Brexit Consequences

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Opti » Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:58 pm

If people had been paying attention since June 2016 none of this needed to happen to them. I* made my decision, and started making proper plans since the referendum result was announced. Anyone could have done the same, anyone.


* I'm not the brightest, but I can tell which way the wind is blowing.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by sTeamTraen » Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:54 pm

shpalman wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 9:16 am
Officially you're supposed to do it within a year, in Italy at least.
This is (AFAIK) not the case if you have one of the post-2013 (the date of the relevant directive; actual licence issuing dates will be later) EU licences.

In fact the new rules are an example of the EU working as people imagine it does, because since whenever each country started doing it right, you no longer have a French or Italian licence; you have an EU one. There is no requirement to change these new licences for "local" ones if you move to another EU country. And when it expires, you don't have to go back to the country that issued it: You renew it in whichever EU country you are living at the time.

So it is actually quite reasonable that UK citizens who had fairly recent UK (=EU) driving licences had not changed them over in the preceding years. They should probably have started asking about this after the Withdrawal Agreement went into effect (end-January 2020), but even then the member states did really not know what to do. Spain was so overwhelmed that they issued an e-mail address (narrator: "Spain never lets you do anything by e-mail") where holders of UK licences could register their interest in changing their licence over. They only had to send an e-mail to that address by 2020-12-31.

A British friend of ours who worked in a senior legal position for the EU, and wanted to continue driving in the EU even in the case of a no-deal Brexit, even went as far as to take and pass a French driving test in 2019. He reasoned that if it all went wrong, his French licence that he obtained by trading in a UK one might not be valid, because when you trade one licence in for another, the new says on it what you traded in for it. And he was genuinely worried that with no-deal, France or another EU country might not recognise, not only UK licences, but also the fact that your ability to drive had been certified by the UK. And indeed, some of this wasn't sorted out until after the Withdrawal Agreement, in the Christmas Eve EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Note also that the UK licences not valid issue also affects EU citizens who passed their test in the UK and want to move back to their home country. They, too, will have to take a test when they return. Not so good a story as hur-hur-hur-everybody-look-at-the-racist-gammons, but there you are.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by shpalman » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:41 am

When I first registered mine, there was a slightly tedious trip to the Motorizzazione and then a big sticker to attach to the counterpart or a small sticker to attach to the photocard or something.

Ten years later when it was time to renew (i.e. 2015) the rules had changed, and I had to go to a driving school in which a "doctor" pointed to some letters and then I got issued an Italian photocard but they didn't take the UK photocard off me (I also renewed to UK one, with my parents' address on it).

Some not-EU countries require taking the test here; some others may not require that but they take your original licence off you. It's the difference between having your licence "recognised" here and "exchanging" your licence for a local one.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by sTeamTraen » Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:39 am

Mrs sTeamTraen has two driving licences because when she moved to Brussels in 1980 they gave her a Belgian one and handed back her UK one. In those days there was no computer connection, so DVLC as was/DVLA as is now (known, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Swansea residents as just "DVL") never knew that she had traded it in.

However, the UK one is useless for all practical purposes as, unlike a foreign one, it can't even be used to hire a car in the UK without the bit of paper saying you don't have any outstanding convictions (or something like that), which you can only get if you have a UK address.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Mar 31, 2021 11:42 am

I never drove in the UK so my licence - and driving education - is fully Portuguese.

I have since used it as a tourist with no problem. The guys in the rental place didn't seem at all phased by an obviously English guy whose licence says Carta de Condução at the top. They all drive on the wrong side of the road over there, though. It's really weird.

Mrs BoaF OTOH still hasn't bothered to exchange her Mexican licence for a local one in the 2.5 years she's been here (which would involve doing a test), so I get to do 100% of the driving.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:24 pm

Ahh at last some of that much-heralded Brexit Dividend.

Short version of the story.

A planeload of foreigners turn up at the airport, in the midst of a pandemic of all things, with dubious residency claims with incorrect or completely missing paperwork and while some might be there for legitimate reasons clearly some were just economic migrants.

On being told their paperwork was incorrect some of them got stroppy so armed border security officials intervened, detained them and then stuck the whole bally lot of them on a plane straight back to whatever filthy hell-hole they came from, that'll teach them! This left their own country with nothing to do but moan impotently at this display of raw sovereignty.

Wouldn't have been able to do any of that before we reclaimed our borders from the dastardly EU, it probably broke their hooman rights or something, I imagine Mail readers will be getting the bunting out, it's what we voted for so suck it up Remoaners!


Hang on I may have misunderstood parts of the article.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:44 pm

I'm not sure I've understood. Sounds like they have to enter Spain to collect their TIE cards, but can't enter Spain without their TIE cards?

These kinds of circular impossibilities are pretty common with immigration paperwork in my experience.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:31 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:44 pm
I'm not sure I've understood. Sounds like they have to enter Spain to collect their TIE cards, but can't enter Spain without their TIE cards?

These kinds of circular impossibilities are pretty common with immigration paperwork in my experience.
It is almost as if the Daily Mail and its readership have been demanding a Kafkaesque immigration policy for decades, one which the mean EU apparently prevents its members from ever implementing.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by headshot » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:30 pm

And so it begins: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... orts-to-eu
UK shellfish farmers threaten legal action over ban on exports to EU

Industry claims it was misled by Defra over post-Brexit position and will sue unless trade with Europe restarts soon

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by veravista » Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:14 pm

And still they insist the EU have somehow changed the rules or that they are new. What were they expecting? That they were just kidding and having a laugh. HMG are worse than war time spivs.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by sTeamTraen » Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:52 pm

Little waster wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:31 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:44 pm
I'm not sure I've understood. Sounds like they have to enter Spain to collect their TIE cards, but can't enter Spain without their TIE cards?

These kinds of circular impossibilities are pretty common with immigration paperwork in my experience.
It is almost as if the Daily Mail and its readership have been demanding a Kafkaesque immigration policy for decades, one which the mean EU apparently prevents its members from ever implementing.
There has been a lot of back and forth on this, for many months. Get yer popcorn:

A load of Brits were very late to register at the back end of 2020. Some may have been incompetent/dithering, but a lot of people who had been planning to move to Spain in 2-3-4 years time will have advanced their plans in order to get in under the Withdrawal Agreement conditions, and of course Covid complicated everything. So while it looks like a case of "Well, they should have started sooner, serve 'em right", in practice it's not so simple. (And again, while enjoying the schadenfreude, please remember that the great majority of these people either voted Remain or had no vote; the occasional moron who voted Leave makes fun TV but is not typical.)

This influx rather overwhelmed the ability of the Spanish authorities to cope; they were having to learn new rules (the conditions for Brits under the WA are not quite the same as for continuity-EU citizens) and they also had to deal with Covid. And they also had requests from all the Brits who did not need a new residency card, and who could have waited until 2021 or 2022 or 2030 to apply for one, doing so anyway because "I don't trust Spain/UK/EU not to change the rules". Those of us who understand international law and the difference between the threatened 2019 No-Deal [of any kind] Brexit and the threatened No-[trade-]Deal Brexit knew that there was no urgency, but for the most part we are not dealing here with people who read legal treaties for entertainment, so this was perhaps also not unreasonable.

And sure enough, there was a cock-up and the first batch of new-style ("TIE") residency cards issued to Brits said "Family Member of an EU citizen" (this is a common type of TIE, but not what the Brits should have got) rather than "UK citizen with rights under the WA", so those had to go back, and people got even more worried, because they had handed in their old cards and only spotted the mistake a bit later. On top of that, there is the absolutely soul-crushing nature of any visit to any form of Spanish officialdom, which has to be experienced to be believed. The other day I had to deal with the tax and the municipality people in the same day and I was incapable of any sort of intellectual effort until the next morning. It is quite uniquely draining, and difficult to describe to anyone who has not been through it.

Anyway, by the end of 2020 there were lots of people who had applied for their residency card, but not received it. They will have had one of two types of receipt. Some had one acknowledging [only] that their application had been submitted (but not yet examined). Others had one saying that their application had been received and accepted (and they just needed to turn up and collect their card). In principle, either was sufficient to say "I have duly submitted my application for residency under the WA. In principle...

And then, Christmas happened. So lots of the Brits went back to the UK to get Covid with their families, and then three things happened in quick succession. First was the final act of Brexit, which meant that as of 2021-01-01 UK citizens can no longer enter the EU without a good reason, as has been the case for (e.g.,) Americans since last May; it also brought in the Schengen 90-in-180 thing, which is an additional complexity that doesn't help, although it isn't what's causing the current problem. Second, the UK's own lockdown said that you can't travel abroad for holidays, only for "a good reason", and of course the UK's list of good reasons isn't quite the same thing. Third, and most importantly, Spain (like some other countries) brought in a ban on flying or sailing directly from the UK to Spain unless you were a Spanish passport holder or "a resident" of Spain, because of B.1.1.7. This even affected non-resident EU citizens, who otherwise have been able to move around freely since the start of the pandemic.

Then the real fun and games started. Nobody at the UK end seemed to know how to identify a resident of Spain. At some airports people were allowed to board with an old-style residence permit but not the new-style one. At other airports, it was vice versa. The UK and Spanish authorities both put out advisories with pictures of all the acceptable documents, and after a week or so the jobsworths had managed to read them and things seemed to be getting back on track.

Except for the people who had only a receipt, either for "submitted" or "received and accepted". This was in a multitude of formats and unless you have fluent Spanish, and are prepared to trust the format and logo, it's hard to tell what it means exactly, or even if it's genuine. So they had trouble getting on the plane, even though in principle they were allowed to.

Then on 4 January, Spain announced that people with only a receipt would not be allowed to fly in after 11 January. Not everyone concerned got this message, or maybe some did and they couldn't get a flight. So they were now stuck in the UK.

On about 2 March, Spain reversed this and announced that people with a receipt now could fly to Spain. But the UK airports didn't all get the memo and were still turning some people down, and some of the people concerned didn't hear about it either.

As of yesterday (30 March), Spain has removed the ban on direct flight/ship trips from the UK, because the B.1.1.7 variant is everywhere anyway. So now is the first time since Christmas that people have been able to go to a UK airport and be confident that they will be allowed into Spain to continue their residency application. Except that it appears that either the authorities at Alicante didn't get the memo, or there's something else about some of them that we aren't being told. (A feature of the recent reporting on this whole question of UK residents has been a few terrible people hiding behind "evil Spanish bureaucrats" in their interviews with sympathetic UK tabloids to cover various deficiencies in their own cases.)

Of course, it's all being hugely over-dramatized, with the Brits objecting to the fact that they could see security people with machine guns, like there isn't exactly the same thing at any UK airport ("but that's different, they're protecting us from the nasty moooslim terrorists, the Spanish are just trying to intimidate us by reminding us of Franco" :roll:). But it is also absolutely not inconceivable that a f.ck-up along the lines of what the Mail is reporting could in fact have happened.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Thu Apr 01, 2021 7:23 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:52 pm
But it is also absolutely not inconceivable that a f.ck-up along the lines of what the Mail is reporting could in fact have happened.
Perfectly conceivable.

The dark humour comes less from the poor bastards stuck in the middle but from the hypocritical outrage expressed by a newspaper (and by extension its readership*) that has been pathologically obsessed about making life difficult for even legitimate immigrants and implacably resolved to end Freedom of Movement for decades.

The scenes in Alicante are the inevitable and tediously predictable outcome of just that obsession and as per the OP had this been a planeful of Spanish immigrants booted out of the country for turning up at Stansted with the wrong(sic) paperwork the self-same paper and readers would be chortling into their cornflakes.

This also will not be the last such episode as the people who were adamant they “knew what they were voting for” finally find out what they voted for.




*it was via such an “angry Mail reader” that the story was brought to my attention.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Brightonian » Thu Apr 08, 2021 1:00 pm


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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Opti » Thu Apr 08, 2021 6:58 pm

sTeamTraen wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:52 pm
... stuff
Never schedule more than one meeting with Spanish officialdom per day.
Time for a big fat one.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:10 pm

Meanwhile the Brexit good news keeps rolling in*.

Remember. No. Downside.





*Can anyone else remember when this wasn't a thing anymore? I can then ... but then again my memory does go all the way back to December 31st 2020. I wonder what changed then? :?
Last edited by Little waster on Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:10 pm

Just a bunch of kids letting off steam after lockdown, absolutely nothing at all to worry about in Northern Ireland https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56664378

ETA crossposted with LW, so you get two wasters for the price of one.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Allo V Psycho » Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:18 am

David Allen Green very good on this, as always.

https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/sta ... avision%2F

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:51 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:10 pm
Just a bunch of kids letting off steam after lockdown, absolutely nothing at all to worry about in Northern Ireland https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56664378

ETA crossposted with LW, so you get two wasters for the price of one.
To the very minute :shock:
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:33 pm

First they came for the pigeon fanciers ...

Local news reports that the various pigeon racing organisations are calling on the British government and EU to resolve the issue as a “matter of some urgency”.

I’m sure they’ll be getting right on to that.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:40 pm

They'll just have to start racing pigeons from proper British places instead of smelly foreign France.

I note there's no quarantine requirements on the Channel Islands https://www.gov.je/Travel/TravellingPet ... imals.aspx
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Gfamily » Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:46 pm

Little waster wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:33 pm
First they came for the pigeon fanciers ...

Local news reports that the various pigeon racing organisations are calling on the British government and EU to resolve the issue as a “matter of some urgency”.

I’m sure they’ll be getting right on to that.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by individualmember » Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:03 pm

Jeezusfuckinaitchchrist, I’ve just been on that basefook thing and encountered a moron who is insisting that nothing bad has happened due to brexit. I expect I’ll get chucked out of that group when the moron eventually works out that I’ve insulted his attitude and his honesty (I found a non-sweary way to call him a hateful lying c.nt).

Just needed to get that off my chest. As you were.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by veravista » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:24 am

Unusual finding someone like that on Faecebook. Unlucky sir

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 16, 2021 7:59 am

veravista wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:24 am
Faecebook
Hahahaha
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:19 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 7:59 am
veravista wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:24 am
Faecebook
Hahahaha
Fascebook is another option, I guess.

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