Continuing chaos!

So there has been a cabinet re-shuffle and Sajid Javid has resigned. Well, there we go! It would seem that clever boy Dominic Cummings is quietly taking over the country. So much for democracy. There are going to be some interesting times with the Conservatives’ backbenchers though. Together with Mr Corbyn suggesting that Mr Johnson should be deported for his past behaviour, things are getting a bit stirred up. 

Most of us have sort of put the whole Brexit question behind us, or at least on a back-burner for the time being but the country is in a bit of a state. People are still being deported or not allowed back on if they have been to visit family in their country of origin. My daughter sent me a link to a story from the Independent, summarised as:-

“Arrive as a child refugee, study then work here and gain British citizenship, live as a model citizen then coming back from holiday find you’ve been stripped of your right to travel back to the place you’ve called home since the age of 14. Disgusting.”

Within my own circle of friends and acquaintances I know of at least two people who have been refused Settled Status, despite having lived and worked in this country for quite a few years. In one case, an Italian friend seems to have scuppered his chances by going back home for about six months to see his ageing mother through her final illness. The other is a Spanish woman, a Basque to be exact, who has grown-up British nationality children. Somewhere along the way she has not provided the right documentation.

I think of my sister who has lived in Spain for 40+ years and has Spanish children and grandchildren. Supposing she came to visit UK family and then found they would not let her back into Spain?!

I wonder how many of us could provide documentation to prove where we were and what we have been doing for the last fifteen or twenty years, or even five for that matter. I suddenly find myself very glad to be married to a man who insists on filing away every bank statement, tax code letter, piece of pension information and almost everything else that comes through the letter box. Lots of fiscal documentation. Mind you, I am not sure I could pass the test for citizenship. I would probably be thinking, “well, I know the answer to that - it’s on the tip of my tongue - now, what is it?”

We talked about this in the Italian conversation class the other day when one of the group asked our “professoressa” if she had applied for settled status (at an earlier stage she was refusing to do so in case, or perhaps hoping that, Brexit would not happen) and had it been as difficult as some people have been saying. Yes, to the first part, she had now successfully completed it and, as she had put it off as long as possible, she had not had to pay any money for the process, unlike some early applicants. As regards difficulty, well, it was easy with an android phone. But an I-Phone doesn’t do it and neither does a computer apparently. It’s something to do with scanning documents and passports and heaven knows what else. You can use someone else’s android phone but it is advisable that it be someone close to you in case the Home Office can contact you quickly.

Just as I began to think the whole business was full of all sorts of restrictions and possibilities for confusion, I came acrss this story in the Guardian:-

“A 101-year-old Italian man who has been in London since 1966 was asked to get his parents to confirm his identity by the Home Office after he applied to stay in the country post-Brexit. In what appears to be a computer glitch the Home Office thought he was a one-year-old child.

Giovanni Palmiero was told that he needed the presence of his mother and father when he made his application for the EU settlement scheme at an advice centre in Islington, north London. When the volunteer who helped Palmiero, a great-grandfather, scanned his passport into the EU settled status app to share the biometric data with the Home Office, the system misinterpreted his birth year as 2019 instead of 1919.

“I immediately noticed that something was wrong because when I scanned in his passport, it imported his biometric data not as 1919 but as 2019. It then skipped the face recognition section which is what it does with under-12s,” said Dimitri Scarlato, an activist with the campaign group the3million who also works for Inca Cgil, an organisation that helps those of Italian descent. He was then asked whether he wanted to put in the residence details of Palmiero’s parents or proceed independently of them.

“I was surprised. I phoned the Home Office and it took two calls and a half an hour for them to understand it was the app’s fault not mine,” Scarlato said. The Home Office then accepted the mistake and took Palmiero’s identity details over the phone.

Last Thursday he was told he could resume his application as a 101-year-old. He was then asked to provide proof of residence for five years in the country, even though he has been in the UK for 54 years and the Home Office is supposed to be able to access national insurance and tax records to corroborate five years of continuous tax residency.”

 That sounds pretty complicated and not terrible user-friendly to me.