A certain amount of amount of British people were working "cash in hand" and not paying any tax, so they won't be able or willing to register now. This is referenced by an interviewee on the article.
Why you would live in the EU, vote for Brexit and then cry when leaving the EU to return 'home' is beyond me though.
I was going to hastily comment that surely the Brits living abroad were not the ones voting for Brexit but then right there in the article:
> ”Yes I voted out, but I didn’t realise it would come to this, my application has been rejected and we are on our way home – the wife is in tears, she’s distraught if I’m honest and I’m not too happy at the prospect of returning back to the UK.”
This is exactly like that meme on Twitter:
> 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.[0]
Nope, I can't beleive it's come to this either.
I get that sometimes people aren't sure what the fine details of something might be on a complex issue, but it's right there in the slogan: "out of the EU"
Someone I know recently lamented that their daughter (who has a physical disability) would no longer qualify for certain subsidies for a prosthesis because they don’t have a job. However the daughter’s husband does have a full time job, and the daughter home schools her daughter. They still qualify for some SNAP benefits (food stamps). The idea that The State wouldn’t make an allowance for this situation was galling to them. I agreed. But within 5 minutes they were back to complaining about welfare queens who don’t have jobs.
I live in a very democratic city. My neighbor down the block is a ~45 year old retired first responder due to a disabling knee injury. He’s mostly at home watching cable news during the week and transformed into a die-hard “conservative”, with the flags, stickers, etc.
Great guy, but deluded by propaganda. We usually talk fishing and baseball, as our sons play together. I avoid political talk at all times as the irony of a young, disabled former unionized government employee with free healthcare is both anti-gov and anti-union is too much for me.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1415577/Brexit-news-...
Edit: Saw too late to delete that The Express also got it from Global247news, which seems to be less than a year old according to https://whois.domaintools.com/global247news.com
It’s just another case of a news agency focusing on entertaining people even if it’s misleading them.
In general, I've found Brits outside the UK in touristy/retiree expat hotbeds like Spain, Portugal or Dubai to be extremely in favor of Brexit, and mostly racist. Britons in the Isles or in other countries tend to be really friendly and open minded. This could be a reflection of the kind of expats who move to places - older expats might choose sunny places like Spain or Dubai while younger expats might prefer to settle down in the US or Germany, where there are better career opportunities.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/eu-referendum-three-quart...
In France, Germany and Portugal, Stay was on just over 77 per cent, below Austria on 85 per cent.
In Sweden, the figure was 59 per cent, 60 per cent in Cyprus, 66 per cent in Italy, 73 per cent in Spain and 74 per cent in Belgium.
This was a grey area already when UK was still an EU member. EU was based on "free movement of workers, services and capital", but the residency rights of non-economically active citizens of other EU countries are ...complicated. You have the right to reside the first 6 months in another country as a jobseeker. In practice, nobody would know when you have entered the country, so you could always claim that you are within your 6 months and you are a jobseeker, so in practice deporting EU citizens was close to impossible, so countries didn't even try. But those Brits probably weren't staying in Spain strictly legally, even when they were EU citizens.
[1] https://www.bmi.bund.de/EN/topics/migration/law-on-foreigner...
They may have expected a right-to-residency that had different terms.
This article doesn't go into such details, however, so it'll be difficult to tell.
If course the problem with breaking the law is it opens you up to selective enforcement if Spain decides it wants to thumb its nose at the Brits in particular.
It’s all fun and games until the borders get closed.
In the end, real people from both sides of the referendum pay the price.