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Wednesday 13 December 2017

Are ALL Guardian readers irredeemably stupid?

It started with a typically whiny Guardian piece yesterday titled "No one cares about us - Brits in Europe". It's part of a big whine from many of the 1m Brits living in Europe for special status - a status that can only come at a cost to the British. It is a typically selfish and self-obsessed whinge, as is normal today. My own view is that those of us who have chosen to make homes in Europe must make shift for ourselves; we made informed decisions. I want no-one in the UK to pay for my choice. 

Anyway, I commented to this effect. What 'protection' do you need, I asked, "To be permitted residence in Austria you have to prove you have an adequate income and are a member of an Austrian health insurance scheme - to demonstrate you are not a burden on Austrian taxpayers. Same before Brexit, same after. What's the problem?"

The problem, it emerged, is that several Guardian readers living in Austria are here unlawfully. If EU or EEA citizens intend to be here for more than 3 months, they must apply for a residency certificate, and do so before the end of month 4 or face steep daily fines.  I have my residency certificate. The Guardian readers do not. One declared that he classed himself as a free spirit and didn't agree with documentation in general, others said they had been here for many years and not been deported, others that said they didn't think the requirement was important. Not one seems to have read the widely available guidance from the Austrian government detailing residence requirements. All seem just to have understood that the EU meant free movement and acted on that - and now that they face problems post Brexit, are whining and moaning that the UK government and all the British people back home should get them out of the shit.

My own view is that the UK should not lift a finger to help them. If they are stupid enough, arrogant enough or misguided enough not even to understand the most basic residence requirements of another country then Austria is probably best rid of them - sorry, UK, you will get some irredeemably stupid and bitter Guardian readers back. I had a drink with my young German mates last night and asked them if they understood the Anmeldebescheinigung. Sure, they said - all of them working or studying in Austria have the 'yellow certificate'. They simply couldn't imagine anyone moving to Austria without checking out the requirements in advance. "They're Guardian readers" I explained "fantasists, dreamers, away with the fairies". They nodded, not quite understanding. 

22 comments:

jack ketch said...

Always used to be (and I assume still is) the case in Germany too. EU citizen or not, you still had to apply for Residency. If you were an EU Citizen then it would be automatically granted but Gott help you if you hadn't bothered to fill in the forms. Infact it was almost impossible NOT to have registered as every single thing you tried to do at an 'Amt' (Government department) required everyone- German or not- to show proof of residency.

Infact when i first went to live in Germany , just to get a 3 month Residency permit (in EEC pre EU days) I had to send off a sample of my shit...I thought they were joking and didn't and almost got arrested for not! Inorder to get Leave to Remain you had to get a Health Cert.

Those Gaurdian readers are living on borrowed time-BrexSShite or not.

DeeDee99 said...

A "free spirit"......lol).

He/she's going to have no problem leaving Austria then and moving on somewhere else.

Poisonedchalice said...

Removing the requirement to "show your papers" when required has been the most disastrous policy when it comes to security. Free movement means exactly that - and it includes all those who would do us harm.

Budgie said...

Open borders means open borders for criminals and terrorists too. And the EAW.

rapscallion said...

In response to your question Radders - "Are ALL Guardian readers irredeemably stupid?"

I'm afraid the answer can only be "Yes"
The one's mentioned in your piece are thicker than the average whale omelette.

English Pensioner said...

My wife worked in Germany for a while before the EU. No problem as long as she had a job, paid her taxes and had a declared place of residence. She had to report to the police every few weeks and show her passport and other papers plus her pay slip. But no problem, they were the rules, it was their country, so you obeyed the rules. She achieved her main objective which was to learn to speak passable German.
Only one minor problem, they have a religious tax to fund the churches. Her declared religion of Church of England didn't fit in so they put her down as Lutheran!

Peter MacFarlane said...

Much the same in Italy as you would expect. There's no problem living there, but you have to get what used to be called a "certificate di residenze" from the local town hall, and make sure you pay all the (sometimes surprising) taxes and dues.

Only problem is, this being Italy, you need another certificata to get your rubbish uplifted, another different one if your children need to go to school, yet another to get hospital treatment, and so on.

In case it needs pointing out, this was exactly the system before the EU existed, and will no doubt be the same, more or less, after Brexit, and indeed after the EU collapses.

Anonymous said...

Brits abroad should get all paperwork in English and be able to drive on the left and be only subject to UK law.

That's 'multiculturism' isn't it?

Tony Harrison said...

Entirely agree about the stupidity of failing to acquaint oneself with a host country’s regulations, and about those Guardian readers. I have a 2nd home in France, and forsee no problems: what a great many of the less thoughtful Remainistas fail to appreciate, against all common sense, is that it was actually possible to live in another European country pre-EEC membership, and many Brits did. Neither did we have to undergo several days’ quarantine, or whatever, when arriving t’other side of the Channel by ferry… It’s part of the extraordinary level of uninformed hysteria evident, most especially among those Guardian readers: they really haven’t a clue. Hell, in the ‘60s a schoolfriend and I travelled across Europe by train as far as Berlin, nothing special at all even though it entailed passing through the grim DDR. A current friend is spitting blood about Brexit, in part because he’s a touchy-feely internationalist who thinks we’re all “better together” even if it means being tied to the ghastly Kafkaesque bureaucrats of Brussels, and partly because he has a house in Spain to which he thinks (against all reason) he might be denied access in future. He reads The Guardian.
I post occasional comments on Guardian pieces, where allowed and so long as I get in quickly before the censors there detect an unacceptable level of non-compliance with what is understood to be the correct viewpoint… But mostly now I don’t bother: it’s a waste of time & effort, given especially the strikingly poor literacy of so many Guardian readers, their fondness for crude playground invective against anyone they preceive to be somewhat Right of Atlee or Wilson, and their dismally ill-informed views. I receive the paper daily by email, but most days I don’t look at it since it’s too early to start chortling in disbelief at what seems to be a regular policy of self-satirisation (“We demand more places for Somali trans one-legged single mums” kind of thing) and/or I don’t want to hurl my coffee out of the window in fury at their latest agit-prop piece supporting the Marx Brothers.

Budgie said...

Asking if all Grauniad readers (and by extension the Grauniad reading BBC) are irredeemably stupid, based on this report, is going from the particular to the general. It is therefore quite naughty. However it appears nearly everyone does it on occasions, myself included.

It is present in the ongoing debate for the apparently forthcoming referendum about leaving the EU (well the BBC seems to think so), especially by the Remains.

Apparently we Leaves are irredeemably thick and uneducated; we don't know what we were voting for; and we are knuckle-draggers and flat-earthers. The latest epithet winging my way was to be called a cretin in print.

I have not seen equivalent abuse from Leaves towards Remains. I am dithering about whether to return the abuse (as in the school playground), whine about it, or to take the moral highground. Do you think the Guardian will report my whines?

Doug Shoulders said...

Isn't the guardian raison d'etre to take the piss?

Anonymous said...

From the perspective of a committed Brexiteer, it seems to me very likely that if Cameron had done most or all of the following, then the vote would have been 'Remain'...

(a) Made EU citizens wanting to come to the UK, (1) prove they weren't benefit scroungers, (2) take out health insurance for 5 years, (3) only get the benefits they would get in their own country until they'd paid UK taxes in full for a decade, (4) get the death penalty for murder or rape,(5) have no entitlement to bring their family.
(b) applied the above, retrospectively, to Indian subcontinent and African migrants,
(c) told the ECJ to shut the fuck up when we want to deport undesirables, by issuing European Arrest Warrants for the judges, on the grounds that they were aiding and abetting criminals,
(d) Withdrawn unilaterally from the CFP, and finally,
(e) Refused to pay any more until the CAP is reformed (or until Hell freezes over).

jack ketch said...

@Anon 14:40

Funnily enough, this afternoon, I have been composing a blog post for another blog. The piece was to be a weak parody of BrexSShiteurs in the style of "Bored Of The Rings".

Bored Of The DitheRING

Brits are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have
decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the trade of cheap tin trays and glass walking sticks with gullible natives.
Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of
xenophobic squalor. They dislike any machine more complicated then a kettle, any system of measurement post dating the Fall of Babylon and they have always been scared of the "Europeans" or
"furriners," as they call them. As a rule they now try to avoid democracy, except on rare
occasions when 17 million or so will get together to dry-gulch their own leaders...


That was as far as I got and was fully aware it was a bit lame. But now I've read your brilliant parody I shall simply copy-pasta it-with your permission of course.

I do feel you missed a couple of points though: "the permanent basing of at least 2 Spitfire Squadrons at Biggin Hill" and "a mandatory life sentence for anyone using Celsius"

Dave_G said...


@Jack

"what have the Brits [Romans] ever given us......"?

Parody of a Python sketch, text here:

http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html

mikebravo said...

Bugger!

I read the guardian once and am now irredeemably thick!

I'm off to knit some yogurt underpants.

Anonymous said...

Once upon a time, the Manchester Guardian was published and printed in Manchester and was a good honest newspaper.

The rot set in when it was moved to London. I think it's too late to move it back.

Don Cox

rapscallion said...

Anon 13 December 2017 at 14:40

Perfectly sensible proposals

jack ketch 13 December 2017 at 15:41

Most amusing - made me titter hugely

Mike Bravo

You caused me to spray coffee everywhere - Git! :-)

James Higham said...

Think you mean Grauniad devotees. Many on our side check it out for its latest inanity.

Anonymous said...

Most are stupid, some are wicked.

Gordon the Fence Post Tortoise said...

In answer to the question at the top and deploying one of The Guardian's favorite numbers - NO - only 97% are stupid.

They are though a national treasure in the sense that their usually toxic fashionable foolishness is never ending and it's a profound mistake to pick one article as "peak Guardian" - since it will inevitably be surpassed and sooner then you expect.

Anonymous said...

"Are ALL Guardian readers irredeemably stupid?"
Yes

Unknown said...

Come back, we're all worried about you