Decline and fall

While all the soap-opera melodramas have been going on, a much more subdued but ultimately bigger drama has been rumbling under the surface. Namely, visas, passports, citizenship, identity.

My son could have been born in the UK had his mother decided to stay three more months. Then the vastly-abused benefits system and all the panoply of British citizen rights and human rights would have been at our mercy, despite his mother not being a British citizen. When it comes to birth, as with property, think: location, location, location.

Sadly, we thought of other things, including P's father, whose health was a concern, and her family, whom she hadn't seen for five long years while living in the UK. Of course, we were aware that she had visa problems prolonging her stay in the UK. It was a difficult decision but in the end it felt right for her to come back to Brazil and have the child here. I followed soon after.

As a result our child has cost the UK nothing, and us a great deal, since the welfare state in Brazil is neither well nor fair - in fact it is just about invisible. Here, everything costs, and costs a lot. Never mind, we put up with it, aware that some things are priceless and for everything else there's MasterCard.

But trying to sort our respective visas for a return to the UK has left us reeling from a toxic mix of Kafka and Catch-22. Even our UK lawyer was blindsided by the belated knowledge that, for immigration purposes, P's ex, to whom she is still technically married because of the insanely slow divorce process in the UK, is technically the father of my child. No-one disputes that I am the biological father with my name on Sam's Bazilian birth certificate.

As a result, my son must jump over god knows how many extra hurdles, and at god knows what extra expense, just to be able to "reside" in the UK - even though under the Home Office rule change in 2006 he was automatically a British citizen the moment he was born - thanks to his real father, as opposed to his "technical" father, who happens to be Brazilian.

So the British embassy here has basically thrown up its hands and said there is nothing it can do to circumvent UK immigration law. Meanwhile, my UK lawyer is scrambling to pull a rabbit out of the hat. But not soon enough to allow the speedy exit from Brazil for which we had hoped.

Perhaps I should try becoming the first person ever to adopt his own son ?

The world is a deeply messed up place right now, as I have bemoaned before on this blog. Europe is drowning in debt and recrimination as it's once-famous middle class disintegrates. The UK in particular has been bled dry by its own complacent sense of entitlement and by the beloved "human rights" granted here, there and everywhere. ** It's a country for EU economic migrants - where "economic" means leaching rather than contributing - or for criminals who can't be deported because their sacrosanct "right to a family life" will be threatened. God forbid.

But when it comes to the right to a family life of an expat Brit, sorry, it seems to be: out of sight, out of mind. You had your chance to milk the system, like everybody else, by having your child on British soil. Silly you for being so naive and failing to play the game. You don't get any brownie points for good behavior. Computer says no. Maybe a clever and expensive lawyer can help ?

Between a rock and a hard place. Two countries, both deeply messed up, one declining rapidly and the other supposedly emerging, but if it is I don't think any of us, not even our son, will be around to see it. Certainly not if we suffer any more violent robberies.

It's been one of my toughest and most dispiriting weeks ever. Just have to hope that the darkest hour really is before the dawn.

** There is no "middle" in post-post-empire Britain. There is the bloated public sector class, the welfare-for-life class, the political class, the fat-cat corporate class, the celebrity class, the tiny entrepreneur class, the euro-rollover-lottery-winner class; and of course not forgetting the ever-expanding criminal class (which may include some or all of the above). Everyone else is in the struggling class.