I was in France on January 31 2020. At a bar, my friends all hugged me as the clock struck midnight and I lost my EU citizenship. Thus commenced the one-year Brexit Transition Period as the UK prepared to lose its privileged position in Europe for good.
Little changed in the way I lived in the EU that year. I was allowed to remain in France without a visa, and even moved to Sweden in September by just flashing my (burgundy) passport at border control. The only real frustration was that I was regularly met with confusion as to how to deal with a British national in the EU. Even at the post office in Dijon, I had to wait ten minutes for the woman serving me to decide whether to put my letter in the EU or the international post box. At that point, Brexit was simply an inconvenience in my day-to-day life.
Then, as the year drew to a close, I had to prepare for the transition period to come to an end. I applied for Swedish residency, which was a simple enough process. The only real hassle was finding my way to the immigration office, and then spending twenty minutes trying to get the machine to read my fingerprints. However, I was still being treated in a privileged way compared to most non-EU citizens. Since I was already in Sweden, I had an automatic right to residency. What was worse was in December, when Sweden decided to ban travel for UK citizens because of the Kent coronavirus variant. Suddenly, my family didn’t have the right to visit me as they didn’t have EU residency. By this point, Brexit was becoming a source of much frustration.
Flash forward to February, and I started to look at my options for my master’s. UK government loans wouldn’t be enough for me to fund a master’s in Britain, so I counted on remaining in Europe for my master’s. However, having lost my EU citizenship, I would suddenly have to pay third-party tuition fees. I received an email from my university in France saying that this would cost 18k euros per year, and with no way of receiving funding from any government, this was impossible for me. I had no idea what to do – it seemed that I had no post-graduate prospects at all and the stress was overwhelming. I quickly banded together my fellow British students, and we lobbied the university to change the tuition fees for British students. I also applied for another degree programme within the EU, aware that I would be needed to accepted on a full scholarship in order to go.
Now, my situation has improved markedly. The British students succeeded in lobbying my French university, and so our tuition fees reverted to the EU standard. I was accepted to the other degree programme I had applied for on a whim, so now I find myself applying for a visa to study in the Czech Republic. Let me tell you, this is the most bureaucracy I have ever had to deal with in my life. It's ridiculously expensive, and getting a visa for the Czech Republic is harder than trying to go to Russia or Turkey. I never would have had to apply for a visa had we not left the EU.
What upsets me is that I was always against Brexit on a political and economic level, but now, a vote that took place five years ago is causing me immense stress and costing me time and money. That is the reality of Brexit for Brits in Europe.
This article was originally published by TheLatest.com
