The Case for Remain From Bremain.

Our first Medium post comes from our campaigning friends Bremain, campaigning for the UK To Stay IN the European Union.

I first fell in love with Spain as a teenager, 45 years ago, & had visited many times over the decades. I was enthralled with the beauty, the people, the culture, the food and, of course, the weather. Over the years, my husband & I started to think about our future, & the idea of retiring in Spain started to take hold. In 2005, we started looking for a holiday home with a view to moving to Spain permanently once we reached retirement age.

However, once we started looking for a property, we thought, why wait until we retire, & we sold our house & moved out here lock, stock & barrel in 2007. It was the best decision we ever made, & our new life was pretty much idyllic, until that is, 23rd June 2016, when our lives were turned upside down by the Brexit referendum. Like many others, I spent the next 3 weeks in a complete state of shock, switching from disbelief to sadness, fear to anger.

I’m still angry, & I won’t stop being angry until Brexit is stopped! For this reason, I am now the Chair of “Bremain in Spain”, an anti-Brexit campaign group made up of over 5,000 Britons living, working & retiring in Spain. If you had told me a year ago what I would be doing now, I would never have believed it.

I was not the least bit interested in politics or current affairs, but how things change. Now I spend anything up to 70 hours a week campaigning to stop Brexit from happening, but also working with other groups all across Europe to protect the rights of British citizens.

What we have seen so far from the UK government does not provide Brits abroad with any reassurances that our rights will be protected — quite the opposite in fact. The EU made an earlier offer that promised to protect almost all of our existing rights & freedoms, “as if Brexit had never happened”. The EU offer was on the table weeks before Theresa May made her underwhelming offer, despite appearances from the UK government that suggested otherwise.

Both sides have said, for months now, that citizens are the number one priority in the Brexit negotiations, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way. Meanwhile, Brits in the EU & EU citizens in the UK continue to be used as bargaining chips, & are living with fear & uncertainty about what their future holds. The negotiations continue, & we are not holding our breath for a speedy outcome.

Even if a deal that we were happy with was done soon on citizens’ rights, it would not negate the uncertainty that people are living with. The only way to achieve that would be for any deal agreed to be protected, or “ring-fenced”, so that it would still stand up in the event of a “no deal”. It is the EU way, with negotiations, that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, so we continue to live in limbo.

We will keep doing everything we can to protect our existing rights & freedoms, which we value now more highly than ever before. It’s only when you stand to lose something that you fully appreciate what you have taken so much for granted. The fight continues, & we will never give up — it is too important.

After all, the best way to protect everyone’s rights is to make sure that Brexit never happens!

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