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Some people whose lives we voted to ruin
Nov. 12th, 2018 06:20 pmRadio 4's Money Box Live had an episode the other day about the difficulties the 1.3 million UK citizens living in the EU are about be faced with. These people, along with the over 3 million EU citizens living in the UK, have been almost completely ignored in the Brexit debate. People who called into the programme included:
Yvonne - lives in France, travels to Switzerland every day to work: "Companies will look at me and say 'If you're not an EU citizen, I don't want to hire you, because the paperwork is complicated and I can get anybody who's an EU citizen to do the same job. I have two kids who are studying, and my family relies on my salary, so I really don't know what would happen."
Delia, 71, has lived in Italy for six years: "The healthcare, I think, is a really, really big problem. If there is no deal, then we have no rights to anything, and at our age it is a really major issue. We can't get health insurance, the cost of having to deal with everything privately is prohibitive.
Anne, 68, lives in Italy: "I came over to the UK with my husband because we became grandparents yesterday. While we've been here we've been thinking 'how can we be grandparents to this lovely granddaughter, and so we put in an offer on a house, and the offer was accepted, we got very excited, and then we thought about it and thought that – we don't know if (husband) Mario is going to be able to live here after March – on Brexit day all our rights cease, and we may not be able to live together in the UK. So we've had to cancel that plan. Our dreams have collapsed."
Later in the programme we hear from:
Zoe, who lives in Italy and provides translation services to customers in Germany, France and Italy. As things stand, after Brexit she will not have the right to provide services to companies outside Italy – as that would count as exporting services. Getting Italian citizenship would take four years. She wouldn't be able to return to the UK with her Italian husband unless she met a certain income threshold. As she's self-employed she would have to be established in the UK for two years to prove she could earn enough money to bring her husband over. They have a newborn baby.
Listen to the full programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00010yt
Yvonne - lives in France, travels to Switzerland every day to work: "Companies will look at me and say 'If you're not an EU citizen, I don't want to hire you, because the paperwork is complicated and I can get anybody who's an EU citizen to do the same job. I have two kids who are studying, and my family relies on my salary, so I really don't know what would happen."
Delia, 71, has lived in Italy for six years: "The healthcare, I think, is a really, really big problem. If there is no deal, then we have no rights to anything, and at our age it is a really major issue. We can't get health insurance, the cost of having to deal with everything privately is prohibitive.
Anne, 68, lives in Italy: "I came over to the UK with my husband because we became grandparents yesterday. While we've been here we've been thinking 'how can we be grandparents to this lovely granddaughter, and so we put in an offer on a house, and the offer was accepted, we got very excited, and then we thought about it and thought that – we don't know if (husband) Mario is going to be able to live here after March – on Brexit day all our rights cease, and we may not be able to live together in the UK. So we've had to cancel that plan. Our dreams have collapsed."
Later in the programme we hear from:
Zoe, who lives in Italy and provides translation services to customers in Germany, France and Italy. As things stand, after Brexit she will not have the right to provide services to companies outside Italy – as that would count as exporting services. Getting Italian citizenship would take four years. She wouldn't be able to return to the UK with her Italian husband unless she met a certain income threshold. As she's self-employed she would have to be established in the UK for two years to prove she could earn enough money to bring her husband over. They have a newborn baby.
Listen to the full programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00010yt
