“The great Polish exodus”, ran an apocalyptic headline in the Daily Mail last weekend. Underneath, readers were told: “The arrival of 100,000s of Poles changed the face of Britain, but now they’re returning home in droves for a better life in their low-tax, booming homeland. Could there be a more damning indictment of our decline?”
The paper was using the numbers of Polish citizens leaving the UK – a net outflow of 18,000 in the year to June, with the country’s Polish population now just 75,000 and falling – as a stick to beat Keir Starmer and his government’s stewardship of the economy.
“From a British viewpoint, the reasons for this mass repatriation are depressing and shameful,” bemoaned hack David Jones, reporting from Gdansk. “Another indictment, many will say, of a broken country.”
Jones quotes welder Slawek Frankowski, who left “the seemingly tranquil Hampshire town of Fareham” after police raided a drug den in his family’s maisonette block. “It got to the stage where we would look outside almost every week and see police, firemen and ambulances,” he tells the Mail. “It wasn’t the same Britain we came to for a better life 15 years ago.”
Suggested Reading
The Telegraph goes banjo nepo turbo by crawling to Paul Marshall’s son
Which is curious, as the EU freedom of movement that allowed Frankowski and his family to move to the UK in the first place was largely the reason the Daily Mail campaigned so fervently for Brexit in the first place. On the eve of the 2016 referendum, it published a lengthy editorial with 10 reasons to leave the EU, the most prominent of which was the number of eastern Europeans who had come to the country.
“More than three million EU migrants live in the UK – double the number in 2004 when the EU expanded to include Eastern European countries, who have sent more than a million people here (despite the last Labour Government saying it would be only 13,000 a year)”, it fumed.
Indeed, so opposed was the Mail to EU – and specifically Polish – migration, that in 2008 the Federation of Poles in Great Britain filed a complaint to the then Press Complaints Commission accusing the paper of defaming Polish residents in the UK. It highlighted 50 Mail headlines it said all displayed anti-Polish sentiment, with Jan Mokrzycki, chair of the FPGB, telling Polish media: “It was the headlines which were the most offensive, using emotive anti-Polish language.”
Still, now Poles are returning home, the paper has changed its tune and decided it is all the fault of Starmer and his useless government. “Unlike some of the newer arrivals to our shores, who have made lurid headlines in recent days, we will miss them sorely when they’re gone,” bemoans Jones.
As Bluesky user Simon Nixon writes, “By the end of the piece, you are left furious that thanks to the enemies of those people at the Daily Mail who campaigned to end freedom of movement, we poor Brits have been denied the right to escape Britain too and make a new life for ourselves in Gdansk.”
Most popular
Twelve angry months
Brigitte Macron’s nasty little words
Reform’s Kent crack-up is getting even worse
How the world forgot James Hutton
