THE referendum is over, we’ve won and left the EU! Now instead of being ruled by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels we’re ruled by unelected bureaucrats in London.

There will be ten times as many of them telling us what to do, but that’s OK because they’ll be telling us what to do in English.

The ferries are full of German doctors, Spanish nurses, Portuguese cleaners and Polish plumbers being deported back to where they came from, and then on the return journey the passengers are British workers who had jobs on the continent being deported back here.

The one million British ex-pats who’d retired to Spain are no longer EU citizens so no longer qualify for free treatment from the Spanish national health service. Unless they’ve got private insurance they’ll now have to pay for their healthcare.

If they can’t, I expect there are charities in Spain who will find them a bed in a dormitory and hand out free paracetamol. I know we’d do the same.

Taxes up If they need constant medication which they can’t afford they’ll be forced to return to Britain. They’ll have to sell their houses, but as everyone else is doing the same the bottom’s dropped out of the market.

Many of them will be forced to abandon their properties in Spain and come back to the UK destitute and hope relatives can take them in. Old people who have always been independent find it humiliating being reduced to begging.

If they have no relatives with room for them, they’ll have to declare themselves homeless and ask the council to house them.

The councils will tell them that they may have been residents of the city before they moved to Spain but that was years ago and they’re not residents now.

Do they expect to get priority over young families on waiting lists who’ve always lived here?

At least as British citizens they’ll still be entitled to free healthcare from our NHS. At the same time as our taxes go up to pay for that, waiting lists will get longer due to NHS staff shortages caused by sending all the foreign workers packing.

Care homes closed, NHS waiting lists up, taxes up, old people owning houses in Spain now back in Britain but sleeping on the streets and men who were working in France or Germany now back here and unemployed.

But get your priorities right – the UK is now independent of Brussels! That’s what matters...

Martin Kyrle