It's cold, its raining, the Conservatives are back in Government and the economy is stuffed so it is hardly surprising we hadn't at some point considered leaving it all behind and moving abroad.
Last year 149,000 Brits did just that and waved goodbye to Blighty and washed up somewhere else with Australia the favourite destination.
The Home Office reports there are 4.7 million British citizens living in other peoples nations, probably moaning about the food and telling the natives what they are doing wrong, and it's Australia that has the greatest numbers of Brits cluttering up its landscape, with just over 1m of my fellow countrymen now calling sausages snags and wondering where they left their didgeridoo.
The second favourite destination is the USA with 829,000 Brits forgetting some words have a letter u in them and almost blowing their hands off when they first handle a gun.
The sun, sea and empty supermarket shelves of Spain comes third where 808,000 Brits now live and then Canada which has 608,000 trying to understand Ice Hockey and develop a taste for maple syrup.
Ireland 289,000, France 253,000, New Zealand 248,000, South Africa 219,000, Germany 97,000 and UAE 65,000 make up the top ten.
While i can understand the draw of a life of sunshine and sparkling seas, i look out of my window on Good Old Blightly and wonder just why 4.7 million Brits have given up all this for life elsewhere.
Then i remember its dark, cold, raining and the Conservatives are back in power. Hmmm, i wonder if they could squeeze another Brit into Pimpinbudgie, Queensland or Burrumbuttock, New South Wales?
5 comments:
You would be most welcome to move here, Lucy, but only on the condition that Cheezy and Q both stay where they are.
We have more than enough Brit and U.S. deadwood and tossers here already!
"Last year 149,000 Brits did just that and waved goodbye to Blighty"
Lucy: Your theory that everyone is buggering off because the weather's been crap this year and the government sucks is an interesting one... but not borne out by the data.
As many people as there are going, there are even more coming - and often coming back... i.e. to the year ending May 2012, net migration was up by a quarter of a million. Again.
David: Sounds like it's time for your ritalin, young man.
Dear DG,
Since you wrote about my spelling errors, with the implication that it was significant for some inane reason, and since I told you that I would improve my spelling, I used spell check on this comment. My spelling is better. Alas, I don’t see any improvement in your condition. You are just as big an ass as ever…
Q
Cheers David, i just won't tell them i am going.
It wasn't a proper analysis Cheezy, just a jokey way into the post so i could repeat it at the end and have a jokey way out again with a jokey bit in the middle about Brits cluttering up other countries. I am surprised at Germany and South Africa being into the top 10 though.
Gotcha.
Still, it's very interesting that net migration hasn't dropped one little bit, isn't it? Y'know, after the Tories made such a play during the last election about 'getting tough' on immigration...
Clearly it was just more bullshit for the cud-chewing classes, just to bribe their votes out of them...
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