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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: May 22nd, 2026

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  • Sweden didn’t even decide what the correct process was until the end of 2020, months after other EU nations, because their government is incompetent.

    And it turns out your advice is completely wrong - as this guy found out, citizenship is discretionary, and not covered by the withdrawal agreement. What he should have done is follow the paperwork for registering as a beneficiary under the WA, his mistake was thinking citizenship was a better idea. (Not that that paperwork is a requirement of the WA either, but who knew that the Swedes of all people would be the ones to break an EU treaty?)


  • Literally the whole point of the Withdrawal Agreement is that you retain the rights you had as an EU citizen. My ID card essentially has “treat as an EU citizen even though he’s British” written on it (it actually says “beneficiary of the withdrawal agreement”, but that’s the meaning), so why would I need or particularly want to change my citizenship?

    The whole “they shouldn’t be allowed to live here if they won’t apply for citizenship” line is exactly the anti-EU-FoM line that the Brexiteers used to justify Brexit. It’s genuinely amazing how every time this comes up all the supposedly anti-Brexit people start parroting UKIP lines like they’re gospel, because apparently it’s only a problem when it’s Poles or Romanians on the receiving end, not Brits.


  • To be fair, the Swedish government fucked around and didn’t work out what the application process would be until months after everyone else in Europe, and finally passed the law in late 2020, when most people had more important things to worry about (i.e. Covid.)

    In any event, the Withdrawal Agreement says “anyone who was resident before Brexit automatically retains all^* the rights they had”, and in principle if anyone ever questions those rights all you need to do is prove you were resident before the deadline. Many countries just left it at that - no registration process at all - but some countries (including the one I live in, thankfully not Sweden) did introduce registration processes as well because having a piece of paper or card saying “we recognise they were here before” just makes that “prove it” easier. But it is NOT required by the WA.

    But that does not change the fact that if Sweden is deporting people who can prove they are beneficiaries of the withdrawal agreement (i.e. were resident before Brexit), just because they didn’t do some paperwork, then Sweden is not honouring the agreement.

    Which is a dick move, whatever you think of Brexit.

    It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of beneficiaries of the agreement are not British - it’s the EU citizens who are permitted to live in the UK permanently on exactly the same basis. I’ll wager dollars to donuts there are a lot more Swedes resident in the UK than vice-versa, and guarantee a lot more EU citizens generally in the UK than vice-versa, and all Sweden is doing is giving a future UK government all the reason it needs to start breaking the agreement itself and start deporting. Just so a far-right government in Sweden can be seen to be tough on immigrants. Dick, dick move.

    ^*: Not quite ‘all’ - exceptions for rights that couldn’t be retained for constitutional reasons; for example I lost the right to buy land or bote because changing that would have required a constitutional amemdment/referendum, which is obviously impractical.


  • For what it’s worth, I had a pretty much identical experience a month or two back.

    Plex woke up one day and decided that the TV in my living room and the server in my home-office were clearly so far apart that I’d need to give them money to stream all 20 feet over my LAN - presumably because they woke up one morning and decided that it’s more profitable not to understand VLANs (apparently not understanding VLANs is the “new Plex experience” and we should be very excited about it.) At least, that’s what their support told me - they assured me that streaming from one room to another is now a paid feature.

    Naturally, I told them to go fuck themselves and installed Jellyfin. And donated 10x what a ‘Plex Pass’ would have cost to the guy that made the Samsung-Tizen-Jellyfin-Installer thingummy. Because, well, fuck Plex.