It is little secret that there is no love lost between the government and what should be their natural allies in Europe, the pro-American non-Eurozone centre-right government in Warsaw. Poland goes to the polls on Sunday and for the first time in its post-communist history the centre-right government of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform is expected to be re-elected. Two key ministers – Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister, and Jacek Rostowksi, the finance minister – are both British-educated Poles close to the Conservative party.
Yet the clumsy behaviour of David Cameron and William Hague have reduced Poland-UK relations to an all-time low. There are rows over EU finance, defence, how to handle Russia, and Cameron’s links to extreme nationalist politicians in Poland.
Poles loved Margaret Thatcher as the champion of anti-communism. They admired Tony Blair as the champion of EU enlargement. Poles have always liked coming to Britain. Conrad in literature and Namier in history are two examples. Polish Jews called Miliband settled here. Polish fighter pilots were the heroes of the Battle of Britain.
But when there are lots of them problems arise. Like the Irish – romantic, Catholic, hard-working and hard-drinking – the Poles en masse tend to upset the settled English.
250,000 Poles stayed in Britain after 1945 unable to return to their nation under communist control. The Poles of the late 1940s were seen as taking British jobs, school places and houses. There was so much anti-Polish sentiment around that George Orwell was moved to write that anti-Polish sentiment was ‘the new anti-Semitism’.
Something similar happened when Poles came to work in the UK after EU enlargement. To begin with France and Germany used transitional controls allowed under EU treaties to stop Poles arriving. They quickly gave up this Canute policy as free travel allowed the Poles to come and work illegally or in the black labour market. Trying to stop east Europeans did nothing to staunch anti-foreigner political extremism in west Europe which has deeper conjunctural roots than can be generated by the arrival of even a few hundred thousand educated fellow Europeans.
Britain was smarter. Everyone who arrived in the boom years after 2004 paid taxes, NI, rented homes, worked hard, filled churches, and allowed British firms that would have relocated overseas to keep production going in Britain.
Nonetheless, the Poles after 2004 like the Poles after 1945 became the objects of the kind of dislike and worse that was reserved for Jews in the 1930s, Afro-Caribbean in the 1960s, Indians in the 1970s, Pakistanis in the 1980s, and Kosovans in the 1990s.
In 2008, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, published a dossier of 80 newspaper articles stirring up anti-Polish hate. They were all published in the Daily Mail. The Federation later produced a dossier of Polophobe attacks.
Before May 2010, the Conservatives, UKIP and BNP took the lead in whipping up ‘immigration’ or the number of foreigners in Britain as a top political issue. In the United States, President Obama wants to give residence rights to 11 million illegal (undocumented) immigrant workers. Spain’s long economic boom which ended with the 2008 crash was based on 3 million incomers between 1996 and 2006. Spanish papers and politicians do not ratchet up anti-immigrant sentiment in the manner beloved of the London opinion-forming classes.
But in Britain anti-foreigner rhetoric is profitable politics. The Tories have brought in so-called immigration caps and unleashed the language of getting tough with foreigners in the UK. Cameron has a parallel set of disputes with Poland. On Europe, defence, political alliances, and foreign policy London and Warsaw take opposing positions. Nick Clegg was making pro-Europe noises in Warsaw last week but the Polish government look at Cameron, Hague and Fox and do not see Polophiles.
But what of Labour? A life-long Labour activist and councillor who is a Brit-Pole has sent me this alarming appeal after he watched Labour interventions in Liverpool. ‘What is happening now at the conference over the Poles is horrendous. Not one voice has been quoted at the conference as having a good word for them. I have just come back from Yeovil today where Polish families and individuals are suffering regular physical attacks in the streets and in their homes. The local police refuses to recognise that these are hate crimes because Poles and English are “the same race”.
‘The words of Ed Miliband, Hazel Blears and Maurice Glasman are part of the atmosphere that is encouraging these attacks. And the Polish press is screaming blue murder at what appears to be a Labour betrayal. If no one can speak up for the Poles at the conference I might just as well resign from the Labour Party, after 40 years.’
I was not present at any event in Liverpool where I heard direct attacks on Poles but I trust my correspondent completely. He knows the Brit-Pole community and if he reports they see Labour as anti-Polish, note should be taken.
Thirty years ago Michael Foot and Peter Shore took the lead in generating political support for Polish Solidarity. During the 13 Blair-Brown years Britain and Poland were partners and allies. That Cameron and Hague are squandering that inheritance is sad and bad and against British interests. But if Labour is turning into an anti-Polish party it will a tragic and historic error.
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Denis MacShane MP is a former minister for Europe
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As a Brit-Pole myself, I wouldn’t take one man’s word as to whether the ‘community’ sees Labour as anti-Polish. I’d challenge the very idea that there is a unified Brit-Pole community that has a settled political sense.
Denis MacShane should beware of using the words, quoting somebody else:
“The words of Ed Miliband, Hazel Blears and Maurice Glasman are part of the atmosphere that is encouraging these attacks…………”
in his article without qualification, because they could be construed as a very heavy personal slur on the three people.
MacShane may feel passionately about Poland and his own Polish heritage, but he would do well to examine what those three persons actually said that offends him, quote those words in his own article and look at what the underlying causes of the alleged anti-Polish sentiment might be.
If a statement sounds OK because its about Poles but would be racist, if it were about Jews or Black people, then it is racist. Several Polish people have been killed in racist attacks since 2004.
Labour needs to learn the lessons of 1945 if it wants to get the support of the 2004 second immigration Polish community. Ernest Bevin denied Polish ex-servicemen the right to participate in the second world war victory parades even though non-commonwealth countries such as Norway did participate. With that betrayal of the Polish ex-servicement, Ernest Bevin also irreparably damaged Labour’s relationship with the Polish community for decades into the future and created generations of Tory voters, even from amongst committed socialists. Those same ex-servicemen (apart from officers) were confined to certain occuptations, mining, railways or farm labour for several years after the war, which was viewed as a further betrayal.
Today, Labour needs to think very carefully before alienating £1m Poles, who may not vote at present but who will vote as they adopt British nationality and whose children are now growing up and will be tomorrow’s voters. These voters are up for grabs because there is distance between the first and second immigration community. They don’t know about Bevin and why Poles don’t vote Labour. There are many cultural traditions that mean the second immigration community are natural Labour voters. To name two Poland has strong traditions in Trade Union activism and co-operative tenant controlled housing. There always have been bogey men to frighten frighten children and there will always be new immigrants to scapegoat for the woes of the country. Let’s leave scapegoating the Poles to the BNP, UKIP and the Tories.
I think Denis is over stating the anti-Polish sentiment in the UK. It is certainly not on a par with that of the Afro-Caribbean community who were subject to awful racism and abuse in the past, when it was not illegal to do such things.
Below are excerpts of remarks by Ed Miliband during an interview with Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News.
http://skynewstranscripts.co.uk/transcript.asp?id=1050
I would suggest that Ed Miliband would never dare to use the terms, Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Somali, Asian, Black, African. Perhaps he needs to be further challenged about this?
” level of immigration from Poland which had a big effect on people in Britain.”
“we take advantage of the transitional controls that we didn’t take advantage of in relation to Poland.”
“I’ll tell you what I think people were worried about in relation to Polish immigration in particular, was that they were seeing their wages, ”
“we didn’t take advantage when Polish accession happened”
Although politics may be unfair, I have to point out that Mr Tutkaj’s mentioning of “Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Somali, Asian, Black, Africa” in the context of the transcript is irrelevant, if not malicious.
The discussion, as recorded by the transcript, is very specifically about what happened on Poland’s accession to the EU and, in my view, it is quite wrong to impute anti-Polish views on Mr Miliband, let alone impute anti-Indian, and all the rest, sentiments on him.
All I can say is that there were 8 countries which joined the EU in 2004.
And there are many many Gillian Duffys out there are susceptible to this type of political propaganda.
Ed Miliband also more or else said the same thing during the Andrew Marr show, albeit using the term Poland only once.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/andrew_marr_show/9599748.stm
Frankly, he should just back off and find some other scapegoat.
Wealden CLP has a recent interest in this issue and we have been doing a bit of research, hence belatedly hitting on this article and comments. I will be contacting Denis MacShane but if anyone else is still picking up new comments and is willing to have a conversation, I am Chris Morris, CLP membership secretary, on [email protected] and would be pleased to hear from you.