Specifically: having received our application at their first processing centre, the visa authority took our money, made NO OTHER RECORD OF OUR APPLICATION, and then send our docs on to their other centre, via the REGULAR-ASS UNPROTECTED MAIL SERVICE, whose post depot flooded.
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Ours was not the only application thus affected. In fact, we were later told by the Australian consulate, fuckups of this nature are *common* to the UK visa authority, who are apparently known for being careless with documents, slow, & generally incompetent by other governments.
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So: we need new passports in order to leave the country. But to get new passports, we need new supporting documentation. And all those documents WERE ALSO LOST. And me? My passport is my only photo ID. So we had to get my mother IN AUSTRALIA to get a new birth cert for me.
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We then had to organise, and pay out of pocket for, a two-day trip to London (where the consulate is) FROM ABERDEEN, to get new passports in an expedited, not-reliant-on-the-Royal-Mail fashion. Which, again, cost us about £2000 out of pocket. It KILLED our savings.
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In the end, the UK visa authority refunded us for the application they couldn't process, and returned our "lost" documents (which evidently weren't destroyed by water after all) to us. But by then, it was late in 2016, almost a full year after we'd applied, and we were in Aus.
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We never recovered or were compensated for the additional £2000 we lost having to sort things out, and because of THEIR ERROR, the UK visa authority now flags all our passports whenever we enter the UK, because for some reason, they need a re-explanation of what happened.
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The entire 5 years we lived in the UK - as well-off, white, English-speaking, Commonwealth citizens - the UK visa authority was a hostile, incomprehensible, unpleasant, stressful entity to deal with. That's it's baseline mode: it is profoundly more vile to anyone less privileged.
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It's a cold, hard fact that dealing with the UK visa authority trashed both my husband's and my mental health and left us in a financial hole which, without the support of solvent, caring family members, we would never have climbed out of. Years later, we're only just recovering.
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How an entity so comprehensively dedicated to intransigence and bureaucratic pettifogging can possibly hope to deal with the hugely expanded workload necessitated by a hard
#Brexit is beyond me. They simply won't cope, and any UK citizens wanting visas should beware.10 replies 203 retweets 937 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @fozmeadows
from an external observer, who has read of a no. of such experiences (though few so 'awfully' comprehensive), may I quibble on one tiny point, Foz. You say "hard Brexit". The hard/soft distinction was always Brexiteer flimflammery. It was always going to be the Brexit From Hell.
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True. But hard is what they’re currently headed for, so.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
the general British public, inc those 100s of 1,000s currently needing food banks, have no idea of breadth of the current Dickensian disintegration of the State or the tsunami of despair that is currently cresting because the mostly R-wing UK MSM, inc the BBC, will not discuss it
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