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vaznettiSo I do have some thoughts about Brexit. But they are under the cut, because they are long.
I met a European colleague for lunch the other day. She’s going on leave next term and her original plan was to do some research in Rome, but she’s postponing that because she doesn’t know what her status will be come 29 March. I was insufficiently reassuring, I fear, because I think it’s entirely likely that she and millions more like her will be in a lot of bureaucratic trouble come Brexit. It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to re-enter the country, I think, but that she might not be able to re-enter in order to work here.
A couple years ago I got caught up in what is now called the hostile environment – this is a Home Office policy aimed to prevent people from living and working illegally in Britain, but the way in which it was put into practice in effect caught a lot of people who were in fact legal, but lacked the right kind of documentation. In my case, I had a letter from the Home Office saying that I had the right to live and work in the UK permanently, and a stamp in my passport to that effect, but because the stamp was in an expired passport and the letter from the Home Office wasn’t on the approved list of documents, it wasn’t sufficient to prove to a suspicious employer that I had the right to work here – even though it was sufficient to leave the UK and re-enter indefinitely. That’s because the people at passport control are professionals, but the “hostile environment” devolved all these document checks onto landlords and employers – administrators or HR people or low-level managers, all of whom were under pressure from the highest levels to follow the Home Office lead, and the Home Office lead was to treat people as illegal until proven otherwise.
I had it easy – I didn’t need that particular job, or the next one I lost because of this policy, and I could take the expensive step of applying for UK citizenship, because I did have all my documents. Many of the people who have suffered the most have been people who had the automatic right to reside in the UK, because they never had to produce documents until the law was suddenly changed around them. This is what happened with the Windrush scandal. This is what I worry about happening to EU citizens -- to some extent its already happening.
So I didn't tell my colleague it would all be OK. I told her that the University would follow the government's lead, and that right now that meant making it easy for (already employed) EU citizens to keep living and working here. But that could change without warning, in a day. It's all based on promises from a government which hasn't kept its word about anything else so far.
I have no idea what will happen at the end of next month. Maybe we will leave the EU without a deal. Maybe May's deal will be passed by Parliament at the last minute. Maybe Brexit will be postponed. The absence of any real leadership in this country has been shocking -- which is why I am leaning more and more towards the no-deal Brexit as the most likely result, since that's what we'll get if no one does anything. A. reminds me that we will be fine (we will be fine; if we need to live off expensive local vegetables and expensive local meat we can do that, and if we really had to we could take advantage of the fact that our garden has been destroyed by badgers to grow vegetables where the lawn used to be) but we live in a part of the country that will take a real economic hit. A lot of people are not going to be OK, people we know, our neighbours and colleagues.
But hey, the Tory party won't fragment, and it's hard to see Labour winning the next election, and that's what matters, right? I mean, that's what matters to Teresa May.
I met a European colleague for lunch the other day. She’s going on leave next term and her original plan was to do some research in Rome, but she’s postponing that because she doesn’t know what her status will be come 29 March. I was insufficiently reassuring, I fear, because I think it’s entirely likely that she and millions more like her will be in a lot of bureaucratic trouble come Brexit. It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to re-enter the country, I think, but that she might not be able to re-enter in order to work here.
A couple years ago I got caught up in what is now called the hostile environment – this is a Home Office policy aimed to prevent people from living and working illegally in Britain, but the way in which it was put into practice in effect caught a lot of people who were in fact legal, but lacked the right kind of documentation. In my case, I had a letter from the Home Office saying that I had the right to live and work in the UK permanently, and a stamp in my passport to that effect, but because the stamp was in an expired passport and the letter from the Home Office wasn’t on the approved list of documents, it wasn’t sufficient to prove to a suspicious employer that I had the right to work here – even though it was sufficient to leave the UK and re-enter indefinitely. That’s because the people at passport control are professionals, but the “hostile environment” devolved all these document checks onto landlords and employers – administrators or HR people or low-level managers, all of whom were under pressure from the highest levels to follow the Home Office lead, and the Home Office lead was to treat people as illegal until proven otherwise.
I had it easy – I didn’t need that particular job, or the next one I lost because of this policy, and I could take the expensive step of applying for UK citizenship, because I did have all my documents. Many of the people who have suffered the most have been people who had the automatic right to reside in the UK, because they never had to produce documents until the law was suddenly changed around them. This is what happened with the Windrush scandal. This is what I worry about happening to EU citizens -- to some extent its already happening.
So I didn't tell my colleague it would all be OK. I told her that the University would follow the government's lead, and that right now that meant making it easy for (already employed) EU citizens to keep living and working here. But that could change without warning, in a day. It's all based on promises from a government which hasn't kept its word about anything else so far.
I have no idea what will happen at the end of next month. Maybe we will leave the EU without a deal. Maybe May's deal will be passed by Parliament at the last minute. Maybe Brexit will be postponed. The absence of any real leadership in this country has been shocking -- which is why I am leaning more and more towards the no-deal Brexit as the most likely result, since that's what we'll get if no one does anything. A. reminds me that we will be fine (we will be fine; if we need to live off expensive local vegetables and expensive local meat we can do that, and if we really had to we could take advantage of the fact that our garden has been destroyed by badgers to grow vegetables where the lawn used to be) but we live in a part of the country that will take a real economic hit. A lot of people are not going to be OK, people we know, our neighbours and colleagues.
But hey, the Tory party won't fragment, and it's hard to see Labour winning the next election, and that's what matters, right? I mean, that's what matters to Teresa May.
