Jo moved to the Netherlands well before the 2016 referendum — for work initially, then for the reasons people usually stay somewhere: a job that suited her, a partner, children in local schools.
She had not thought of herself as an emigrant. She thought of herself as a British citizen who lived in Europe, which for a long time was a distinction without a difference.
Brexit made it a difference. The paperwork was the visible part: residence status to secure, documents to gather, an anxious year of not being certain what she would be entitled to. The less visible part came afterwards, in a series of small disconnections spread over several years.
Her UK bank wrote to say it would no longer serve customers at her address. When she looked at what it would take to keep a foothold in the UK property market, she found the rates available to her were materially worse than those advertised to anyone living in Britain, and that most lenders would not consider her at all. When her eldest started thinking about universities, she learned that a British child raised abroad is usually assessed as an international student.
None of these were catastrophes on their own. Together they amounted to a steady message that her citizenship had become conditional on staying put.
The part she found hardest to accept was the political one. For a period she was outside the 15-year rule and had no vote at all. When the rule was abolished in January 2024, nobody told her — she found out from another British parent at a school event, months later. She registered. Her ballot is now counted in a constituency she left long ago, where she knows no one, and where the concerns that shaped her last decade are shared by nobody else on the roll.
"I'm not asking for special treatment," she says. "I'd just like to be somebody's constituent."
Case studies on this site are written from the experiences BOVF members have shared with us and are presented in anonymised form. Names and identifying details have been changed.
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