The New Beachhutman Blog

Big Barry N in a comment the other day posed the question "Why are all the Brits leaving UK?"

A good question. Worth a meme tag? Why did you leave? Or why didn't you?

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Having posed that, the thoughts of Chairman Beachie. 

First, latest available figures show that more people left the UK than arrived in it in the last year for which figures are avaiable. OK, some are immigrants re-emigtrating, but there are two other classes. The Pensioners, who have decided that they can't afford to live in UK any longer, or deserve their place in the sun, or are going to be close to families overseas who previously made the step. They take their spending power, what there is of it, with them. 

And then there are the employable members of UK society. True, they tend to be the ones with the sort of skills they can  transfer abroad. They are a loss to the UK economy. Quite a big one, as their skills probably came at least in good part, from the investment the UK made in their education and training. And they cease to apx tax into the system, often at the higher rates. But you can't keep them all, never could, and they pay a price, often a social one, for leaving.

Some, like the current incumbent of Beachhutman Towers of Beijing and Malaga, are more or less forced abroad. Back in 1980 something a potential employer looked at my CV and declared I was "just over the hill" at 40, and would be "Difficult to place". That proved not to be the immediate case, but 20 years later I did find myself in that uneasy situation called self-employed consultancy, which was neither collegiate not financially rewarding. Established readers will recall how I had briefly landed a well paid job in Leeds, one to rebuild my pension, only to find the buggers were not going to keep their promises and worse, were damaging my professional good name by using it to sell utter crap. I felt I had to leave, but not without a really sad backward glance at the very big golden handcuffs that had been on offer.

Fortunately, at that time, I still had good skills to sell abroad, so I was one of the lucky ones. And still am. The job in China made the UK residence a pointless problem, so I moved out. 

All of which is a preamble (and a bloody long one, granted) to this point; I have never said, "Oh, UK isn't what it used to be!" as a justification.

Nor am I saying, "That Bloody Gordon Brown and that Chuffing Alastair Darling......" (well I am, constantly, but not as a reason for leaving UK). I like a scrap, I'd rather be there fighting the bastards.

So I didn't really "Leave the UK" in that way. It just happened. I never felt really English, and always saw my time there as a step along the way, well, along some way or other.In a funny, cyclic way, I have in fact come home by leaving UK. Come home to the expat life I have always had, and to the work I like to do.

And I suppose, had I stayed at Carterton School way back in 1973, I'd be a retured headteacher by now.  Living in Spain.

Or dead.