What sold us on France? The healthier work-life balance and excellent education system, plus the fact that we’re lucky enough to have jobs that allow us to work remotely. Ultimately, though, there was one factor that cemented our decision to emigrate: Brexit...it’s not just that EU nationals are turning their backs on the UK – in the year after the referendum, 17,000 Brits sought citizenship of another EU country, according to figures collated from embassies. The Brexodus is fully under way....A common refrain among the Brexiles I speak to is that they no longer recognise the country they grew up in. Raised in Northern Ireland, I’ve always grappled with my national identity. I was born in west Belfast and have an Irish passport – yet until I moved across the UK border in Ireland to study at university, my cultural references were, by and large, British. I watched Gladiators on television and read The Famous Five [Jesus!] I bought pic’n’mix from Woolworths and wanted to be Anneka Rice...In the 2012 Olympics, I felt a surge of pride for my adopted homeland....A French friend, whose children were born in London, moved her family to Dublin last summer. She felt increasingly uncomfortable about the rise in xenophobia (Home Office figures showed that hate crimes rose by a third from 2016-2017) and wanted her daughters to be “raised European”. Many Irish friends have returned home, too, uneasy with “jokes” made by colleagues and acquaintances about the Irish famine, shocked by the ignorance of many of their English peers...Nationalism isn’t confined to the UK. Nearly half of young French voters backed the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, in the country’s 2017 general election. But aren’t we better off wading through this mess together? ....When my husband and I lived in London, we became good friends with a neighbour, a retired diplomat in his 80s. He had loved serving his country, including a stint in the USSR during the cold war. These days, he no longer identifies as British, but as a citizen of the world....In a world of increasing uncertainty, I’ll take a bunch of bureaucrats over going it alone any day – even if that means uprooting. I spoke to four others who feel the same way.
Second up is 'Pip Batty, 40, a communications consultant, originally from Leicester, moved to Georgia [well-known for tolerance] in November. She now works in Tbilisi as an English language teacher'.
It’s a beautiful country and the people are so welcoming. I’m half Greek, and had been learning Greek for five years with the intention of emigrating there someday. Then Brexit happened. Suddenly, it started to become more challenging: a potential employer in Greece, who had been happy to offer me work, asked, “You have a Greek passport, right?” When I told him I was born in England, he just said, “Oh.”... There are people I don’t speak to any more because I know how they voted and I’m furious with them. People who were aware of my plan to move to Greece, people whose children are dating foreign nationals, how could they vote for Brexit? They weren’t thinking about any generation apart from their own...Two years after the referendum, we’re an international laughing stock. It’s humiliating to be British.... I don’t want to say I’ll never come back to the UK because I will always be British. I’ve been told I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I feel very strongly about this and will do for years to come. We’ve been wronged.
Journalist Alex Rawlings, 27, moved to Barcelona last November. He speaks 15 languages and holds Greek and British passports:
I was really excited about being in cosmopolitan, international London. This was the UK I had grown up in, a country that had been proud of its multiculturalism, its ability to welcome people from different backgrounds. A few weeks later, it voted to leave and that all evaporated...The fact that the Brexit debate centred so much on immigration made me uncomfortable....I wanted to move to a place where people go out on the streets and protest in their thousands, asking for more refugees.[Germany then? Has he asked the Greeks?]...The reason more people don’t move from the UK is because they don’t speak languages.
A cancer researcher chose Toronto (not Europe?)
The main things I worried about were access to funding, being able to ship chemical samples to mainland Europe and what would happen to my colleagues. Roughly a third are EU citizens...Mum is Sri Lankan and Dad’s a Geordie. I grew up in Hertfordshire and was usually the only non-white person in the room. You get used to it, but I definitely felt “other”. Moving to London for university was a revelation.
An 'Irish-British software developer' moved with his husband to Berlin
Josh and I were heavily involved in the remain campaign, turning our tiny flat into a hub on the day of the vote. At the time, I likened Brexit to the Scottish referendum, where everyone was panicking a few weeks beforehand but, when it came to it, voted for the safe option, the status quo.[Surely the safe option and status quo was Remain?]...Afterwards, I went through a very unhealthy, spiteful stage that I’m not quite out of yet. I stopped speaking to people who voted leave. One was a close friend, and I regret that now, but I’m not sure how to get back in touch...the main issue was immigration. I was born in Germany on a British army base and moved to the UK when I was seven. On my first day at school, the teacher mentioned my background and immediately there was this wave of xenophobia [he diagnosed this accurately -- at age 7]...I’ve got Irish citizenship, as my grandparents were Irish, and my goal in the next few years is to become German....Brexit is the failure of the progressives, rather than the work of the hard right, and that’s what makes me sad. The left failed to challenge it and as a result, we’re leaving the world’s largest trading bloc. If Brexit has been good for anything, it has made people on the left realise how important it is to stand up for globalisation and cohesion.
No comments:
Post a Comment