Thread for documenting effects of Brexit in your own situations

That should say "there's been no real tangible effect so far, FOR ME"

meh its just y2k all over again tbh

Working pretty hard on getting Australian citizenship.

Should be working on getting UK leave to remain, but the motivation comes and goes tbh.

I moved to New Zealand

brexit has turned me into a cannibal-in-waiting

glad to hear you're waiting

une veritable bebe du nom-nom

my partner is doubling down on Brexit since the EU banned Anne French cleansing milk. I told her that something that contains formaldehyde might not be the best shit to splash on yr face every night. As a protest I'm emigrating to Halifax, because it's the closest I'll get to Canada. Au-revoir you ignorant subhuman plebeians.

moving to Halifax to own the libs

glad to hear you're waiting

Working on Italian citizenship. (Lol any port etc etc)

GF is going for Irish citizenship, I have to wait for Scotland to secede from the Union and re-join the EU before I can claim my Scottish passport, braveheart.jpg etc.

Exchange rate is probably better for me, a temporary denizen of the UK, than it would have been otherwise.

I have been successful in becoming an Oversees Citizen of India

Overseas Citizen of India

I think I might actually be eligible for Portuguese citizenship, which I only considered looking into as a result of this thread but now I am definitely going for it.

I could get Irish Citizenship tomorrow probably but two things come to mind:

i/ They wouldn't want me back.
ii/I don't even think I like Irish ppl based on experiences of my own family.

so here i am in self-loathing exile until the famine comes!

My da has a grandparent born in Ireland (while their dad was in the british army, occupying it lol), so annoyingly, he who hardly needs it because pensioner is eligible and I'm not.

I recall some banter on this theme at the time of the 94 world cup

ii/I don't even think I like Irish ppl based on experiences of my own family.

Uh… Neutral statements are hard to come by when family is involved, but don't you find this a little extreme?

xp yeah I'm in exactly the same situation

xp

don't judge till you've been to Tralee and experienced at least a dozen midnight lock-ins in the pubs there!

you craven, latte-sipping, metropolitan snobs

tragically afaik i am 100% english and thus doomed to rot on this dank island

True cosmopolitans don't spoil their coffee (or tea, for that matter) with milk.

speaking as a full English gammon i'm sure everything's gonna be great

gammon, u say *salivates*

not a good time to be self-identifying as gammon.

I eat full English gammons like you for breakfast

> My da has a grandparent born in Ireland (while their dad was in the british army, occupying it lol), so annoyingly, he who hardly needs it because pensioner is eligible and I'm not.

curious... if he becomes an irish citizen, do you then qualify?

I can get a Mexican or a scotch passport no bother but I’m not fucking going anywhere, I have a housing association flat and will not leave it alive

Will judge all you cowards as I remain on this shitheap subsisting on innovative jam bathtub hooch and krokodil tbh

Xp no, I think I would only qualify if he'd taken out citizenship before I was born.

More concretely, I'm thinking being on holiday during the actual B-day mightn't be the worst idea. Worked out well during the 2011 riots, was spared the traumatising sight of our Gregg's burning down.

Greggsit

the best way to reject britishness nationalism and its rapacious seafaring tradition is ofc to remain here on the island. there's nothing more british than an ex pat

Problem with going on holiday is surely it could take you a lot longer to get home.

Is that really a problem

Thinking of May and Cleggsit, walking through the Alps - I think ogmor might be onto something there.

someone whose family has lived in the same corner of britain for generations will never be as british as a true product of empire like, say, rory stewart:

"Stewart, whose family seat is Broich House near Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, was born in Hong Kong, the child of Sally Elizabeth Acland Nugent and diplomat Brian Stewart. He was brought up in Malaysia and Scotland and educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and Eton College."

Basically Eddie Izzard's biog there, but slightly more posh + he's probably much funnier.

I think so far the only effect will be getting shafted on the exchange rate when we go on holiday next month, although tbf it has been this bad before (2008-11ish).

More worried about threats about medication shortages but they are just threats at the moment.

I'm a couple of generations shy of Irish Citizenship unfortunately.

The amount of work coming in completely fell of a cliff after Brexit but has recovered right now and seems to be weirdly buoyant right now. I entirely expect it to evaporate altogether in the New Year.

I've been trying to get the bf to apply for the Irish passport he's eligible for but he won't go for it so far. I am not eligible for any such things, alas

apart from food prices and the odd 3am bout of panic not much has changed in my life so far, but I know some people from a biotech research group and record numbers of the group have left to work abroad over the past year incl. a couple of good friends

with this in mind I have been particularly annoyed by Boris and D. Hannan's hot air about post-Brexit Britain becoming a magical wonderland of science, technology, research, new world-leading pharmaceutical corporations just springing up in every village, etc

I can only get a Irish citizenship if I lived there for two years but will still be able to live and work in the rest of the EU post-Brexit by sponging off my partner’s status.

The company I work for has benefited greatly from the trashed exchange rate as we sell overseas and convert to GBP; though it’s not clear what impact leaving the EU will have on the long-term business.

The biggest direct consequence is having to explain to completely mystified people in Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Germany, etc, etc, why it is all happening whenever I am abroad.

Lost two staff to Brexit recently. One left due to fear of what was about to happen. One potential hire then also ruled themselves out by emigrating. Both to Amsterdam. Make of that what you will.

I’m coming to Britain next week to take advantage of Brexit exchange rates and eat all your pies.

We have British friends coming to Paris for Brexit day, hoping it will help their quest for French residential status. Mostly they just want to keep EU passports.

Occasionally, for a few split seconds at a time, I feel awful for taking advantage of the tanking pound sterling but then I remember that I'd be utterly strapped otherwise and all is well again. Took a day trip to London for the first time yesterday and as I walked by Westminster Palace (it is every tourist's wont), a small band of anti-Brexiters, decked in EU flags, was chanting slogans while a portlier version of the Thief from Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was bellowing back 'we'll never surrender to Brussels!' in the most unhinged of tones, a pitch-perfect caricature of the jingoistic cretin so many continental Europeans picture whenever the topic comes up. His performance immediately absolved me of any and all feelings of guilt forevermore.

that Thief is national treasure Michael Gambon aka Dumbledore, headmaster of the gammonest, most reactionary public school in the country

michael gammon morelike amirite

brexit didn't happen while richard harris was head of hogwarts btw, seems significant

if "situation" includes "how it's affecting my mental health", then no. A horrible feedback loop of joblessness --> more time spent on Twitter --> more time spent reading about how crap Brexit is --> helplessness & less inclination to do anything much (inc apply for jobs) --> repeat

Ugh, GG, sorry to hear it.

Sorry to hear that, Grandpoint. The psychological effects of this are obviously things which manifest in different ways, particularly this elongated sense of limbo. Perhaps this isn't the best of threads, the idea was to separate out the tangible from the psychological sort of partly for this reason.

It occurred to me yesterday that I need to send hundreds of kg of extremely time-sensitive papers to Spain in April and, like Theresa May, do not currently have a Plan B in case the ports are stuffed.

I heard today from someone who knows someone who works at angl1@n w@ter and apparently because the chemicals they use to treat the water come from abroad they are having to stockpile in case of a no deal Brexit - the problem is that they are running out of warehouse space to store it. Between the purchase of extra chemicals and the rental of extra space we’re talking about a fucking massive amount of money being spent to make sure we don’t run out of clean drinking water a week into July.

According to the person I was talking to this is likely to result in a significant increase in everyone’s water bill whether we leave without a deal or not. This should maybe have been obvious but I hadn’t really considered how much a no deal Brexit would fuck things up just by being a possibility

the way that the political process has created so much uncertainty for people and business, to the point where businesses literally have no choice but to start making expensive contingency plans, and despite continual pleading for some certainty, is one of the many disastrous things this paralysed government has done.

and yes i know country and parliament are also paralysed, but it’s the sheer lack of engagement, the empty platitudes spoken directly to experts in their field over the last two years, that really mixes the gall into the blood. the sheer carelessness and indifference to anything other than the plight of the tory party.

no business can avoid making plans that take anything less than the next six months into account.

focused on business in this post but of course you can apply the same amount of pressure to affected people’s psychology and mental state.

adam tooze and david runciman (an extreme sports version of platonic white male academic liberalism) in conversation here covered it from a couple of interesting angles:

existential issues like where they live and with what rights they have in the places that they live and what the legal framework for their identity is.

...

i myself spent all of the formative years of my youth in germany, never acquired a german passport because it didn’t seem necessary and am now faced with losing the legal frame in which that dual identity made sense.

i appreciate that people who are affected in this direct way are a minority. and i have also come to understand what it means to be discussed in those terms - “oh but you’re a small minority”, which is indeed true. and what’s clearly gone out of the picture is the ordinary protections that liberals would want minorities to enjoy, as opposed to the rampaging of thinly based majorities.

there’s quite a number of things there which may stick a bit and are also telling: the sudden position of a privileged white male in a def perceived minority and the perception that liberals are good at protecting the minorities who have considerably more experience of that position than tooze.

nevertheless i thought the removal of a frame for identity and the assertions of a small majority almost amplified in inverse proportion to the slenderness of the majority were interesting observations.

So if one wants to be in France for B-day, what is the best way to get there? Will want to have a car, so flying and passenger train is out. Will the roads to Dover already be crazy in the week leading up to it? When does Operation Stack kick in?

I'm not sure I'd advise it as a course of action (says he, after inviting a bunch of people from Ireland and parts foreign to a wedding in mid-May, and whose hand is currently reaching towards the button marked 'bricking it')

So I've got a conference in Paris at the tail-end of March and am scheduled to return on the 30th. Perhaps I'll be barred from entering the UK as a EU national – I'm very curious to see what'll happen.

Well I just called the Home Office and their answer was basically 'We don't know. Anything's possible in these ludicrous times.' Truly inspiring.

Not sure what's going to happen to some of my students, some were between jobs while they were learning English.

still be able to live and work in the rest of the EU post-Brexit by sponging off my partner’s status.

i would be interested in hearing more about the mechanics of this, SV. is it simply that places you wish to live and work in will allow you to do so because you are there with your partner? or something more complicated?

^ narc

Xp, yes, that’s correct. Non-EU partners of EU citizens can apply for an EEA Family Permit in any EU country as long as the EU national is there for a purpose considered valid (work, study, etc) iirc.

Interesting, thanks! Not narc-ing, promise. Simply in a similar situation as you and reasonably desperate to get any kind of concrete information about what is happening.

In that case consult an expert as I’m absolutely not qualified to be giving advice!

That is my understanding of how it works at present, though, and irrespective of the UK’s future relationship with the EU, the worst case scenario would be similar rights to, for example, the American partner of a Belgian living in Spain.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/family-residence-rights/non-eu-wife-husband-children/index_en.htm

Kfb, read this page for a quick overview & cross reference with the immigration policy of whatever country you’re living in. Do you mind telling us about your circumstances? If you’re British, some countries have already made assurances.

Can't be arsed with renewing my Portuguese passport. This is my home, for better or worse.

Would you ever consider moving back? If given the chance, I'd love to spend a few years in Portugal fwiw.

Sorry should 'back' turn out to be an inaccurate assumption btw.

Funnily enough three of my cousins used the Portuguese connection to make passports and move here in the last three years. All have jobs and are settled enough. One got married to an Irish woman last year.

Another is planning a move but I somehow doubt that will happen now.

xxp = as it happens I am not Portuguese, just have the parental connection (Brazilian but not going back right now). I love Portugal and would consider going to Porto someday. But really, this is home for me and I want to fight for it - whatever that means.

Fair enough, I was just curious. It's sweet that you've got the option, remote though it may be.

Funnily enough just came across this essay on Pessoa, depression at the world and moving from the UK to Lisbon

https://lithub.com/living-fernando-pessoas-dreamlife-in-lisbon/

Many of the Portuguese people I’ve spoken to attribute this heaviness to the brutal dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, who maintained a suffocating grip on the country for over four decades through what’s known in Portugal as the “Three F’s”: Football, Fatima (Catholicism), and Fado.

In passing I love the idea that the shorthand for Catholicism in Portugal would be the name of a daughter of Prophet Muhammad!

That is my understanding of how it works at present, though, and irrespective of the UK’s future relationship with the EU, the worst case scenario would be similar rights to, for example, the American partner of a Belgian living in Spain.

great, thanks! that was my understanding too—I just wanted to check in case there was something I'd missed. "desperate" may have been over-selling my actual situation, I meant purely that I'm frustrated (as are not doubt a lot of people) about the utter lack of clarity coming from the UK gov about what's going on for UK citizens abroad. I'm hoovering up any and all information that I can.

Kfb, read this page for a quick overview & cross reference with the immigration policy of whatever country you’re living in. Do you mind telling us about your circumstances? If you’re British, some countries have already made assurances.

thanks for that link! my own circumstances are slightly, er... confusing. I'm a uk citizen (for my sins, apparently) that nominally resides (legally & fully documented) in an EU country but am self-employed and selling consultancy services to another EU country. my host country has assured my residence rights already, but I'm nervous about my status selling said services. to the best of my knowledge my "company" is a fully-fledged EU thing and so shouldn't be affected but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

my partner is a national of my host country, but we aren't married (and have actively been trying to avoid it). the further wrinkle is that for other reasons we are currently living temporarily in london, until august/september. I have no idea how this might or might not affect anything this year.

to contribute more directly to the thread, my own direct concrete effect of Brexit currently is that I have booked a flight next week to go and swap my UK driving licence for my host country's version on the advice released recently, despite previous EU commission documents suggesting that this won't be necessary.

kfb i am feeling that post, and your other posts, and the bewilderment.

i'm pretty straightforward relative to that - a non-EU spouse of an EU citizen living in the UK. i have an EEA-4 in my passport which says in capital letters "permanent residence card" yet which also says "expires 20 april 2022" :/ it's a uk vignette, but based on a right flowing from the UK's membership of the EU. shrug_smiley.gif

more worryingly, i have two kids, born here in the UK, both with american and french passports but not a UK passport (y because neither parent is british). what happens when they get older? want to vote? my instinct is do nothing, wait til they're older, sort it out later. there are a lot of scary newspaper articles about people getting royally fucked with this approach, but we really have done everything right. i came here on a fiancee visa, not a tourist visa, etc.

and we're like fully ready to apply for this free residence permit thing but like... where is it? when's it going to be ready? like literally brexit day apparently, or the day before??

Is it an expiry date like a passport has, which can be renewed?

yes, it is, except.. what if that route doesn't exist any more for to because breggzit

"EEA4? no we don't do those any more, sir"

You’ve been a resident here for over 15 years, might be worth a punt on British ILR (or ask work or your MP).

After that long can’t you apply for citizenship? Not that being a citizen, subject or whatever of the UK is a particular appealing thought. (I’m guess expensive and painful as well)

Expensive. The charges started to apply in 2003, and I’m so glad my ILR started in 1995.

Yeah it's about a grand, and if you fuck up part of the application and have to reapply you don't get your money back. I guess i should have done it before now but I NEVER NEEDED TO MASSIVE_SHRUGGIE_GRIN_BIGGER_THAN_THE_SUN

sympathies for all ilxors and those connected to em anxious abt the most shakey and direct possible effects of the shitshow

im thinking i should encourage mrs mac to investigate dual citizenship or w/e simply for the likely benefits in travel if nothing else. any reason why she shouldnt, or any other thoughts?

yeah i married a half brit btw idk if ive kept that pseudo under wraps til now but i guess brexits rly bringing the light to some ugly truths or w/e

yeatsian possibilities of half-brit to be examined later

My lesson from this all is collect as many passports and residencies as you can, when you can. I wish I’d done something to get Italian residency when I might have been able to.

ugh, horrible. close colleague who has lived in Spain for twenty years, has just found she didn't fill in a bit of paper six years ago, and could be in danger of not being able to claim citizenship. directly caused by the ruptures of brexit. it really has created life-upheaving psychological turmoil for a lot of people.

ugh, horrible. close colleague who has lived in Spain for twenty years, has just found she didn't fill in a bit of paper six years ago, and could be in danger of not being able to claim citizenship. directly caused by the ruptures of brexit. it really has created life-upheaving psychological turmoil for a lot of people.

this pretty much happened to me. i dropped the ball when i first moved, didn't realise i should have registered because my naive brain thought "but EU". had i done the right thing initially i would be holding a different passport right now. sympathies for your colleague, fizzles. surely there's some way of proving her residence to the authorities, even if it's not the official bit of paper?

not sure _kfb. we're hoping so. father was spanish and basically she's spent most of her working life there. but it sounds like it's going to be at the very least a massive pain, and will produce a lot of stress and uncertainty.

yeah, definitely. the premise of this thread is certainly interesting but maybe glides over what i've observed as the real consequences of the ongoing brexit shambles in myself and others: the psychological effects of several years of total, unmitigated uncertainty and seemingly no scope for anyone to be able to position themselves to reduce or mitigate their personal fallout before the whole sorry ordeal actually happens (at which point it's too late anyway). for all the talk of may etc playing games of 5-dimensional chess i feel like i've been doing that exact thing for years, too. and i'm exhausted by it.

not sure _kfb. we're hoping so. father was spanish and basically she's spent most of her working life there. but it sounds like it's going to be at the very least a massive pain, and will produce a lot of stress and uncertainty.

― Fizzles, Monday, February 4, 2019 4:05 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im p sure if you have a spanish parent you're eligible for spanish citizenship?

i’ll be sure to let her know.

I lived in France for over a decade. Moved home a few years ago to look after ageing parents, but with the definite intention of eventually returning to live in France. Then Brexit happened. I'm kicking myself I didn't apply for French citizenship while I was living there, it just never occurred to me that it would be necessary. Now looking into the possibility of an Irish passport, as I had an Irish grandfather.

possibly not the exact thread but was just chatting with a musician friend and i wondered whether any UK people have any specific knowledge/experience of this situation that might be relevant here?

I should really give some attention to releasing some of the backlog of other stuff mentioned in that email, although that’s been rendered slightly daunting by the fallout of Brexit - in terms of can I still get CDs manufactured outside of the UK and likewise hope to sell any beyond the bounds of this country without incurring customs/VAT nightmares?No-one seems all that clear on how bad it actually is...

Last night I talked to a friend (originally from the Middle East) who said things like: "after the Brexit vote I didn't recognise this country ... I haven't felt the same since ... this isn't the Britain I knew ... it's the worst thing that's happened to Britain in my lifetime".

This seems to me quite a standard sort of (liberal?) line.

But I reflected and said that I did not agree with it.

I did not vote for Brexit and I am not convinced that it is good policy. I think it was often voted for for bad reasons, and it has been advanced and pursued by very bad people.

But I do not think it is the worst thing that either the UK state, or the UK people, have done in the last 40 or 50 years.

I think my #1 contender for that would be the Iraq War.

And if you think "the British people are decent and moderate and I can't believe this jingoistic vote", you may have missed the Con election victories of 1983 and 1987, among others.

Compared to several other policies - including "austerity" (as well as war) - Brexit arguably has been a peaceful process and has not killed or physically hurt people. (This does not mean that I endorse Nigel Farage's false occlusion of the murder of a politician during the Brexit campaign - but I do not think that that murder was intrinsic to leaving the EU.)

Again, I do not personally think Brexit is a good policy. But I think that the view that it is worse than all these other things is, in fact, an ideological delusion.

Some things that might be worse than Brexit:

Iraq War
Afghanistan War
(other wars)
Miners' strike
Privatizations from c.1980 to the present, including rail
Sell-off of council houses without replacement, making it harder for people to find homes
University policy esp on fees
Ecological damage / contribution to climate breakdown (though I don't have figures for this)

I conclude: It might be accurate to say something like:

"Brexit appears to be a bad policy, voted for for bad reasons, and executed by bad people. It could make a bad situation even worse.

However, it is not at all exceptional in UK policy, but is in fact quite a *typical* instance of bad and damaging policy, executed for bad reasons, in the last 40 years, and actually so far minor in its effects compared to some of the even worse policies."

how does anyone articulate anything in this area given how thoroughly enclosed it all feels and how even the things in it that are real are embedded in this sort of discursive sludge of ideological bullshit so many levels deep

everything in the above post is true but there's no denying brexit has materially made everything much worse both in its immediate wake and apparently indefinitely and as much for its symbolic / ideological flexibility as the actual legal bullshit it's means supposed to mean on paper at any given moment (ie it's impossible to know where it ends and the general rightward fashy trend begins). "remain" should be considered part of the larger catastrophe of "brexit" here (I make no sense to people when I try to say this irl) which is in many ways a fairly typical british catastrophe but I wouldn't want to understate the catastrophe part

or the british part- a lot of people invoke notions of imperial decline but it rarely seems to go beyond metaphor & symbolism partly bc i suspect liberal & frankly left attachment to the british imperial project is way too real to seriously interrogate in a way that would actually maybe break through some of this mystification