BENIDORM, Spain: Tad Dawson’s pub in this Spanish vacation town was doing brisk business in the summer sun. The only dark clouds he saw were coming from the bar’s TV, tuned to a British news channel.
Inside the Yorkshire Pride were many British tourists watching the screen as their prime minister announced his resignation on Friday after the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU).
Dawson, a 51-year-old Englishman who has lived in Spain since the 1990s, admits the decoupling of Britain from the EU other 27 member nations has him spooked.
His future is suddenly uncertain.
“We’re very scared because I’ve been here 23 years. I’ve got my house, my kids were born here, they went to a British-Spanish school, I’ve got a bar, I’ve got a lot to lose,” Dawson said at his pub, which was decked out with the red-and-white English flags featuring St. George’s Cross.
EU leaders are due soon to begin unprecedented — and knotty — negotiations on how to extricate the UK from the bloc. Crucially for British expatriates, EU laws stipulate that the bloc’s citizens have the same rights as those nationals in any other member nation.
Nobody is saying what the rights of Britons living in the EU might be in a future outside the bloc. Dawson worries about losing his entitlements in Spain, which is part of the EU. “We might have no pension. We might have no medical. We may have to sell our properties. We’ve lived here for a lot of years. We don’t know how it’s going to affect us anymore.”
An estimated 1.2 million Britons live in other EU countries, many of them in France, Spain and Portugal, according to Britain’s House of Commons library. But analysts reckon the true number could be at least double that — and maybe a lot more, because many don’t bother registering with their embassies or the local authorities.
Raquel Martins, an immigration lawyer at the Lisbon, Portugal, law firm of SRS Advogados, said the UK and the EU would now enter many months of negotiations to try to secure a reciprocity agreement that establishes legal guarantees for their citizens who live abroad.
“Nothing will happen right now. Nobody is going to be sent home,” she said.
Looming larger for MacDonald, however, is the value of the British currency. She, like many retired expats, lives on a UK pension that is sent in pounds. She has to exchange that income to the Euro, which is used in Portugal. After the referendum result was announced, the pound fell to its lowest level since 1985 amid financial market concerns that the outcome will hurt the UK economy.
There were no currency worries among Britons in the UAE, where they are one of the largest groups of expatriates. For those earning foreign currency, the British pound overnight became a lot cheaper to buy. “The one bonus, I guess, is that transferring money back to the UK suddenly became a whole lot easier, but that really pales in significance when you consider the wider situation,” said Charlie Miller, a 24-year-old from West Berkshire who works in advertising in Dubai.
