My partner was born and brought up in Czechoslovakia under communism. Without going into too much detail since that is not the purpose of this blog, he managed to ‘get out’ of the country in the 80s by taking political asylum in the UK. There he learned to speak English by working as a barrow boy in a fruit and veg market and then, once that was proficient and he had managed to gain British citizenship, he went back to university to study law (having qualified as a lawyer in his home country). When people ask him nowadays where he is from, he says that he is British, to which the locals, in particular, respond that he speaks remarkably good Czech!
As you can tell, he is enormously proud of having a British passport as he went through a lot to get it. He will fly back to the UK on the 23rd June purely to vote for ‘us’ to stay IN the European Union. I, however, will not be going, since I have lived outside the UK for more than fifteen years and can’t actually vote…..
Today I had a meeting with one of my clients who is also British (born and brought up) and who is living in the Czech Republic with his girlfriend (who is from somewhere else (but I can’t say where) and has a Czech passport. Needless to say, our conversation soon turned to Brexit and how it could be possible that anyone could vote for us to go out. But now I can see that, if the polls are to be believed, there is a chance that it just might happen.
We mulled over the implications of Britain leaving a bit more, and how disastrous this would be for the millions of expats living outside the UK (apart from everyone else involved in business, or anything else for that matter). My client pondered this for a while and then said that he had a solution; he will marry his ‘Czech’ girlfriend and, thereby, get Czech citizenship. And give up his British passport out of annoyance.
The world (or the UK) has gone mad.
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