Expats do not notice 'poisonous mistrust'

Our chance to say 'told you so'. One major predicted problem seems to have gone away according to teh Graun,but some people can still find problems:

“We continue to call on the EU and member states to protect the rights of UK nationals with faster implementation, longer application windows and clear communications, as the UK has done for EU citizens in the UK,” said a Foreign Office spokesperson....It coincided with a joint statement with the British ambassador to remind Britons their rights are “guaranteed” if they are living there before 31 December.

Sue Wilson, the founder of Bremain in Europe, a campaign group for Britons in Spain, said the fact that the Spanish government have chosen a simple declaratory scheme allowing rights to be “guaranteed” without an application for settled state a “great relief to British immigrants”....“We are grateful to the Spanish authorities for making the process as simple, seamless and painless as possible.”

 But:

“I suspect a large number of people are out there who may not understand that there is an issue that they have to deal with because of Brexit [really?], some of whom may not like to approach officials because they don’t know or fear how it might impact on things like taxation, health care,[or maybe because they are criminals on the run?] ” said Helen Weir, the director of Age in Spain.

  Meanwhile, EU solidarity seems as fragile as before:

a proposed €500bn in grants for the hardest hit countries was shaved down to €450bn. ...The Netherlands, along with many EU governments, wants to tie European funds to upholding democratic values – a plan staunchly opposed by Hungary and Poland, both subject to EU investigations on the rule of law... Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, compared Rutte [Dutch PM] to the communist police.....The communist police used “unclarified legal terms, exactly the same which is written in the proposal of the Dutchman,” said Orbán recalling his own encounters with state police as a young activist.

Bulgaria’s prime minister, Boyko Borissov, accused Rutte of wanting to be “the police of Europe”, while Poland’s leader, Mateusz Morawiecki, called Rutte and his “frugal” north European allies “misers”....After a second day of deadlock, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron walked out of midnight talks with the frugals

By Sunday, however, some EU diplomats thought western Europe’s united stance on the rule of law was beginning to fragment...Failure to agree will weigh heavily on the EU. The hardest-hit countries already have access to a €540bn financial cushion, but France, Germany, Italy and Spain see this as inadequate to the scale of the looming recession.

Even with a deal, this bitter summit has exposed poisonous mistrust between some leaders, as well as the EU’s struggle to deal with nationalists in central Europe, who are feared to be trampling on Europe’s basic values.

BItterness?Poisonous mistrust? Is this the Europe of suave diplomacy and that nice  M Barnier?