Dzien dobry, London.
Today I’m addressing you on behalf of more than 1 million Polish citizens left stranded here by the disastrous Brexit referendum and its equally shocking aftermath.
Of course, we are only part, admittedly the largest part of the many cohorts of EU citizens left stranded here by that man-made catastrophe, which has undermined Britain’s currency and thrown the UK’s political, economic and cultural future into chaos.
The Polish presence here and that of other EU citizens was both a symbol of the UK’s economic success story and an important contributor to that success. Treasury statistics show that in the tax year 2013/2014 European Economic Area citizens have paid in £12.1bln more into the exchequer than they have drawn out. All these European communities, spread ethnically as well as geographically around the country, contributed also to the economic prosperity and the social and cultural fabric of the community, with their commercial enterprises, their food shops, their places of worship and their motivated workers, who were also concert goers, sports fans, students and school children.
In turn, they too saw the UK as their new home, even though most of them came here not expecting to stay, but more with a sense of adventures. Now they have settled with their families. On average 22,000 children of Polish mothers are born here every year, a sure sign of their optimism about their future in Britain, as well as a welcome counterbalance to the UK’s ageing population The ONS estimate for 2015 was 187,000 Polish children in this country below the age of 14, the overwhelming majority of whom saw themselves as citizens of this country. Well you can imagine the devastating effect of the referendum on those children, when they came into school that Friday morning, traumatized by their shell-shocked parents, only to be asked by their schoolmates, “So when are you going back to Poland”.
Well the Leave campaigners had assured EU citizens that they will not have to leave and their acquired rights in this country will be affirmed. Initially they trusted them, but the government while promising everything, has refused to give a formal guarantee of their stay, and when the EU negotiators put forward concrete proposals as to how permanent residence status could be extended after Brexit, they counter-proposed with something called “settled Status”.
I can think of nothing more unsettling than settled status. Superficially it promises the right to stay permanently, but It begins with the very negative decision about abolishing permanent residence status completely on the cut-off date so that everyone of the 3.2 million EU citizens must reapply again in the space of 2 or 3 years to obtain their new status. Even now with permanent residence applications there are so many provisos, about time of stay, past history, maternity rights, levels of income, uniting families. If this were to be applied to a settled status then as a promise it would be almost worthless, especially as these provisos are to be governed by that well known caring magnanimous institution called the Home Office. This is the institution that has 15 miles of shelved paperwork waiting to be investigated and where current PR applications would take more than 10 years to resolve. Also, any appeals will be governed by new UK immigration laws without any protection from EU legislation. We have seen the impact with Poles and other residents already receiving illegal notices of deportations while Polish children born here who had already obtained British passports are having them taken away.
If you are British citizens, you may not have noticed this yet but Polish citizens have already moved. They no longer live in the United Kingdom. They now live in Limboland, unsure of their future, or the future of their families and their jobs. They did not cross any borders, the borders crossed them and they sit alongside you on the London tube or at work but with anxieties and priorities of which you are not even aware, alienated from the security of being a citizen of this country. They are stuck between the prejudices and taunts of xenophobic bullies in the street or in the pages of the “Daily Mail” on the one side and the bureaucratic negativity of the Home Office on the other. And this was a country they had loved previously for its seeming freedom, resilience, tolerance, entrepreneurial possibilities and sense of security. Not surprising then that one EU citizen recently wrote “A bit of me is dying here….”
This nightmare existence of EU citizens must end, which is why the3million and other organizations are holding a mass lobby here on Wednesday of Parliament and holding a further rally on behalf of EU citizens at Trafalgar Square at 6pm. Either the UK government negotiates a proper safe settlement of EU citizens’ rights, or better still it calls a halt to the whole Brexit process and calls for a new referendum based on the sheer revealed impracticality and injustice of leaving the EU.
Thank you for coming and for listening.
Wiktor Moszczynski Author of “Hello I’m Your Polish Neighbour”
Speech at People March against Brexit 9th September 2017 - Parliament Square, London
No comments:
Post a Comment