‘Brexit has taken my family and me out of our home countries and dumped us in limbo’ (Picture: Dave Anderson for Metro.co.uk)

Being forced to choose between the people you love is not something most people associate with Brexit.

It wasn’t on the side of Vote Leave’s bus. And it certainly wasn’t on the referendum ballot paper.

But that’s exactly what Brexit is going to make me do.

That’s because I’m a Brit living in the Netherlands and caring for my Dutch husband who has multiple sclerosis. At the same time, my elderly parents live in the UK, and increasingly need my help.


Until now, the UK’s EU membership has held out the hope that one day we would all be able to live together in one place with me as their joint carer. But that’s only possible because of free movement.



Under the plans that Theresa May is pursuing that will no longer be possible. All Brits in the EU 27 as well as those in the UK will lose free movement.

Worse, I won’t be able to bring my husband into the UK as a third country national because his disability means we won’t meet the minimum income requirement to show he can support himself.

Dual nationality is not an option because the Netherlands doesn’t allow it. Nor can I bring my parents over to live with us because they won’t get be able to get the insurance to cover them. So, at some point I am going to have to decide who to care for and where.

Never mind that Vote Leave and then the UK government promised the 1.3million Brits in Europe (along with the 3million EU citizens in the UK) that we would be able to carry on our lives exactly as before Brexit.

‘So what – you emigrated?’ is often the response I am met with. But I didn’t:

Free movement is not an immigration system, it’s an automatic right that gives people the freedom to work, study or love in any other EU country.

What’s happening to us is like being on a train that set off going to our destination, and then being told that it’s now going somewhere entirely different – and we’re not allowed to get off.

We have been treated as an inconvenience by Theresa May and her Brexit secretaries ever since the negotiations started.

In my case, I first went to Germany in the early 1990s when the recession hit the UK and I couldn’t get a job. I ended up living and working there for 16 years before moving to the Netherlands nearly 12 years ago where I met and fell in love with my husband.

Brexit has taken my family and me out of our home countries and dumped us in limbo. What’s even more bewildering is that the UK Parliament refused to allow Britons living in Europe to vote in the referendum that decided our fate.

This is because of something called the 15 year rule which automatically disenfranchises Brits who’ve lived outside the UK for that length of time or longer.

Around 60% of the 1.3million Brits in the EU 27 weren’t able to vote in 2016. As such, the UK government had an extra special duty of care to make sure that our lives were protected.



Instead we have been treated as an inconvenience by Theresa May and her Brexit secretaries ever since the negotiations started. They blithely bargained our lives against those of EU citizens in the UK because her first priority seems always to have been cutting their rights rather than protecting ours.

Many people are unaware of the devastating impact on our lives and many do not even know that we were unable to vote.

Many also think we have nothing to fear because a deal was reached on the citizens’ rights part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement in December. The reality is that that deal means we cannot carry on as before and, if we crash out without one, we could lose everything.

That’s why I and many other British people living on the continent marched in the People’s Vote March in London on Saturday.

We may have been gagged in the first referendum but this time we are determined to have our say.

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