Project Fear? Tell the 78-year-old British widow fighting deportation from Sweden

Last week, this newsletter talked about how the Home Office was telling potentially thousands of EU citizens they had no right to remain, despite having initially been told they could.

While pointing out that this absolute fiasco would see vulnerable EU citizens – perhaps old, possibly struggling with paperwork – would have been expelled, it also added that such a move would make “it harder for the UK to stand up for its citizens who find themselves on the wrong side of authorities in EU countries which did not automatically grant rights post-Brexit”.

Ten years ago, of course, we were told this was all scare-mongering: Project Fear. The Leavers reassured the electorate that reciprocal self-interest, existing international treaties and good old-fashioned common sense would guarantee the status quo for British nationals abroad.

Vote Leave argued that, under international legal principles, Brits already living in Spain, France or elsewhere held vested rights that would remain valid after Brexit regardless of what new relationship was negotiated.

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And Boris Johnson insisted: “EU citizens living in this country will have their rights fully protected, and the same goes for British citizens living in the EU. British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.”

And yet this week we read the sorry tale of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old British widow, resident in Sweden for 21 years, and now fighting deportation after authorities told her her post-Brexit application to stay had been submitted too late.

And she is not alone: incredibly, she is just the latest of 2,500 British people told to leave Sweden after Brexit, victims of a hardline approach taken by the authorities there. It comes two years after the country threatened to deport a British woman living with dementia in a care home shortly before she died.

Thomas, a retired nurse, was told to leave Sweden in November, three years after her husband had died.

“It is unbelievable at my age to be chucked out after being in a country for so long, when you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong,” she told the Guardian this week. “I have no criminal record, no driving penalties, nothing. And I have lived here on my own financial means. I just think nobody has actually looked into this thing. I mean, if it was their family or mother, they wouldn’t like them to be in this situation.”

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Her husband, Gwynne, died of cancer in 2023. According to the paper, it was upon returning from a trip back from the UK in 2022, when they visited their son in Brighton, that they first learned they should have made a formal application to stay in Sweden after Brexit.

While late applications are permissible under the withdrawal agreement with the EU, Thomas’s submission was rejected as she could not demonstrate “reasonable grounds” for applying late (she says her husband handled such matters and appears not to have known about the need for a formal application). She is now taking the case to a higher court.

According to Eurostat data, 2,500 British nationals have been ordered to leave Sweden since Brexit, one-third of the entire number across the 27-member bloc since Brexit in 2021. The country, for unfathomable reasons, is taking a considerably more strict approach to others (Bulgaria refused just five people).

It doesn’t reflect well on Sweden, whose right wing government is trailing in polls ahead of a general election on September 13. But it reflects even worse on the likes of Boris Johnson, who vowed that “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down”.