What Brexit Could Mean To A Bristolian In Sardinia

Until November 2009 I had lived in Bristol all my life and had someone told me ten years ago, that I would be moving to Sardinia in Italy in the future and that I would like it so much that I would make it my permanent home, I would have laughed at them. I was very attached to my native city and couldn't see how it was ever likely that I could possibly leave. That all changed when I met my wife eight years ago almost to the day. After she had made four visits to Bristol and I had made four visits to Nuoro in Sardinia, where we now live and where she grew up, I decided the time was ripe to look into the possibility of taking early retirement and spending more time in Sardinia. So at the age of fifty-five I did take early retirement from my job in the Civil Service and moved from Bristol over to Sardinia for an initial period of four months. While I had no doubts about my relationship with Maria Rita I was worried that the nostalgia for my home town would be overwhelming. Those fears proved unfounded and I stayed. In time I arranged for my house in North Bristol to be let and I was lucky to get a young couple in who are very good tenants and who are still there. And of course, I'm still here in Sardinia.

As Maria Rita is several years younger than me it still isn't possible for her to retire herself. However, we had always liked the idea of being able to spend several months of the year in Sardinia and several months in Bristol when the time comes for her to retire. She is something of an anglophile. She loves the English language and British culture, from Shakespeare to The Beatles, and she has often told me how she had always had a desire to live in England one day. Her English is pretty good, she has no difficulty in conversing in English although she sometimes has some difficulty in understanding people who speak very quickly or litter their conversation with slang and idiomatic expressions. Furthermore, she loves Bristol. And as I'm the not-so-secret identity behind the Professor of Bristolian I've found that my influence has rubbed off on her a bit in that every now and then she'll come out with Bristolian expressions like "innit ever!" or "cor blige!" Anyway, no problem, we thought, should we wish to live in Bristol one day. We're all European citizens now. Then came last Friday. We woke up in a Bed and Breakfast in Naples (we were on our way down to Calabria for a wedding at the weekend) and there was the news on the TV that the British people had voted to leave the European Union. I was surprised and not a little worried. I had read articles like this in the Guardian about British people needing a minimum income of  £18,600 per annum in order to bring their foreign spouses over to live in the UK. In the event of Brexit would that rule be extended to British ex-pats with a spouse from a EU member state should they wish to return to live in the UK? If so we might find ourselves with an insurmountable obstacle to overcome should we decide that one day we want to set up home again in my native city of Bristol. People have tried to reassure me. "No, it could never come to that!" they say. I'm not so sure. I never believed that there would ever come a time when the disabled and the unemployed would be treated with such crass insensitivity and cruelty as they have been under the present Conservative government with Cameron, Osborne and Duncan-Smith (for most of the time) at the helm. 

Another concern regards the fact that I will be eligible for a state pension in a few years time and, while at the moment the state pension is uprated annually for British citizens living in another member state as part of a mutual arrangement with the rest of the EU, a recent piece on the BBC website suggests this might change after Brexit. People in my situation could find their state pensions indefinitely frozen as they are for British citizens living in Canada, for example. Furthermore, Professor Michael Dougan of Liverpool University, a leading EU lawyer and critic of what he describes as the Leave Campaign's dishonesty, points out (in a Youtube video that has gone viral) that the rights of UK nationals living in other EU member states are not automatically protected under the Vienna Convention as was suggested by some of the Leave campaigners. He states quite clearly that Article 70 of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties refers to the rights of states being protected, not the rights of individuals, on the termination of a bilateral agreement or withdrawal from a multilateral treaty. (Watch from about 6 minutes 40 seconds into the video).

So how else could Brexit affect us? Well, we return to Bristol every year, usually for at least ten days, and we take advantage of the Easyjet seasonal service from Bristol to Olbia, Olbia being the nearest airport to where we live. Budget airlines like Easyjet have thrived as a result of the European Union and the access it gives the company to European air space. Could this be under threat as a result of Brexit? It seems that it might well be and that Easyjet might have to set up a new European operation as a result. My fear is not only that Brexit could effectively put an end to cheap air fares but that routes like Bristol to Olbia could be discontinued. There is a very strong possibility that our regular trips to Bristol could become much more expensive and much more troublesome.

Maria Rita in Queen's Square on one of our trips back to Bristol

You might think that my concerns about Brexit are entirely personal and subjective, which of course they are, but that doesn't mean I'm unthinkingly uncritical of the European Union project as a whole. The EU have done themselves no favours with their treatment of Greece, which has wrecked the lives of so many ordinary Greek people. While I accept that there has been a sistemic problem with corruption and tax evasion at many levels of Greek society I find it extraordinary that the investment bank Goldmann Sachs, who engineered a deal to help Greece mask its debts, were able to walk away unscathed. Therein lies a story of where the real power lies! And this is the kind of story that has convinced many people that the EU is too closely aligned to corporate interests and the privatisation agendas that the large investment banks make as one of the conditions of their lending. Public opinion is largely sceptical of too much privatisation which is hardly surprising considering that the argument, that privatisation increases production and brings in extra revenue to be ploughed into future investment, has proved to be hollow in many cases.

On the other hand, while it has to be said that there are bound to be corrupt and anomalous elements in any organisation the size of the EU does that mean that, relatively speaking, a United Kingdom independently governed will be less corrupt? Unlikely, especially as one of the political organisations most anxious for a Leave vote had the habit of collecting their MEP expenses and hardly ever voting on anything. Furthermore, environmental and workers' rights protections given by certain EU directives are likely to be under much greater threat from a future conservative government that is pro-fracking and further to the right than the existing one.

There are always winners and losers. Conventional wisdom suggests that the British Fishing Industry has been well and truly screwed by EU policies and it's perfectly understandable why those directly affected should vote for a Brexit. Having said that, farmers receive huge subsidies from the EU which a post-Brexit UK government would be unlikely to match. And then there are the absurd scenarios such as the one in Cornwall where people voted Leave despite the fact that they could lose £60 million a year of EU subsidies for being an economically deprived area. Lots of stories have emerged of people having regretted voting Leave because only now have they discovered what they are likely to be losing.

Because, as I've already written, a vote for Brexit is likely to have a largely negative effect on my life I've been following events very closely as they've been unfolding. For me the saddest thing about the whole affair has been the divisions created by the hyperbole, scaremongering and exaggerated claims by both the Remain and the Leave camps. For the Remain camp, however hard they may have worked, the forceful rhetoric of Cameron and Osborne was never going to cut any ice with those already marginalised people who see Osborne as the chief architect of austerity and Cameron as a PR man rather than a Prime Minister, someone without any firm convictions and who treats his House of Commons exchanges as if he was still in the hall of an Oxford University debating society. Likewise with the Leave camp, playing on people's fears and insecurities with the consequence that many people who have come to work in the UK from EU countries suddenly feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. I have a personal interest because one of my tenants is from the Czech Republic (her partner is a Bristolian). She is a lovely person who has been working and making an economic contribution to the country ever since they have been tenants of mine. Spanish and Italian people that I have met in Bristol have been equally likeable and a friend of mine who lives in Henbury has told me that, in what is largely a white working class area, Polish people have integrated very well there. When I consider how much kindness and courtesy the people of Sardinia have shown me since I have been living here it breaks my heart that this might not always be being reciprocated back home.

Earlier today we were sitting in a nearby bar, in the open air but in the shade because of the hot sun. As I drank a cappuccino with a glass of water and took in the style with which Italians do anything connected with food and drink I thought of how some Brexiters have been saying, "let's make Britain great again!" and I thought: "this is great! It's great just being here and it's great being a European! Forza Italia!"


*(This links to a more recent piece on the same subject, written in March 2019, What Brexit Could Mean To A Bristolian In Sardinia - Almost Three Years On)