Prague Confessions: With Matt about Brexit

“Hi Matt, I’m here,” I end the call. In a couple seconds I hear the key rattling from the inside of an apartment building at Štěpánská street. “May I tempt you to a glass of wine?” Matt does a courtesy dance while I settle down in my favorite chair. I grab the glass of red and step into the role; “Oh, what a nice apartment you have!” “Why, thank you!” Matt plays along, and I laugh, “What’s the story behind it?”

“I basically got it by getting lucky.” Matt visited Prague for the first time ten or eleven years ago and kept coming back again and again. “In 2012, after just returning from holiday in Prague, the company he worked for announced having serious financial troubles. “And unlike normal people, who go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve lost my job; what will happen now?!’ I went, ‘Oh great! This means I can move to Prague!'”

He had only four days in Prague for apartment hunting. “So I contacted a property agency. I got the impression they had gone, ‘Wooo, an English person! Let’s show him really expensive properties that we haven’t been able to shift to anybody who lives in Prague already.'” But the last morning a new property came on to their books. “And it was this apartment here. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is right in the centre of Prague and it’s a really nice apartment.’ And it was actually cheaper than the other options they had been showing me.” 

“Then I spent a month or two worrying that my employers would decide not to make me redundant.”

Matt moved to Prague as the situation with his former firm was unfolding. “On the day when everything was formalised in my old company, some of the people there went, ‘Hold on a minute, we’ve just made redundant a man who knows how our computer system works; this may not be a brilliant idea.’ So they asked, ‘If we have any work, can we call you and get you to do it remotely?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure; I’ll be in Prague.’ And they went, ‘We don’t care,'” Matt cracks me up.

“But I didn’t get anywhere near as much work from my former employers as I had expected, so I thought, ‘Well, I shall just bite the bullet and do a TEFL course,’ as is traditional for every native speaker of English who ever comes through the city of Prague.” Matt signed up for a course at the Language House. “But it was a lot harder than I’d expected. Okay, it’s not as hard as trying to learn Czech,” he laughs, “But it taught me a lot more respect for anybody who’s ever attempted to teach me anything.”

After he completed the course, he received a phone call. 

One of his former employers offered him a remote IT consultation position and he agreed. “From that point onwards, I had a regular stream of IT work, so I lucked out again. I’d gotten my TEFL qualification but never made any direct use of it. Basically, I moved to Prague to carry on doing the two jobs I had been doing in the UK. Except remotely. So I wasn’t stuck in an office from nine until five thirty, aaand the instant I’d finished for the day, I had all the bars and restaurants of Prague on my doorstep…. And again, when I explain this to my friends in the UK and tell them how terribly, terribly hard it is, they just don’t believe me. It’s shocking!” Matt’s humor serves as his national ID.

“My friends and family are the two things I really miss from the UK…”

“…but I can still keep in touch with all of them over the internet. I’ve met a wider variety of people from a wider variety of countries within six months of living in Prague than I had done in 40 years of living in the UK. And I have made lots of friends here.” Matt continues, “It’s one of the safest places I have ever visited. Back in the UK I lived in a small town, if I went out, it was always about being aware of what’s going on around me, just in case… I never had that concern here in Prague.”

Matt reflects further, “In the day to day life in the UK, lots of people feel they have the right to intervene, and comment, ‘You! You two people over there, sitting at a table together, who are minding your own business! Because you happen to be of the same gender, I feel that I have the right to interject and criticize you.’ What the hell business is it of anybody else’s? I am a member of the most privileged subsection of society, ’cause I’m a straight white guy, but speaking to friends here who are not in those categories, it’s going, ‘Czech people will look, but they don’t go out of their way to offend you. If you leave them alone, they leave you alone.’ And that’s a really rare thing.”

“Up until June of 2016, it was nice and simple to live here under the EU’s rules…” 

“…certain events that have occurred since then will make life more difficult for anyone who wants to come here from the UK in the future.” Matt treats the word Brexit as if it was Voldemort’s name. I can hardly understand how the consequences of the referendum must feel to a British person so I listen quietly as Matt unfolds what happened.

“The instant I saw the result of the referendum, I went and got me a temporary residence permit. Before that, you had to register, yes, but you didn’t have to get the same residence permit as non-EU citizens. When Brexit happens, the rules will change, and British citizens will have to go through the same challenges that Americans or Canadians have to go through. And I know from having spoken to friends from those countries, those are not inconsiderable hurdles to go through.” Matt stays pragmatic and takes one step at a time, but the fact that some of our non-EU friends are dragged in and out of the Schengen zone doesn’t exactly bring peace of mind.

“Practically it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to me right now. Psychologically, and emotionally, it’s taken a huge amount out of me.” Matt pauses. “The United Kingdom is not the country that I thought that I knew. It’s not the country that I left… The fact that 52% of people could vote for something that was based on so many either false or mutually contradictory premises, really surprised me.” He shakes his head. 

“I, unsurprisingly, voted to remain.”

“I have friends who did support the leave campaign, and it was possible to articulate positive reasons for wanting to move away from the EU… but I have seen nothing – not in terms of research, not in terms of subsequent events – to indicate that the high principle version of Brexit is ever going to be the outcome of it. And I fail to see how anybody could ever have been under any illusions that it was going to be anything other than a hugely divisive issue.” Matt presses his lips together. 

“I still think that leaving European Union is the dumbest idea of my adult lifetime. Yeah, it was pretty daft of the Americans to elect Mr. Trump as their president, but there’s a constitutional limit that can last for eight years at most. Whereas leaving the EU is gonna scar Britain for decades. There is no middle ground; you can’t only half leave, and whatever you do, you’re going to annoy half of the population. Being British, we will just seethe about it for generations. It will be that unspoken thing that’s ripped families apart,” he sighs.

“I have a natural aversion to being told what to do…”

“…and my default is to choose against the person who is forcing me to choose. Up until June of 2016, I could be English, and British, and European, and live in Prague, and work for companies in the UK and there was no contradiction. But then Brexit forced me to choose. Do I want to live in the United Kingdom? Or do I want to live in the Czech Republic? And it took me approximately 0.1 seconds to go, ‘I’ll stay here in Prague, thank you very much.'”

“Therefore I got my temporary residence permit, and as soon as I’m eligible to do so, I will apply for the permanent residency… By that time the UK will almost certainly have left the EU, so I will be forced to pass the Czech language test, which I would not have had to do otherwise. And if anybody thinks I’m going to ever let the Leave Campaign forget that they forced me to pass exams in Czech, then they have very clearly never attempted to learn Czech!” We laugh again.

“I tend to regard myself as being more of a permanent guest in the country.”

“I don’t get involved in the local politics. I’m stressed out enough about politics back in the UK.” Matt sums up his situation, “As long as I stick to the rules and don’t cause trouble for anybody else, and as long as I’m allowed to stay and I enjoy it, I will probably stay. But they do say that once you’ve made that big jump from your home country, then it becomes easier to move on to other places.” Matt keeps his options open as we finish the bottle. I hope for my own sake he will stay but for tonight it’s time to say goodbye.

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