“Brexit is changing our lives in Spain. I can live with it but it would have been nice if someone had told us.” | MDB files

TW
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We were told that our lives would stay very much the same and there was no need to panic but Brexit is already changing the lives of expats living in Spain. I suspect that we will get little sympathy from those living in the UK, if you don´t like your lives in the sun well come back to Britain will be the text book answer. Fine, I can live with but what annoys me is that we were not told or if we were the message never got across. The 90 day rule will have a direct impact on long-term tourists.

The fact that many British household favourites have disappeared from British supermarkets is another blow. If you want to move between Spain and Britain there is now a mountain of paperwork which your removal company will have to supply and you could even have to pay tax. Even a parcel from the UK now costs more.

Britain is now described as a “third country” by the European Union which means that as expats we have lost some of the rights we had taken for granted. In other words we were not given the full picture. Some of the problems I have highlighted above are not real headaches, they could even be described as teething problems. I suspect that the British government were scared that if they highlighted some of the obstacles which British citizens in Spain would face they could be accused of scare mongering or even the infamous “Project fear.”

Brexit will not have a direct impact on my life because I am old enough to remember the days when paperwork was a problem for Brits in Spain and expats would return from the UK will bulging suitcases of food stuffs. But that was then.