Poland

The narrowness of President Andrzej Duda’s victory in this weekend’s Polish presidential elections, where he defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the Mayor of Warsaw, by less than 2 per cent, was God’s gift to opinion commentators. What with Brexit, Trump et cetera we can write 800-1200 words about a nation being ‘divided’ and ‘polarised’ in our sleep. Why even write different pieces? Just shift the names around and you are golden. The problem with that kind of article is it often obscures national distinctions. In Poland, for example, President Duda’s Law and Justice Party – unlike the Conservatives and the Republicans – is the more redistributionist of the two leading parties. Their

At first, Brexit was seen in Poland as a glorious but chaotic farce. As strange as it sounds, three long, grim years after the referendum, the whole thing seemed, to them, like a glorious chaotic farce. Most of them supported Poland’s membership of the EU but the irreverent Nigel Farage was more relatable than a bunch of uptight bureaucrats; they could at least imagine having a beer with him. As reality sunk in, and the months ground by, these comical aspects paled. Poles are now as bored hearing about Brexit as many Brits. The national conservative Polish government has been in an interesting position when it comes to Brexit. Ideologically,

When Labour moderates tried to oust Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, their attempt only made him stronger, protected by swathes of loyal members. But this year, is the tide turning for Corbyn, as even supporters begin to doubt him? First, there were the abysmal European Election results, which for many Corbynites were particularly painful because they disagree with the leadership’s ambiguous stance on Brexit. Then, last week’s BBC Panorama brought out a dark side to the leadership – the press team’s defensive response to the programme, accusing whistleblowers of being ‘disaffected’, disheartened many most loyal to the project. One high profile Corbynite I spoke to told me that they were disappointed

In 1989, the year Soviet communism collapsed, John O’Sullivan, Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter, gave the world O’Sullivan’s First Law of Politics. ‘All organisations that are not actually right wing,’ he pronounced, ‘will over time become left wing.’ No one who watched Amnesty International’s descent from austere principle to cultural relativism can deny he spoke with a little truth. Yet if you listened carefully, you also caught notes of self-satisfaction and self-regard. Subversives corrupt impartial organisations, O’Sullivan continued. They rig the system and impose their prejudices against ‘private profit, business, making money, the current organisation of society and, by extension, the Western world’. Who fought them? Who reinvigorated the West and

Nothing spoke of the fractious atmosphere in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum more than the death of 40-year-old Arek Jozwik in a shopping centre in Harlow, Essex in August 2016. What might, on any other weekend, have been passed over as just another grubby Saturday-night incident on Britain’s drunken high streets became elevated into a symptom of Brexit-induced racial hatred. James O’Brien, an LBC radio talk-show host, declared that certain Eurosceptics had ‘blood on their hands’ as did ‘anybody who has suggested speaking Polish in a public place is in any way undesirable’. This was the premise of almost all reporting on the story: a man seemed to have

‘Just think of America; there’s so much of everything there! And Australia, too,’ said the passenger beside me, a Pole with an impressive white moustache, as we flew east from London. He had laughed when I asked if Brexit keeps him awake at night, with the uncertainty over the future of EU citizens living in Britain. As we flew over sleeping Berlin, this man, who has been working at a London hotel for the past decade, was full of optimism. He had, he said, paid his taxes to HMRC over the years and braved the damp of Victorian-era lodgings. Britain was home now. Forget French cheese and wine; the riches

I guess the hate crime epidemic that gripped Britain after Brexit hasn’t put that many people off, with new figures showing net migration of 273,000 in the three months to September 2016. That represents a decline of 49,000, of which 12,000 is due to an increase in eastern Europeans heading home (39,000, as opposed to 27,000 the previous year), which I imagine is less to do with any hostile atmosphere in Britain than the booming economy in Poland. No doubt that’s the way it will be presented, though – ‘Poles fleeing the Brexit terror’. In my view, the Government is doing a lot of things wrong at the moment, chiefly