The news
in the Telegraph, followed by the rest of the British Media with that
certain relish that the British 4th estate has for anything that
proves us ex-pats to be delinquents, shirkers and lazybones, is that
90,000 Britons, living peacefully in Spain, suddenly all decided one
day to up sticks and return to the glories of Olde England.
Perhaps someone has a spare room for
them all.
The Spanish press followed the news, a
bit more cautiously; after all, it wasn't like our venal and useless
politicians had caused the abrupt exodus, they said, and maybe we
could sell all those extra houses to the Russians and the Chinese
anyhow, throwing in free visas for the wealthiest of them, although
knocking down their pleasure palaces in a sunny future imagined by
our idiot ecologists may be worth considering, this time around, a
bit more carefully.
What, 90,000 Brits just left like that
– 20% of them, apparently (believing the anal
number-crunchers at the INE, who get their information in this case from the
padrón, the town hall registers of this Great Land)?
No wonder our Mojácar Town Hall has
dropped its plans to get a native English speaker into the Casa
Consistorial to help with the Google Translations. There's no point
now in adding to the 150 locals working there, since the percentage
of the British element in our thriving village kleptocracy has
precipitously fallen to not much over 60%.
In reality (and don't, for Christ'
sake, tell the Telegraph), the thing about the padrón, is
that most Brits don't bother to register on it in the first place.
So, no one knows how many of them are living in Spain. The INE, in a
burst of idiocy, says 297,229 – oops 228 – while the British
consul vaguely waves its hands and suggests 800,000. No one can even
say, in a European country without border controls, how many of one
European race or another there are physically present, short of those
who are registered for working, home-owning, studying or merely
appearing on some police file. Plus, of course, those who want to be
registered because it is their civic duty to do so.
The Spanish move, occasionally, from
one town to another during their lives. They register on the new
town's padrón, and the secretary informs their old town, who strikes their name. All easy and straightforward. With the
foreigners, it's a different matter. Returning to Chipping Norton,
Oslo or Timbuktoo is rather more final and the authorities in those
fine cities will most certainly not bother to inform their Spanish
counterparts of the change in residence. The local ayuntamientos
must find this out for themselves and draw the appropriate line of
virtual ink through the departed subject's name. Bearing in mind that
the Town Halls of Spain have little interest in their foreigners –
apart from a strong desire to demolish their homes – its easy to
see that the numbers can get a bit wonky.
Thus, in its wisdom, the Ministerio del
Interior recently ordered the Town Halls to check their registers –
every two years for the foreigners and every five years for the
comunitarios, the Europeans who walk among us.
So, those 90,000 absent Brits, rather
than leaving last Saturday after the Match, as has been suggested by
the Telegraph, have in fact tended to fade away over the past five
years – sometimes returning to the UK, sometimes going forward to
another country or destination within Spain, or sometimes by quietly dying!
Another piece of news,
which is appearing shyly in some quarters, has it that a full 13% of
all Britons living in the Sceptered Isle, would move to Spain in a
heartbeat if they could.
And finally, an observation for the
statisticians. Rather than counting on the padrón as a guide to population numbers, use the electric
companies who at least know how many foreign households there are.
Then, simply add 300,000, being the number of homes occupied in their
majority by 'those who left their brains on the plane' and live in
'viviendas ilegales' without water or electricity.
Sounds uncomfortable that. I wonder if
any of them are considering leaving.
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