Dear Editor, I read with interest the recent letter regarding the police checking foreign registrations on cars at Faro airport. I have for some time been concerned at the attitude many expats show with regard to this.
I don’t know if they are either ignorant or arrogant, maybe both but many display a very cavalier disrespect for their chosen country of residence.
I am not talking about the occasional long term visitors but those who clearly live permanently in the Algarve. You can usually spot them a mile off.
UK registered cars, left hand drive with no sign of a current UK tax disc in the window. Just how stupid do these people think the Portuguese authorities are? It is so easy to go online to the DVLA website and check out the status of these.
If I can do it so can the police. I am appalled at the number who have declared their cars SORN in the UK yet carry on driving them around here like they don’t care.
Has anyone told them a SORN car is uninsured and illegal to be on the road anywhere not just in the UK but across Europe? I shudder to think what would happen if I had an accident with one of these cars, heaven forbid an injury or even someone killed!
Many of the people who drive cars like this would be exactly the first to complain if they lived in the UK and an “immigrant” drove an unlicensed and uninsured car there. But they are “immigrants” in Portugal, or does the fact they were born under the Union Jack exempt them from obeying the law in some way?
Personally I am glad that the authorities are clamping down. I think these cheaters and law breakers should be seen as just that, criminals!
Dominic Harrison, by email
