How are British nationals in the Netherlands coping with Brexit? In the run-up to Brexit and beyond, we are talking to Brits about how the issue is affecting them personally, what they are planning to do to regulate their stay, and how they view the UK.

Elsa Court, 23, from Birmingham, came to Leiden as a student, but in the wake of the Brexit referendum is considering settling in the Netherlands permanently and taking Dutch citizenship.

“I came here in 2015, when I was 18, to do my bachelor’s in international studies at Leiden. I wanted to study abroad and my parents said that was fine as long as the fees were lower than the UK. So I came for a weekend visit, walked round The Hague, stood in the middle of the Binnenhof without knowing what it was. And then the referendum happened at the end of my first year and since then I’ve just stayed on.

I had no emotional attachment to the Netherlands when I arrived, but the referendum made me more motivated to stay. So after my bachelor’s I did a master’s in conflict studies at Utrecht, which I graduated from in September.

Now I’m doing an internship at the film festival in Rotterdam and I’ve started learning Dutch properly. I’ll be eligible for citizenship in September, so I’m going to see what the situation is like in the summer and if nothing’s changed, I’ll probably take that step.

Privileged

It’s more a point of principle than a rational decision. People have told me that I’ll find a good job if I go back to London. And I know from my studies that I’m very privileged to have the choice. It’s not as if I’m having to return to a war-torn country, it’s a relatively prosperous country. But I feel like going back would mean ‘they’ had won. It’s the only power I have as a British citizen living in Europe.

You feel very powerless and that’s where a lot of the worry and anxiety come from. I went to one of the British embassy’s information sessions and it was just a long PowerPoint presentation of all the rights that were being taken away. It was weird, being in a room full of people who were being told in minute detail how they were losing their rights. It was the most polite anger I’ve ever seen.

I remember talking to my mother before I left the UK and asking her, what if the referendum vote is Leave? She said, don’t worry about it. It wasn’t something we were expecting.

And now if I go back and my parents are talking to certain family or neighbours, they say: Elsa, really, just don’t bring it up. It’s become even more polarised. I have friends whose parents voted Leave and still believe that was right, despite the fact they have a child who lives in the Netherlands and has a European partner.

European values

I was brought up with European values, or European British, and my parents really pushed me to learn languages and see Europe. We went on holiday to very obscure places in Germany. So for me it was a betrayal of everything I was taught as a child.

My grandmother, who’s 89 and lived in Plymouth during the war, is extremely angry at the whole thing. She says in her whole lifetime she’s never known anything as bad as this politically.

It’s strange to be at the point in your life where you should feel that all doors are open to you, and every year, it’s felt more and more like they’re closing. You stop planning for the long term.

I’ve been to job interviews where they ask, where do you see yourself in five years? And I reply: I’m British, it’s hard to imagine where I’m going to be in five days. It’s very difficult to plan ahead. And that’s something you like to do if you’ve just graduated from university.

Milestones

It’s been more about getting through little milestones and seeing what the next deadline brings. It feels like a way to mark seasons now. Someone said to me the other day, you don’t say how many years you’ve been in a relationship with someone, you count it by Brexit deadlines.

The Netherlands isn’t a perfect country, but there’s a sense that it’s going somewhere and actually has innovative solutions for a lot of its problems. Whereas the UK feels stuck in a constant groundhog day of poor decisions and embarrassing fiascos. And the quality of life is a lot better. I can cycle to work instead of spending an hour on the tube.

In one way I don’t need to worry too much because the Dutch have been so clear about saying that if you’re here, you can stay. I know that in other European countries the situation isn’t so clear. So I’m thankful for that.

I think the vast majority of British people are just tired of Brexit and want it all to go away. But I also come from a conflict studies background and I’ve studied situations when two different sides become hugely politicised and one is just ignored or dismissed, and you see what that means for a country in terms of polarisation.

You need a form of therapy, I think, for the entire country, like a reconciliation process. But how do you do that for something that hasn’t happened yet?