Comment by peblos
9 days ago
I left in 2010 and the consensus is very much the same among my friends, or at least some of them anyway.
I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.
For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.
I believe the issue people have with the term ex-pat is that it sounds like a fart-sniffing variation of "migrant" (or the derivatives "emigrant" or "immigrant").
It's kind of wild how people can't accept that anyone would want to leave the UK, plenty of people come here, they're leaving other places, so this must be the best place in the world.
If you don't like it you must be foreign; I'm not, I was born and raised in England to British parents. Nowhere did I say I was even planning to leave, I merely suggested that if things got worse I might have to consider it, and I was jumped on for that.
Things ARE getting worse, but I'm not at that point yet, maybe we'll have a miraculous turn around and our public services will improve and our economy will grow, I'm not even asking for it to be sunny for 3 months of the year, but if they don't, am I just supposed to sit here on a sinking ship with my children next to me?
And let's be real, it's not even about me at this point, it's about what is and what will be for my children, I've worked hard to give them a better life than I had as a kid, and I'll be damned if I don't do it.