Foreign Perspectives

Well, not us directly but the government’s £175 billion borrowing equates to for each family in the UK thanks to the incredibly optimistic UK budget announced today. Actually, it’s worse than that as the borrowing is planned to continue for around a decade and amounts to something like £30k per family over that period.

Naturally, there were the usual increases in taxes on luxury cum non-essential items and, breaking a Labour campaign promise, on higher earners too. Well, tax increases for the higher earners were announced but, as usual, they’re unlikely to be as effective as the government hope for them to be as every tax increase on higher earners results in increased thinking by accountants on ways to avoid paying it thus the claimed £7 billion to be raised won’t be.

One notable piece of generosity is the £2,000 to be paid for those scrapping a car over 10 years old and buying a new one. Unfortunately, it’s going generosity towards other countries as the UK has virtually no British owned car manufacturers. Unless, of course, the likes of Morgan have behind the scenes plans to radically raise the number of cars that they produce.

As always the growth predictions coming out of HM Treasury are something of a finger in the air job but that’s particularly the case this year with a 3.5% decline for 2009 being replaced by 1.25% growth the next year and 3.5% the year after that. Thus there’ll be a swing of 6.75% in the fortunes of the country in under two years. Somehow, I don’t think so.

Still, it could be worse. We could be in Ireland.

With summer approaching fast I thought I’d give my new theme a whirl and use any feedback to tidy it up a little before releasing it on an unsuspecting world.

This is the theme I was working on off and on throughout last year. It’s got oodles of options on it so I’ll likely be playing around with some of them in the coming weeks but, so far, seems pretty workable with the current settings (I’ve been using it on some other blogs for several months now).

Big pluses are that it’s fully widget enabled so no more hunting around for missing things that always seems to happen when you change a theme. Also, it’s very easy to change from a full splash background to a plain and simple one.

Now, all I need to do is talk Wendy into using it on her blogs too to simplify looking after them all…

One of the common comments that I hear about all of the level 2 psychology courses is that there’s way too much content for the level and number of points of the courses.

They’re not wrong either if my experience so far is anything to go by. The level 2 60 point Child Development course feels much more like a 90 point course at times and some of the work required from assignments seems to fall into the definition of requirements for level 3 rather than those for level 2.

Usually the Open University are pretty good at setting the level and amount of content in their courses so how come they appear to have this one so wrong?

One big difference that this sequence of course has is that it’s very much targeted at creating professional psychologists rather than having a more general aim of producing degree level education as other courses usually do. Thus, even though level is the lowest level of psychology course that they offer, the content and requirements of us seems to be almost a postgraduate level eg the “big” assignment that’s coming up soon seems to require original research.

The snag is that if they did make it a 90 point course they’d put a lot of people off what’s a very popular course and if they make it level 3 then they’d have to go and produce a new level 2 introductory course to fill in a gap (it takes a very crazy person to start a new subject at level 3!).

Having started to move more seriously onto Twitter a short while ago it’s interesting to see that using the keyword approach to find people is working rather unexpectedly well and I’m finding people that I’ve run across via their blogs already.

Which raises an issue… I really should change my Twitter name to match the blog but the problem is that “ForeignPerspectives” is 19 letters and Twitter only allows 15… more mulling over required as I don’t like any of the alternatives that I’ve come up with yet (suggestions welcome!).

I’d thought originally that this change would mess me up and it implies on the Twitter screen that it would but by coincidence somebody in Belfast I’m following has done just that and it seems not to make any difference in terms of the followers that you already have. That said, it seems best to make the change early on in my Twitter life before a whole heap of people need to start remembering a different name.

No, not as an asylum seeker!

We’re following European Directive 2004/38/EC which is the directive which gives European citizens and their family members and dependants the right move to any other European country. In general terms to take advantage of this directive you need to be moving your family from one country to another. For example, if you are only British and are living in the UK then you can’t use this directive to get any residence rights for a non-European wife. However, in the special case of those who count as “people of Northern Ireland” it’s possible for a British citizen to exercise these rights by requiring the UK authorities to consider them to be Irish (see the British-Irish agreement).

Who counts as a “family member or dependant”? Basically it’s:

• the European citizen plus their spouse (or registered partner or partner in a durable [2 years or more] relationship) and
• the direct descendants of either one up to 21 (or older if they are dependant on the parent) and
• the dependant direct relatives in the ascending line of either (ie parents, grandparents, etc.) and
• any other dependant relatives or members of the household of the European citizen.

Which essentially translates as anyone who lives in the house of the European citizen in the country from which they are moving, regardless of their nationality (which paraphrases Articles 2 & 3 of the directive).Most people think they must have a visa to move to another country but if you are one of the people covered by the above paragraph then in fact you don’t courtesy of Article 5, paragraph 4 which lets you prove “by other means” that you are covered by this directive. For example, in our own case Wendy has an expired European Residence Permit in her passport thus proving that the directive applies to her so she doesn’t need a visa and neither does she need to go down the “Non-European citizen” queues at immigration control even though she’s Australian.

Now you might think that you’re sure to need a residence permit but even that’s not the case because  Article 25, paragraph 1 also has the option to “prove by other means” entitlement to the rights granted under this directive and specifically forbids possession of a residence permit to be used as a precondition for the exercise of any rights or completion of any administrative formality. Which means that, in practice, you never need to have the residence permit.

But, what rights does this directive actually give? Well, in practical terms it translates as giving anyone covered by the directive almost all the rights that a national of the country would have with limitations only in areas such as national security (eg you probably couldn’t work as a diplomat) and voting (although the European citizen can vote in local and European elections). Thus the authorities are required to treat Wendy as though she were British and had always been British.

That’s the theory, but how does it work out in practice. Well, Wendy doesn’t get any UK stamps in her passport these days and avoids the massive queues at some airports which simplifies our lives no end as we can all go through the “EU Citizen” immigration queues. She already has her National Insurance number from when we were here before but temporary ones are allocated once you start work in the UK if you don’t have one already. One current complication remains in connection with the doctor (and I suspect the dentist) which is that although the doctor’s office don’t have any problem in treating her, the Central Services Agency (CSA) are still asking for copies of her visa and residence permit which, of course, we can’t provide as we have neither and we just found out this morning that because of that they’ve told the doctor to take her off his list. That’s not really a big problem as worst case scenario from the doctor’s office end is that we fill in a temporary resident form every time we go to the doctor. It does have a potentially major upside in that as the CSA are breaking the law we could get quite a sizeable compensation payment…

So, overall, an easy, legal and free way to live & work in the UK.