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.
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. EU citizens contribute on balance £12.1bln annually to the exchequer. The Polish diaspora in the UK has contributed also to the economic prosperity and the social and cultural fabric of their local community, with their commercial enterprises, their food shops, their “pączki” (doughnuts), places of worship and their motivated workers, who were also consumers, concert goers, sports fans, students and school children.
In turn, Polish citizens too saw the UK as their new home. They have settled with their families. On average 22,000 children of Polish mothers are born here every year and there are currently 187,000 Polish children in this country below the age of 14, the overwhelming majority of whom saw their future in 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”.
Leave campaigners had assured EU citizens that they will not have to leave and their acquired rights in this country will be affirmed. Yet the government has failed 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, the UK government 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 actually begins with 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. Immigration rules will not grant the new status out of hand, but will have so many provisos, about time of stay, past history, maternity rights, levels of income, uniting families. Also, any appeals will not have the protection from EU legislation. We have seen the early 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.
Currently Polish and other EU citizens, including their children, sit in an alternative world, like cancer patients, who outwardly appear to live the same life as those around them but are faced with growing and stressful uncertainty about their own future and their families’ future in this country. Should they still register their children for school, should they buy a house, should they wind up their business, should they invest back in their original homeland? They are stuck in the country they once loved and admired, between the prejudices and taunts 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.
This nightmare existence of EU citizens must end now and the UK government must agree a new deal with the EU in the October round of negotiations which will end the stress and the uncertainty.
Wiktor Moszczynski Author of “Hello I’m Your Polish Neighbour”
Speech at the3million rally 13th September 2017 - Trafalgar Square, London
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