C4 news last night showed that the decision to leave the EU is having major consequences for people who thought the consequences would apply to everyone else, but never them. It turns out that many people voted to leave Europe in the 2016 referendum because they objected to immigration and so emigrated to countries like Spain, calling themselves ex-pats in order to distinguish themselves from proper migrants. In doing so, they knowingly voted to end the free movement of people, not realising that the end of free movement would affect them, too. I didn’t feel so much sorry for these migrants, I felt pity.
I have no interest in emigrating to another country. Despite the mess our country is in and despite the abysmal climate, my life, my family and my friends are here. However, as a liberal-leaning person, I fully support the right of others to live wherever they want in Europe. I know plenty of people who have left these septic, as opposed to sceptred, isles to work or to see out their latter years under a different sun. When the EU referendum came along, I voted to maintain the status quo for the benefit of my family, my friends and society in general. My side of the argument lost and now, finally, we are leaving Europe. If I need to get over it, then so to do those who voted for it.
It must be frightening, especially for elderly British migrants whose futures are massively in doubt. Imagine upping sticks, flogging your British home and setting up in a little British community in the sun, as hundreds of thousands of people have done, particularly on the Spanish Costas. You think this is going to last forever. Life is just like it is at home, but the booze is cheaper. You can still watch EastEnders and Coronation Street, you can still eat British food in the myriad of English eateries and you don’t even need to learn the language. Then, someone comes along and threatens to take it all away and you remember you agreed with them when they told you how much better life would be once Britain pulled up the drawbridge to the world. Those foreigners couldn’t come here anymore. What a shock to find that you, too, were a foreigner!
Let’s be clear about this. A crash-out, no deal exit from Europe would be catastrophic for everyone but imagine if you are a British migrant in your little community in Spain. You’re getting older and sooner or later you will get sick. When the reciprocal health arrangements disappear, how do you pay for treatment? What happens when your British pension, already diminished by the post Brexit vote sterling devaluation, stops being uprated every year? You want to go home, but how do you afford it? You can’t. It’s not a dream: it’s a nightmare.
“Have you shot yourself in the foot,” asked the C4 interviewer to the Brexit-supporting ex-pat migrant.
“Yes, probably,” he replied, burbling something along the lines of freedom of movement was something he thought only applied to people who weren’t “proper Europeans”, whoever they were. (I suspect he meant people who were perhaps less white than him, although seeing his skin cancer inviting sun tan, he barely looked like a white man at all.)
I’m afraid he lost me at that point, but then he’s not the only person who felt like that. He was sold a vision by an elite, rich, small state, low tax English nationalists that would see Britain set free, liberated from the evil European Union. Just around the corner there would be the sunlit uplands where everyone would be better off and Britannia would, once again, rule the waves. Instead, he was facing the very real possibility of having to return to the country he couldn’t leave quick enough. Bloody immigrants. They’ve ruined everything.
Still, the British migrants parrot the line that their Spanish hosts won’t want them to leave their adopted country because their money talks and they can’t afford to lose it. If I were them, I would not hang my hat on that desperate assumption. At the very least, it will become far more complex and expensive to remain, to use that unfortunate word that we must now learn to let go.
Everything is coming home to roost now, including many of the migrants who sought refuge in a foreign land to escape the chaos and division that was beginning to devour Britain. Back to the rain and wind, the longer queues at A&E, hospital waiting lists and the social care crisis that awaits them. Welcome home. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it?
As I have said a million times, I never wanted change like this. In many ways it barely affects me, certainly much less than many who voted for it. And therein lies the paradox. Vote to stop immigrants coming into the country where you live is apparently all well and good until you become that immigrant.
I could say, “Get over it: you won” and actually I just did. And be careful what you wish for. Either way, don’t blame me. I was always on your side.
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