Loading ...If you listened to Baroness Shirley Williams you’d buy shares in removers like Pickford’s or Berwin & Berwin (both sadly private companies, mind you). Or you’d buy shares in stolid but boring container truckers like the Swiss firm Kühne und Nagel (VTX:KNIN).
Lady Williams tells us[i] that if the British people vote for Brexit on 23 June then one million British citizens will have to leave Spain like Syrian refugees but with Samsonite luggage and head back to Blighty. Where, Lady Williams says, they will become an additional burden on our failing National Health Service.
I do hope that, the next time Lady Williams dodders into the House of Lords, one of the kindly old buffers will take her to one side and put her right.
Shirley, love – don’t worry. There are about half a million Russians living in Spain for all or part of the year and, the last time we looked, Russia wasn’t even an EU member. Actually, Shirl, if they buy a Spanish property worth €250,000 or more, the Ruskies get a Spanish residency permit thrown in for free. So it’s very unlikely that, come 24 June, our Spanish friends will instruct the Brits to get on their bikes. In fact, if they did that, whole villages would have to close. And the fire-sale of gaudily-painted villas would precipitate another Spanish property collapse. This, by the way, would plunge the Spanish banking system back into crisis – probably requiring another European bail-out…
Last November I wrote about another wonderful EU country close to British hearts[ii] – Cyprus. There, the authorities have been compensating unfortunate Russian residents who lost money in the Bank of Cyprus 2013 bail-in… with Cypriot passports. The idea that Cyprus – a land where Cricket is played – would hustle pensioned and rentier Brits out of their nice villas because we had had the temerity to vote OUT is about as likely as ex-President Dilma Rousseff winning gold in Rio this summer for body-popping. (No doubt to the thumping tune of Get Lucky.)