The Real Casualties of Brexit

Or the story of how people were lied to and are about to be again. REPOSTED

I was born in 1984, an ironic year to be born whilst we’re in a present day Tory government which eschews the truth for Boris-isms and a fervent reworking of the facts.

We’re in the age of ‘post-truthism’, where we’re led to believe that manifesto pledges and promises aren’t to be taken at face value, and that the political manoeuvring of ‘The Bullingdon Boys’ to facilitate the trashing of our political processes is ‘the will of the people’, albeit less than half of them.

Brexit has happened. We’re in the here-after of the process and many of us who voted to remain are looking to the leave voters for them to indicate what we actually won with this whole mess. For years leave voters kept crowing about how we were going to be a free and ‘sovereign’ nation again (we already were mind you) and that we’d be kicking out all of these undesirable EU people who had come here to simultaneously “take our jobs” and “abuse our welfare state”. These were things they could could conveniently point to over the horizon and say “you’ll see I’m right”, but we’re here now and looking around I don’t see a lot of the things they promised.

Take my house as an example. I live with a Romanian couple who both work, an Italian woman who is currently studying, and two British artists. According to Nigel Farage we were supposed to be sending all of the EU people back but they’re all still here. If you voted based on immigration and returning EU citizens, you didn’t get what you voted for.

What about the money we’ve saved to be able to put into The NHS; £350m a week apparently. This was actually walked back on the same day by Nigel Farage who said this on ITV’s Good Morning:

“No I can’t [guarantee it], and I would never have made that claim. That was one of the mistakes that I think the Leave campaign made.”

This wasn’t even 24 hours after the result and after Nigel Farage had sped around the UK using the red bus as a backdrop and made the £350m a week for the NHS claim numerous times.

In 2018 the amount we contributed to The EU was £11bn. The UK Govt spent £864.9bn in 2018 so our EU contribution (this included our rebate) is 1.27% of total expenditure.

To put into perspective how tiny our payments to The EU are, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon has a personal fortune of $193bn.

It’s been reported that in January exports and imports to The EU are down by 40% which should be of great concern. Our largest trading partner was and is the EU and no amount of waving trade agreements with Belize will make up for this shortfall. One can only hope that Covid has had a chilling effect that has squeezed the real figure and will recover once lockdowns cease and goods can flow.

A lot of was said about remain voters and organisations stoking up ‘Project Fear’ but what was derided by many Brexiters as lunacy has come home to roost but let’s talk about what has been lost as nothing has been gained.

I had always intended on moving back to the continent. I left Madrid in 2010 not because I wanted to leave but because I had no choice. I was a casualty of the 2008 economic downturn which bankrupted banks and lost people homes. As a business English teacher I was especially hard hit.

When large businesses like Sage and Deutsche Bank want to cut costs the first thing to go is training. Unfortunately that training provider was me. I wasn’t alone; many in my school had their hours reduced being forced to take work from different schools to make ends meet. I scrimped by for months with the help of my school and finished my contract for the year and returned to London.

As Madrid disappeared below the cloud level on my last flight out of Barajas Airport I had no idea that that would be the last time I would be in Spain as an EU Citizen.

It had always been my intention to return to Spain, or at the very least another European country for a new adventure. I’d planned on saving up to buy an apartment to split my time between London and the UK and wherever my home would be. This isn’t a new phenomena of home-ownership as there were 784,900 people living in the EU excluding the UK and Ireland in 2017. I wanted to retire to a relaxed life in the sun and return to the slower pace of life I’d enjoyed during my time away.

Now there are issues. Rental income tax in Spain is 19% for EU nationals which would have made it profitable to rent out my Spanish property whilst I wasn’t living there but as UK people are no longer classed as EU nationals the tax rate is 24% which amounts to thousands more. The effect of this is magnified with smaller budgets and cheaper house prices which may force me to have to live in Spain permanently. The problem with this is that I can’t do that either. I can only be in Spain for 90 days every 180.

You should see the issue as plain as I do.

So much was messed up for so many people for so few legitimate reasons. No doubt people all had their hill they were happy to die on with this referedum but I will never understand the motivations for damaging the rights utitlised by people like me. I was content to use my free movement to explore Europe and live wherever I wanted but I can’t do that anymore. All of the EU people I heard people mention on TV are still here but the real effect of this is that I can’t leave.

You didn’t make a castle to keep out the hordes, you made a prison to keep us all in.

Repost update: I can’t believe people are taking this cretin seriously again.