DEAR JOHN

Calling all citizens of nowhere: a building society not near you is about to give you the flick.   

It's that time of year when you start thinking about your next tax return and if you are a British person living in an EU country, beware.  If you have accounts with a UK building society and have been honest about where you live, you may have already received your Dear John letter:

"Dear Mrs X

Thank you for saving with the Teapot Building Society.  At the end of 2020 the UK left the EU."    As if we needed reminding.

 "Therefore we have taken the difficult decision...."

I am given 60 days in which to close my accounts and make alternative arrangements. I call the building society's customer services and ask them to give me a technical explanation of why this change has been necessary.  They can't because the agent is struck dumb by my question.  I rationalise that it's about the loss of financial passporting arrangements between the EU and the UK.  Clearly the UK Brexit negotiating team didn't think this arrangement was important enough to retain as it clearly smacked of continuity of single market arrangements and therefore continued stranglehold by EU red tape.

I am assured by the customer service agent that someone will call me back and explain in more detail why this "difficult decision" had to be taken. No one calls.  So I email them and ask for a written explanation of why this "difficult decision" was necessary.  A week later I get exactly the same letter using the same wording only this time it's from the Contract Centre Assistant and not the Chief Commercial Officer.  It's a demotion.

I am no longer a customer and therefore don't merit an honest technical explanation for the change.  My partner, who continues to use a UK address of convenience, has received no such letter and will not be asked to close his accounts.  Make of that what you will.  In current circumstances honesty is not smart behaviour.

                                            Mill Road bridge, Cambridge, March 2020

It has long been known that one of the many unpleasant side effects of Brexit is UK passport holders resident in the EU losing the right to savings facilities.   My problem is the lazy and glib way this change has been communicated.  I suspect that to continue servicing accounts like mine will cost the building society money and accounts like mine are no longer profitable.  But they are unable to say this.  They can't be bothered.

How to be a citizen of nowhere

Ever since Theresa May called us citizens of nowhere I have tried to understand what she was trying to achieve. It was clearly intended to destabilise at an already difficult time. I guess the Windrush debacle has unpacked this for us nicely.

I must be the archetypal citizen of nowhere.  I was born in Australia and spent many childhood years in Asia, where my father was posted for work during the dying days of the colonial era.  I returned to a snowy Britain during one of the coldest winters, 1963.  Later in my career, I worked in southern Africa. Living outside the United Kingdom is second nature and part of my identity but it doesn’t disqualify me as a British citizen.  So I was disappointed but not surprised when in June 2016 the vote went the wrong way.  I say the wrong way because it has already had damaging effect on so many people, even the citizens of somewhere. Couples split and families don’t talk. Savings dwindle and businesses struggle.

Soft power evaporates and reputations tarnish. My country of nationality is losing credibility and contributing to the instability that certain interests are trying to profit from.

I moved to France in 2016 so I don’t quite have the required 5 years clocked up for permanent residency.  However, in that time the £ has lost almost 20% of its value, and it’s still falling.  Thank you Brexiteers for bestowing us this gift.  We already have our private pensions at risk.  But the Brexiteers’ turn to suffer will soon be here as project fear turns into project reality. I digress.

France has no compulsory registration process for new arrivals, unlike Spain and Portugal.  I am not one to ignore official advice so my partner and I decided to apply for the Carte de Séjour. It has never been necessary to do this but to disregard Ministry and Embassy advice seemed churlish.  So we dutifully waited the hour to be seen at our local prefecture one hot August morning, bulging files in hands.  I had the foresight to book successive appointments so that I could translate for my OH.  Unfortunately, we were called in at the same time, by two different officials.  I explained the problem and this is when the shouting started.

“You cannot expect us to wait just because your husband does not speak French.  Why is he here anyway if he doesn’t speak French?”

So I go to one cubicle with Madame Reasonable and OH goes to the other with Madame Shout.  The shouting gets worse as it becomes apparent that no communication effort is being made other than to shout loudly and hysterically, like a comic colonial from “It ain’t half hot mum”.  I end up translating everything Madame Shout is bellowing in real time, just like an app:

“She wants to know when you arrived”

“She wants evidence of your French income”

“She wants to know why you came to France in the first place”

“She wants to know why you have presented her with a baptism certificate”

This last one was particularly explosive;

“How dare you present me with this religious document. Don’t you know that France is un état laïc?”

This last statement was delivered with all the venom of a viper on acid.  I’m so glad I paid attention in French class.

After a good half hour of the shouting relay Madame Reasonable gets fed up with this that she releases me to intervene next door.  I walk in, answer all Madame Shout’s questions and pull out the relevant documents to prove income, both French and UK side.   As a parting shot Madame Shout accuses OH of not filing tax declarations appropriately.  I muse briefly on the how many times she must have said those words before pushing the said proof under her nose.

So what happened next?

A letter arrives in the post.  Clearly, my partner’s motives are not believed.  The letter asks for all explanatory documentation concerning our AutoEntrepreneur businesses and five years’ worth of bank statements.  These are downloadable but there is a two-page pdf document for each month. This is over seventy pages of A4, just for the bank stuff.  We have to supply all the household bills for the same period (water, internet) so that will be another 120 pages of A4 at least.

So we citizens of nowhere are busily murdering trees and spending small fortunes on document translations just to get something that we were told would be easily sorted out with a reciprocal agreement on citizens’ rights.  We wonder how those who might be older, perhaps frail, perhaps not so tech savvy would cope.  We conclude that they wouldn’t.

The prefecture letter also demands proof of identity as the passport, in my partner’s case, is not enough.  There is a small name difference, accounted for by the highly offensive baptism certificate.  I phone the British Embassy in Paris for advice and help.  The woman I speak to gives neither.  I email the British Embassy in Paris demanding they do something to break the impasse on my partner’s identity checks. They finally send me “une note explicative” that stresses the supremacy of the passport when establishing identity.  Theresa was right. We really are citizens of nowhere.

Is that a threat or a promise?

threat (noun) a statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or not done.

My first threat came from 8 year old David, an ardent admirer at primary school.  He threatened to kiss me in front of the boys while I was escaping his advances in the playground.  The next time I was threatened I was 14 and at secondary school.  This threat was not so benign and involved cigarettes behind bicycle sheds.

My most memorable workplace threat was from an erstwhile colleague - an unhappy pale-faced man who resented having to work with a woman.  His threats were overtly verbal and thinly veiled.  Sadly he never put anything in writing as he knew exactly how far to push it.

My next experience of being threatened came from a unexpected source.  My Mother did not want me to go through with a house purchase in an area that she considered beneath me.  Her way of dealing with this was to call, at a late hour of the night while my child was sleeping.  "I will never speak to you again if you go through with this" was delivered in the kind of chilled tones that remind you of a mafia movie.  I bought the house and she is still not speaking to me but this time over some other more imagined slight.

At work I have been threatened with demotion once and the sack twice.  I was working for a particularly insecure manager the first time and the threats were issued behind closed doors.  I gently laughed it off and told no one but I was deeply worried by this.  I was a single working mother with nothing to fall back on. Happily nothing came of it but I could not escape this manager.  Deliverance had to wait for his retirement. The second time I was threatened with the firing squad came from a more senior source.  The person issuing the threat was a newly appointed interim director of human resources.  I could barely understand what she was saying as I was too busy trying to put my mobile on record. The person on the other side of the desk wearing a Paul Smith suit and a fascistic grin was telling me to get ready to clear my desk.  On autopilot I asked her to put it in writing so that I could inform my solicitors of the grounds of my prospective dismissal.  Again nothing came of it and I never learned what my crime was. 

Threats have all one thing in common: a wish to exert power and control over the person.  The most effective threats are psychological in nature and come from those who perceive themselves to be powerful.  In fact threats are made by the desperate and the desperately needy.  Threats are part of the bully's arsenal.   I hope you do not receive any threats today, this week, this year or ever.

If you can read this thank a teacher

We are delighted to see our dear German friends, Nonie and Torsten.  They arrive in an aged BMW, fulfilling every preconceived idea about Germans loving quality cars that last forever.  We settle them in with rosé and catching up.  After a while I hesitate to ask the question but the right time never comes.  Finally I blurt it out:

"How did you feel on 24th June?".  The atmosphere immediately freezes and there is a pregnant pause.

Nonie was in tears.  She went to work on autopilot that morning to the tearful hugs of commiserating  staff room colleagues.  Torsten looks thunderous as Nonie proceeds to tell us about her classic stages of grief.  The last phase is anger and it is clear that this is still the major emotion.  They both feel utterly betrayed by a campaign that allowed so many lies to go unchallenged.  Yes, they agree that Cameron was incompetent and slothful and that complacency led to this outcome.

They avoid eye contact while they tell us what they really feel about living in the UK.  After 20 years teaching in state schools and approaching retirement they feel betrayed and are now planning to retire in Germany.  Devaluation of sterling will impoverish their pensions.  Living in Germany may devalue them further but staying in the UK is unthinkable.  Why should they stay, they argue, in a country in which they feel unwelcome, despite their years of service in secondary education?  I quip that an Irish acquaintance was able to vote but this merely enrages them - they had no vote. Mentioning the disenfranchisement of long-standing expats seems superfluous at this point.

I put it to them that the referendum was purely advisory, that the campaign was based on lies and that Parliament must be made to vote to trigger Article 50.  No, they say.  "You have voted, now you must go and go quickly" they retort, echoing the words of Frau Merkel and Herr Hollande.  Nonie and Torsten are reasonable, intelligent people and if they are thinking in this punitive way, then what are Europe's leaders thinking?  Will the UK be shown the door?  Is there a clause for this?  Will Merkel and Hollande tolerate the delays?  How the UK economy will cope with years of uncertainty remains to be seen.  How will we be able to recruit the native speakers we so desperately need to teach modern foreign languages? We are now seen as a nation intended on doing monumental self-harm - a quick look at European headlines is illuminating.   The post resignation humming of Cameron added some humour the very dark days after the referendum but left the reputation of British politics in tatters.  It is clear that the UK is to be punished for its folly and European capitals will gain from our loss.   And Germany will gain Nonie and Torsten.

The letter I always wanted to write

Dear Mum

I have spent too long trying to understand your decision.  It is time to break the radio silence.

When you voted OUT what did you think would happen?  I wonder what wrongs you thought would be corrected.  What benefits did you think would accrue from this act of defiance?  Did you think that we would wake up on June 24th to a new dawn?  Or did you have a sudden realisation that there was no plan and this could start going horribly wrong?

You live in a beautiful city with two Universities.  With your splendid university education behind you, rich with the input from many European teachers, and your two degrees did you not think about the negative impacts on our higher education system?  Did you not know about the Erasmus student exchange schemes or the European Commission grants driving research?  Did you not think about the many Europeans turning down job offers now because they no longer feel welcome?

Just what were you thinking of?  Did you not think of the prospect of an independent Scotland and your grandson's future?  Is a new passport a fair exchange for all those English tuition fees he has had to borrow?  Do you think he will want to come back to England now?

Is immigration really such a problem for you?  Where will you find your next Polish cleaner?  Do you really begrudge them a place here?  When I woke up from my operation, the one that saved my life, the anaesthetist was Spanish and the consultant was German.  The intensive care nurse was Portuguese.  Do you really want to throw these highly skilled and dedicated people out of the country?  Does it worry you so much that we need them to staff the NHS, an institution that has looked after you almost all of your life?   Do you think that the NHS is safer now that the country has voted, by a narrow margin, to leave?  And what did you think of the £350M promise?  Were you really taken in by that?   Did you see how quickly it was retracted after the result was announced?

Did you not think about the pension and healthcare arrangements of the 1.5 M British expats or did you swallow the line in the British press?  If you looked at the headlines you would be forgiven for thinking that this was only about inward migration from the EU.  Did you not realise that this is a two-way street? 

I really fail to see how you think that you have got your country back.  I can't see the benefits: - the loss of business confidence, major corporations threatening to leave, the jitters in the City, a downgrading by Standard and Poor, all of which will diminish further the pension pots of millions of pensioners.  Were you really convinced by the angry and threatening words of both campaigns?   I could see this coming: the wagging finger from Obama and the famous last words of Osborne were the turning points.  Did you not feel belittled and insulted by their words?  So why did you not think this through?