A leading Swedish opposition party has promised an urgent reprieve for British nationals facing deportation from the country over Brexit administrative issues. Niels Paarup-Petersen, the migration spokesperson for the Centre party, said it would introduce laws to end the suffering of people such as the 78-year-old British widow Joyce Thomas if, as polls project, it forms a new centre-left coalition after the general election in 10 days’ time. Thomas has been told to leave by next Wednesday after 21 years in Sweden.
Paarup-Petersen said if his party got into power it would reopen the application process so British citizens threatened with deportation could reapply to stay in Sweden. He said: “We have seen many appalling cases, people who are in a vulnerable state who have every right to be here but are being denied that right because of a minor administrative problem. There has been no leeway whatsoever.
We need a slight touch of humanity here.” His declaration comes after a British man was detained in Stockholm by police on Tuesday ahead of a threatened deportation, the latest in a string of cases involving British citizens in the past month. The man’s wife pleaded with Andy Burnham to intervene, but so far no British politician, or official at the European Commission, has commented on the controversy which the Left party has said was “damaging” relations with the UK at the time of a potential reset with the EU. Al Pinkerton, the Europe spokesperson for the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, also called on Burnham to intervene: “This is the human cost of Brexit: British citizens who built their lives in Europe decades ago now facing detention and deportation.
Andy Burnham must urgently raise these cases with the Swedish government and demand that the protections promised to British citizens under the withdrawal agreement are being honoured.” Paarup-Petersen’s intervention comes amid growing controversy over what he says is the “appalling” approach of Sweden’s current right-wing government towards British citizens caught out by Brexit. He said Sweden’s hardline approach to immigration seemed to have infected the approach taken to its obligations under the EU-UK withdrawal agreement, which was a legally binding treaty designed to give lifelong rights to EU citizens in the UK before Brexit and British nationals living in the EU before the end of the transition period in 2021. It is just hard rules and there is little consideration of the way people live in reality,” he said.
Two weeks ago the centre left held a 10 percentage point lead for the 13 September ballot according to an opinion poll by the public broadcaster SVT. Paarup-Petersen’s promise comes after weeks of revelations about British citizens who had made Sweden their home long before Brexit who had received removal orders or had already been deported. They include Thomas, a former nurse who has told how she is “sick” with worry at the prospect of leaving her home and proximity to her son, grandchildren and her husband’s grave.
Others include 34-year-old John Sellers, who was deported in January, even though he has lived in the country since he was 10 years old and George Mason, 74, who needs round-the-clock care for dementia and who has lived in Sweden for 25 years. Paarup-Petersen said the wider immigration system in Sweden is “messed up” with one case of a 95-year-old wheelchair-bound Iraqi woman who was told she would be deported after 20 years in the country.
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