual-nation...

One of my former colleagues would refer to this as "introducing an unnecessary constraint"

Additionally: An Irish passport gets you into the UK just as well as a UK one does.

This new rule might be problematic for those Northern Irish people who identify solely as Irish (as is their right under the Good Friday Agreement) and who only hold an Irish passport: unless things have changed since the DeSouza case [0], the UK Government and UK law treat everyone born in Northern Ireland (as long as at least one of their parents meets citizenship or residency requirements) as a British citizen, regardless of their opinions on the matter. The UK Government holds that this is compatible with the GFA because you can renounce your British citizenship; but you have to pay hundreds of pounds to do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_DeSouza

Small point, if you're traveling from republic of Ireland you don't practically need a passport or an ETA, you can just drive over the invisible border

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