‘Don’t have the credentials’ meaning they’ve been working cash-in-hand for other Brits for years and not paying any tax. Fuck 'em.
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Quite. The bar for showing residence is incredibly low:
Among other requirements, you must prove that you resided in Spain before the end of the transition period (e.g. through your registration certificate, rental contracts, property ownership, employment contract, registration at a school
In other words, Spain wasn’t being difficult. If you’d legally used your FoM, you got to stay. The only way to have none of these documents is to have basically been illegally resident in the first place.
I fairly obsessively followed how Germany was going to deal with resident Brits through a couple of big and semi-official Facebook groups, the BMI webpage and the local Foreigners’ Office website, and while these weren’t always 100% consistent, there was no doubt that there would be some post-Brexit process and being legally registered here was the absolute minimum. A very quick search finds pretty similar information for Spain. Nobody can claim they didn’t know. Dicks.
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As a counter point, I’ve had family and friends living in Spain for 20+ years. Dealing with the Spanish bureaucracy is significantly more complicated than you would expect.
That being said, you can get what you need mostly, it’s just hard. These people have had years and years of notice that brexit was going to happen, so there was plenty of time to get their ducks in a row.
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Italian bureaucracy is also terrible, and Germany’s isn’t exactly a doddle, but I’ve friends in both who are sorted, principally because they actually applied well ahead of any deadlines.
I can’t decide whether I imagine the German bureaucracy to be exceedingly efficient, or whether I imagine it to be some dystopian hellscape of over precise and labyrinthine legislation.
I don’t understand what you are trying to say…
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i’m living in Germany and my vote goes to “dystopian hellscape”. definitely!
efficient? like the german covid vaccination campaign? german “health” bureaucracy has ruined it all completely.
i think only Brazil has done worse, thx to dumbass Bolsonaro.
The thing that is a bit weird and different in German bureaucracy compared to the UK is how incredibly local the administration is. In the UK, you mostly just deal with one central national organisation by post or the internet, and that’s it. I think the one time ever that I had to deal with our town hall in person was to arrange for a civil wedding.
Here everything seems to be done by the local town hall and you have to go there in person for everything. Seriously, having to turn up with your car’s licence plates is just weird. On the plus side, it means that you’re dealing directly with a human being, on the downside you might get a stroppy or under-informed human being. I went for my post-Brexit residency appointment and the officer got the validity period wrong, but fortunately was corrected by the computer. Registering that we’d moved here was interesting when the lady struggled with our British wedding certificate. I guess because we’re not in a city, the local admin don’t see unusual cases that often.
On the residency point, my German residency card will arrive in 3 months, which is painfully slow, but in the meantime I have a “Fiktionsbescheinigung” which is an impressively official looking document confirming i am allowed to live and work here until the real thing turns up.
This pragmatic solution feels very German to me.
So not a dystopian hellscape IME, just different, although possibly it helps that I’ve encountered only reasonable people so far…
Yeah, the vaccine rollout is bollocks though. It seems to be at about 15% in all the Länder so far, which is better than I thought but still not impressive. I blame the German love of endless meeting rounds before adequate consensus is reached and everyone feels able to take a decision (possibly a discussion for a different day and a different thread).
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I think, every now and then, that I’ve made some kind of peace with the knowledge that Brexit has happened. We’ve been through the whirlpools of denial, the waterfall of anger and are now flopping about in the stagnant pond of acceptance.
Then I read something so face-punchingly asinine like these tweets from Lance “Forman”, fish salesman, former Brexit Party MEP and all-round twat that it all comes back. This is the same bloke who wants government compensation for the harm caused to his exports to the EU by checks notes Brexit.
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Another Brexit dividend.
Welcome to Upsidedownland.
Yes, this is a massively overused gif, but I read more of that site and the following perfectly summarises my feelings:
I particularly enjoyed the “Britain’s nuclear options” article. Like most nuclear options, you might do some damage but your own country will end up a charred pile of rubble in the process.
On the plus side, it’s a good glimpse into the mind of a brexiter, that tangy mix of affronted victimhood and wilful ignorance.
Edit: Betteridge’s Law applies to the headline. Specifically, no, the Commission and the Council almost certainly want the thing ratified so everyone can get on with important stuff and the UK be the loud, annoying but generally iignorable sideshow it clearly wants to be. However, because the UK have been behaving like twats, the Parliament might get arsey about it, which might actually be harmful all round but isn’t an act of war.
First of all, Discourse, fuck you.
Secondly, it’s interesting to see this sort of deviation from consensus reality grind up against consensus reality and produce more friction (and excuses). I do wonder what is going to bring it to a halt though.
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First, that Discourse message gave me the first genuine laugh of the day.
Second, I suspect nothing will halt it. There’s no consequence so bad that can’t be fitted into the affronted victim worldview. No amount of reasoned explanations that there was no way to resolve all the NI promises once May coloured in her red lines, or that the TCA is not a free trade agreement and will inevitably involve non-trade barriers, or of just-in-time supply lines, or rules of origin, or SPS regulations, or all the other tedious facts, will penetrate. EU malign, UK innocent victim is a simple and immovable story. Shit, my whisky glass is empty suddenly.
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The best thing about the BBC is they’ve been put in a terrible position by their own actions, using their charter to provide balanced reporting as a Trojan horse to insert far-right views, and are now looking at being defunded because the far-right think they’re too far left for providing any balance at all, and those on the left are no longer willing to defend the BBC because they’ve been staunchly presenting far-right nonsense.
Essentially the whole Brexit fiasco has been literally traumatic for huge sections of the population - on both sides - and there is no acknowledgement or mitigation. Do not expect healing any time soon.
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Brexit is done right? People got what they wanted. Borders, identity, self-determination.
Now, the identity might not align with what was expected, but it is a unique identity!
I suppose the pull of victim hood his so strong even the all conquering white angle Saxon Protestants wanted a piece of it 