Why Poles in UK will not be safe after Brexit

So far Brexit has been seen as a measure that would affect Poles who are only now arriving in the UK or are planning to do so. There appears to be a growing presumption that, actually, Poles residing here already are in no danger. Several times politicians and business supporters of Brexit, such as John Longworth at the public meeting on Brexit organized by the United Poles on April 21 in the Ognisko Club in Kensington have assured Poles residing and working here, that they, and their families, "are safe." Wrong! Of course, in the first years after a negative referendum to leave the EU, it is argued that in theory nothing should change. Prime Minister Cameron would have a certain period in which to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon in order to officially start negotiations with the Union on future legal and economic ties between the EU and the UK. These negotiations should officially take up about two years. The most favourable solution for us Poles in case of Brexit would be a model of relations based the current status of Norway or Switzerland where the United Kingdom would continue to have full access to the duty-free single market of the EU but in this case, the United Kingdom would continue to be open to the free movement of not only capital but also of the work force. It is likely that following a victorious referendum campaign the new anti-European policymakers in the British government would not have agreed to this model of relations, aware that it was mainly spooked hostility of the British electorate to all new immigrants which would have been the deciding factor for supporters of Brexit. Restrictions against new immigrants would come into force only after the conclusion of the negotiations, although the feverish national debate on the subject would begin to be felt soon after the referendum. Panicky employers and frightened local officials would be aware that the mood had changed while hysterical right-wing Conservatives and UKIP members vie with each other in seeking harsher solutions for immigrants in general. We are in unknown territory here as such a new form of agreement with the European Union for a former member of the EU is unprecedented. So the atmosphere in the tabloids and in local and national government would be quite tense for Poles right from the beginning after the vote. Various forms of local discrimination could have started, in health services, job centres, schools, places of employment as the future looks more and more uncertain. We know what in these circumstances would face new Polish visitors after the initial two-year period, once EU arrangements no longer apply. Right of entry would only for restricted to tourists and to students who have an assured place at their university, but not for those looking for work. For those who would have obtained an agreed contract to work in advance would now require an entry visas with their work permit (currently £ 575 for contracted workers under three years and £ 1,151 if their contract exceeds three years). Moreover, they would pay £ 200 a year for health insurance. Tuition fees for Polish students would be elevated to the much higher level of ordinary foreign students. This is all as could be expected. But what about the Poles already resident in the UK who are allegedly "safe"? If you are staying here less than five years and have not yet obtained permanent residence any loss of employment would no longer be cushioned by out of work benefits or any low pay by in work benefits. The national living wage would not apply to you once your current job is finished. Theoretically there may even be no guarantee of child benefit, and of course it goes without saying that a benefit for a child who is resident in Poland would be no longer be considered. If the child was not born here he or she would not even be sure of a guaranteed place in the local school. Besides Polish citizens would lose their right to vote in local elections even though they pay council tax, and any travel between Poland and the UK, even for Christmas or for dental treatment, would require a Polish passport, and no longer an ID. If a Pole were to work illegally here or have some minor legal infringement on their record in Poland or the UK they could be stopped at the border and even face permanent expulsion, regardless of whether they have a family here or not. Poles that have been here less than 5 years would be subject to the same conditions as non-EU workers. If already living here, any permit for a new job in the UK would have to be approved by the Home Office and the current cost of a new visa for a 3-year contract for someone already legally in the UK would be £ 664. They would again be subject to the above-mentioned health insurance of £200 per year, regardless of whether they pay National Insurance contribution in this country already. If self-employed you need to be aware that current employees from countries outside the EU have had the right to work only if their earnings are at least £18,600 per year. In April this year the minimum income level was increased to £ 35,000. How many Poles could boast that they get such a salary? Perhaps Poles and other EU nationals here without permanent residence would find ways to alleviate these rules through various appeals based on their human rights, but ultimately all will be subject to what the British government negotiates with the Union. Following a complete break without the right to free movement of labour, bilateral working arrangements with EU countries could be established. Thus, for example, the French or Germans could be treated differently than, say, Poles and Romanians? Here, much will depend on the effectiveness of Polish diplomacy, but that Polish consulates will already be overwhelmed defending the rights of individual Polish families wrong-footed by the new circumstances. Yet even those who already have permanent residence after five years, or even have British citizenship after six years of residence, would still not be free from problems arising from Brexit. The above-mentioned income level of £35,000 would also apply, for example, as the lowest income ceiling for a British citizen seeking to reunite permanently with his wife or child living in Poland. Furthermore to invite your grandmother to look after your children for a longer period would require an official written invitation approved by the Home Office. In the case of access to social benefits, these would be withdrawn if, for family reasons, such a British citizen should wish to live in Poland for a certain period. Besides, even for those British citizens by birth from the post-war Polish immigration would feel the effects of Brexit should they want to live their last years in Poland, and find that their shrinking British pension is no longer index-linked. Am I painting the picture in excessively black colours? Well of course it may never happen. The British may reject Brexit altogether in the referendum in June. Or they may still, after deciding to leave the EU, opt to continue, like Norway and Iceland, within the single market thus largely accepting the terms of free movement of labour, though I think that particular option as being unlikely. Otherwise we are in unmarked territory and anything can be decided dependent on the volatility of public opinion and an unsteady divided government. That is why such a dark scenario is still possible and necessary to consider. It cannot be ruled out. That is why so many Poles and other EU nationals are agreeing with me and are applying in ever larger amounts for British citizenship. According to the Home Office, their number increased by 40% in the last twelve months. Red Squirrel, publishers of the text book "Britishness" which prepares candidates for the exam needed to qualify for British nationality, claim that recently the number of their book sale increased from 550 to 2250 a month. Conversely British citizens who want to continue to travel and work around Europe despite Brexit are beginning to submit applications for citizenship of EU countries such as France and Ireland. For the same reason British citizens of Polish origin, many born here as the second generation of the post-war Polish community, are beginning to file for the Polish citizenship they are entitled to and for Polish passports so that they can continue to own property in Poland and travel around Europe as EU citizens. That is why I still cannot understand why so many Poles living here with British citizenship are thinking about voting for Brexit? Poland is desperate to have the UK remain in the Union as a counterbalance to Germany and France and to head the non-euro block of countries. So pro-Brexit Poles in this country seem oblivious to the national interests of their home country and to the rights of their fellow countrymen in the UK. Polish citizens in the UK without British nationality will no longer have the right to vote in the referendum on 23rd June. They can only watch helplessly as the British electorate decides their fate. But at least the 9744 Polish Londoners without British citizenship who are registered to vote in the mayoral election in London and who constitute 1.5% of the entire London electorate, can still do themselves and Poland one last favour. So far, London has been represented by Boris Johnson, the most flamboyant campaigner for Brexit even though London has largely got a pro-EU bias. Johnson’s Conservative successor as candidate for Mayor, Zac Goldsmith, is also unfortunately a supporter of Brexit. Therefore the patriotic Pole who cares about his country has a clear task in this election. The first vote they can give to Prince Jan Zylinski, the Polish independent candidate, but their second vote should go to a candidate who wants London to remain in the Union. They have a choice between the liberal-democrat Caroline Pidgeon, the Green candidate, Sian Berry, or the Labour candidate Sadiq Khan (although, according to polls, Sadiq Khan has the only chance of defeating Goldsmith). Finally, with a pro-European spokesman for London elected as Mayor with Polish votes, Polish citizens in London can feel they have improved their chance of defeating Brexit and retaining their current legal status of being Polish and EU citizens in this country. Wiktor Moszczyński Polish Weekly April 29, 2016

In Defence of Lech Walesa

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As a former Chairman of the Polish Solidarity Campaign in this country in the early 1980s I was shocked by the peremptory haste with which the Polish Institure of National Remembrance recently revealed and verified evidence of collaboration with the police in the early 1970s by Polish national hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa Lech Walesa, as chairman of the of the first independent trade union in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe, was a charismatic leader of the peaceful workers revolt that shattered the very foundations of Soviet power not only in Poland but ultimately in its neighbouring countries. There would have been no collapse of the Berlin Wall without the Solidarity saga a decade earlier. Obviously we knew that Mr Walesa had his personal faults but that did not undermine in any way his courage, his gut instinct about his Communist opponents and his extrarrdonary sense of responsibility for the country that he was suddenly entrusted, without any preparation, to lead. His picture, like that of Nelson Mandela, was automatically recognized around the world as the inspiration for peaceful revolution and for the eventual transition from tyranny to fredom and democracy. With time we learned that earlier, as a simple electrician and participant in the 1970 strikes, he had believed the promises of the Gierek government to set up a fairer society and appeared even to have retained contact with the security forces following his arrest and interrogation. We realized that every great man may have his faults and felt that this in no way diminished what he achieved in the years that followed. We knew that the Communist authorities did everything possible to besmirch his name with falsified testimonies and forgeries when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. That is why we are concerned at the unseemly haste with which the current Polish Institute is drawing conclusions from the latest documents of Lech Walesa's apparent cooperation with the police. We deplore the attempt by some in the new Polish government to denigrate him as a result of his earlier criticism of their government. In seeking to blacken his name abroad they are seeking to undermine not only Lech Walesa's international prestige but the prestige of their own country as well. For this they may have to answer to Mr Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the all powerful chairman of the curret ruling party, who was responsible for launching and master-minding Lech Walesa's succesful presidential campaign in 1990. Shame on them!

Can the Polish Government assist the British Prime Minister in winning the EU referendum in UK?

Memorandum to Mrs Agnieszka Kowalska, Deputy Director for European Affairs at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw.

It is known that the continued participation of the United Kingdom as a full member of the European Union remains an important objective in Polish foreign policy, as long as it does not lead to a need to renegotiate the EU treaties. The two countries have many common strategic interests in security, energy and in protecting the interests of EU countries that are so far outside the euro zone. The list of demands for her EU partners from the British government is not very specific because it is dependent to some extent on: a / the whims of the general public in Britain and particularly from the growing reluctance of older voters to tolerate uncontrolled access to the UK labour market and to the UK health and welfare services and social benefits by people from abroad, regardless of whether or not they are EU citizens and b / on objections from businesses, and above all from small businesses, protesting against the excess of regulations set by the European Parliament. British concerns regarding "ever closer union" stem directly from the fact that this slogan automatically motivates officials and members of the European Parliament to create new rules and directives on harmonization of everyday products and services that seem completely superfluous. And besides the British feel that this threatens their sense of national sovereignty which they had managed to retain even during the Second World War, when Britain was the only European country participating in that war that never had to survive the humiliation of defeat and occupation. For sure this statement could restructured into a similar formula that gives subsidiarity to the clause by adding a phrase, such as “at the appropriate pace for each EU member country”. The British government would even like reverse some of the Directives, particularly as regards employment rights within the Social Charter, but any changes (and especially a withdrawal from the Charter) would not have received the support from the opposition parties in the UK, particularly Labour and the SNP, and without their support, Prime Minister Cameron could actually lose the referendum. And besides, mechanisms for toning down or excluding irksome clauses and regulations already exist provided that a sufficient number of other EU countries would agree to support such changes. In the case of free movement of workers across EU borders, the British government is already aware that it can no longer undermine the basic principle of the right and entitlement of every EU citizen to receive benefits and services of the country they have settled in provided such provisions are the right of that country's own citizens. There can be no discrimination between nationals and other EU citizens. British public opinion is not so resentful of access to its own benefits to anyone, regardless of nationality, if they were known to have already made a contribution to the prosperity of the country by working here and paying national insurance (NI), as well as income tax and council tax. The most intense objections relate to recipients of benefits which are obtained within the first weeks of arrival in the UK, and these include access to benefits for the unemployed or working at low wages (e.g. income support, job seekers allowance, working tax credit), housing benefit, Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit, without previously having made any contribution to the state exchequer. British voters suspect that the amount arriving to work and claim benefits from other EU countries is getting out of the control of the UK authorities and that the main motivation for such arrivals are generous (in their own opinion) benefits which have not yet been merited. In any event, such a perception of abuse of benefits and possible fraud persists, and when statistics are produced showing that the percentage of such abuses are rare, the public remains sceptical. Poland is also acutely aware of the need to stabilize the current excess of 140,000 young Poles a year travelling abroad permanently to other EU states. These departures exacerbate the threat of long-term demographic decline in Poland. If these people going abroad for work send part of their income back to Poland for their families then their departure still remains a relatively positive phenomenon; but if their intention in going abroad is merely to take advantage of more generous benefits then this will not benefit Poland in the long term. These people not only create a loss to the Polish economy and to the economy of the country of destination, but also harm the reputation of other hard-working Poles abroad. In this situation, I believe that it is both in the interest of the Polish authorities and the British government to reduce the amount of further departures from Poland of so-called Polish "benefit tourists", and to restrain their temptation to make use of those British benefits when in this country. Of course, because of the cardinal EU principle about the free movement of EU workers from one country to another without discrimination against their rights and access to local services, I propose another solution that could begin as a bilateral practice between the British and Polish authorities and which could in turn, be enhanced and undertaken by other EU countries, bilaterally first, and later on multilaterally. So, it is proposed that any application for Polish benefits by UK citizens and for British benefits by Polish citizens made within 12 months of their first arrival in the country of destination, be frozen for that first 12 months of arrival until the relevant health, tax and social services of the country of origin have been able to assess and reveal the applicant’s true financial status. The relevant Polish authorities, for instance, would have to acknowledge that their citizens do not have other sources of income, e.g. social insurance payments from ZUS, and that they have paid off all financial obligations in their own country. Only after confirmation that these applicants do not have other sources of income, would the destination countries be able to grant the various benefits to which the applicant could be entitled, including the payment due for the period when this payment was frozen. Any trip by an applicant away from the destination country, even for a short period of time, will negate the waiting time to that date and the applicant would have to begin his or her quarantine period again on their next arrival at that country. Ministries of the two countries would undertake in the spirit of mutual transparency to provide sufficient data during this probationary year in order to carry out their assessments within the required 12 month period. This will also cover child benefits paid to children not resident in the country where the benefit is issued if the applicant has arrived at the country of destination less than 12 months before the claim is made. On the one hand, it will discourage trips that were only dependent on obtaining benefits in the other EU country, but also it will discourage people in the destination country from making premature applications for financial assistance to which they were not yet entitled through earlier tax and national insurance contributions. In addition, it will be an effective tool against tax and benefit fraud in both countries. However, no such measures could be regarded as discrimination against EU citizens because, in the end, those benefits to which the applicant has been entitled will be made available and be back dated after the quarantine period is over. The second difficulty broached by the British government is the question of Polish citizens who, despite their access to work legally in the UK, still continue to work illegally without registering for national insurance and without paying taxes. Where this applies to illegal employment of citizens not originating in the EU, the authorities can impose heavy fines on the employer and deport the illegal worker. I would suggest, however, in the case where the UK authorities catch EU citizens working in the informal economy they could deport these people back to their own country. The Polish authorities and other EU countries would have the same right in the case of British nationals working illegally in Poland or another EU country. Of course deportees could return relatively quickly to the country where they were employed but that deportation, even if temporary, would nonetheless be costly and create a certain amount of dislocation in the private and professional life of the offender in question. Due to the fact that this work in the grey economy is outside the law, and under British law would actually be a crime, it too cannot be classified as a form of sanction that discriminates against EU citizens. It seems to me that such initiatives by the Polish government would be a viewed positively not only by the British Government, but also by the British public, and make it easier for the UK Prime Minister to argue that he had been able to obtain positive results in his negotiations in the European capitals, particularly in Warsaw. It would also put the remaining hard working Polish citizens working legally in the UK in a more positive light. In fact these administrative measures could be a model or pilot scheme that could be adopted by other EU countries and would still not be regarded as a form of discrimination against EU citizens, Wiktor Moszczyński London 16/10/2015

Could Poland help out Cameron?

As Prime Minister David Cameron has sown, so must he reap. Over the last five years, instead of facing down the right wing of his party and the populist slogans of UKIP, he took the path of least resistance. He acted with hostility towards the European Union constantly threatening to withdraw from the Union and highlighting at every step the most negative aspects of the Union. He drilled away at the wound of EU migration, at the excesses of bureaucracy and restrictive legislation and alleged fraud in social benefits by EU citizens. He boasted that he was the first British prime minister who vetoed a decision of the European Council of Ministers though it was just an empty gesture that upset potential allies who sympathized with some of his proposed reforms. Earlier still, he cut off the Tories in the European Parliament from the dominant Christian Democratic grouping and led them into a marginal Euro-sceptic grouping alongside Polish members of PiS (Law and Justice Party) and other more extreme right-wing European parties. Because of this Conservatives have lost daily contact with the real Christian Democratic initiators of European policy, headed by Chancellor Merkel. Cameron strutted around and puffed himself up proudly as a British patriot defending the interests of his own country in a zero sum game against the rapacious demands of EU bureaucracy and the needy countries of Eastern Europe. He did not dwell on any of the benefits emanating from membership of the Union, almost never named the effectiveness of the single market or the environmental protection of the rights of workers and women. We now know that this attitude was just a front in order to maintain the support of a large part of the electorate that felt intimidated by the UKIP induced spectre of an endless tidal wave of immigrants. Instead of confounding and condemning the barren isolationist tide Cameron and his party tried to head it off by showing their "tough" image in what proved to be a panicky swelling up of anti-European feeling in the country. Miliband, the Labour leader, bravely clung to the principle that the United Kingdom should remain in the Union and therefore a referendum on membership would be undesirable. Miliband, loyal to his principles, lost; Cameron, a cunning gambler, surprisingly won the elections. He has proved the more effective politician, but he is not a statesman. Now Cameron wants to change everything and seek to reaffirm the UK’s membership of the Union. But in order to regain public confidence after such a U turn and to get a positive result in the referendum he needs to play a deception on the electorate. He must demonstrate that the whole previous quadrille on the European Union dance floor was just an attempt to persuade the European Union to make the relevant concessions to spice up the bid to retain membership. A broad litany of fundamental concessions announced earlier in the Conservative election manifesto included the right of national parliaments to block EU legislation that they disapprove of, the need to reduce the amount of trade regulations and to stop social benefits for newly arrived EU citizens in the first four years as well as cutting child benefit to EU children living abroad. He would have liked to regulate all EU citizens’ access to the labour market but was aware these would be vetoed by all other EU member states. While he had hoped that some of the other demands, such as the re-interpretation of the phrase “ever closer union” in the EU constitution, or a reduction in EU directives on commercial transactions, could meet with much sympathy from other member states, it was pointed out that none of them had had the appetite for any fundamental treaty changes. They had no wish to then hold the required referenda to approve those changes and certainly not within the 2 year timetable set them by Cameron. Despite undoubted cosmetic concessions that he may receive from his neighbours he was now realizing that his main demands for stopping benefits and national parliamentary vetoes were completely unattainable. Now that he has won the general election Cameron must "negotiate" something sufficiently substantial with his European partners to persuade the British electorate that it can finally vote in a referendum for remaining within a "reformed" Union. So he needs to draw in other countries to concoct a somewhat hypocritical illusion that he has won something substantial in this game. It is a matter not so much of reality, but the perception of that reality. In politics, perception itself is often enough. Cameron hopes that in this game a large part of British society itself will be ready to accept this version. Cameron does have the heavy artillery of big business and foreign investors, especially Asian and American, on his side and politically he will be able to count on the support of the main opposition parties, namely Labour, SNP, Liberal-Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Ranged against him will be around 100 recalcitrant Tory MPs, about 3 million voters who had voted unsuccessfully in May for UKIP and the anti-EU newspapers "Daily Telegraph", "Daily Mail" and "Daily Express". Furthermore, at the head of the "No" block he could well face the most popular politician in the UK, the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Public opinion is currently volatile and the outcome is uncertain. Much will become clear by next year when the charade called “negotiations with European partners” will come to a close and Cameron will have to present to the electorate a paltry outcome of concessions he had obtained in the other European capitals. After being subjected to a twelve month barrage of daily propaganda from alarmed captains of industry on the one hand and the shrill call of the Europhobes on the other, will the electorate want to join in the game of smoking mirrors with the Prime Minister and pretend that something has been achieved? This hostile part of the electorate will know, however, that the emperor has no clothes and it will ensure that every one is made aware of this. After that it will be a matter of “Europe - take it or leave it". But Cameron's unclad appearance will not only be decried by isolationists, as it is being already by UKIP and by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson. Cameron has been warned about his naked stance by the Polish Europe Minister, Rafal Trzaszkowski, one of the younger talents of the current, somewhat wobbly, ruling elite. He called upon the British people to be realistic about many of the things they could lose by leaving Europe and about what their prime minister will be able or not be able to negotiate successfully despite the greatest good will on the part of Poland and other EU countries. Trzaszkowski’s comments appeared in the British media, most notably in Sunday's "Observer" which devoted its first page to him. Besides, we know that the current Polish government, in the face of upcoming parliamentary elections in October, and following a disastrous defeat of its candidate in the recent presidential candidate and its current messy cabinet reshuffle, will not risk any concessions to Cameron that could threaten the rights of Poles abroad. In the field of migration Poland will not buckle, and Poland is not alone in its stubbornness. In matters appertaining to the principle of free migration Cameron may as well give Warsaw a miss at least for the time being. And if the more nationalist opposition, PiS, were to win the election Cameron should stay away for longer. But there is another side to the coin. First, Poland would be devastated if Britain left the EU. For indeed London is a counterweight to Germany and the consolidated core countries in the Eurozone. The remaining countries still outside the Eurozone, like Poland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Hungary or Romania, will not be able to cope with the agenda of closer integration of the countries sharing a common currency. Here Britain's contribution to the Union's internal decision-making outside the straitjacket of the single currency is crucial. Secondly, the United Kingdom supports Polish targets for a coordinated energy policy and the maintenance of sanctions against Russia. Thirdly, Polish expats in the UK contribute over one billion pounds per year to the Polish economy, although that income is slowly declining. Poland can only lose if Britain were to leave the EU. As UK’s staying with the EU is such a vital strategic interest for Poland, should not the Polish governments, now and after the election, be keeping in reserve a more flexible approach to Cameron’s requests to helping him win over a volatile British electorate? Poland is right to insist on respecting the fundamental EU principle of free movement of workers within the EU labour markets and their right to benefits under the same conditions as those countries’ indigenous citizens. However the most provocative aspect for British voters of these EU freedoms is the opportunity for EU arrivals to enjoy the fruits of the British welfare state immediately upon arrival without having worked one day and without having paid any taxes. In fact, this kind of benefit tourism is not as widely practiced as many claim but this again is a matter of perception. Many of the hard-working Poles living in the UK and diligently paying their taxes here also consider this unfair. Complaints about the possibility of benefit tourism remains one of most festering wounds in the current political crisis within the EU and specifically in Polish-British relations. Increasingly also many Poles are becoming concerned at the drain of young Poles from their own country as they fear a considerable demographic crisis as the Polish working population begins to shrink and they too would be loath to see this exodus fuelled by lax social benefit rules in countries like the UK. This was a matter of particular concern to the new Polish president-Elect Andrzej Duda. Consequently a certain respite in the number of Poles travelling to the UK could already be in the mutual interest of both the UK and Poland. So what could the new Polish government, formed after the elections in October, offer Prime Minister Cameron as a last resort to meet the whims of the British electorate? Something which would also be consistent with the interests of Poland? I think the best gift would be an agreement by both countries to give full access to the records of every citizen applying for new benefits in another country – whether a Brit in Poland or a Pole in the UK. Then there would be no possibility of illegal dual access to services and any new applicant, for example for housing benefit, would have to be checked with the income of that person in the country of origin. Of course, such research could take up to a few months during which any new benefit would be temporarily frozen. This would give the erstwhile applicant the appropriate incentive to finding legal employment in the country he or she is visiting. Such a system could also be extended to other EU countries, and I think that Germany in particular might welcome such a project. No EU principle of the right to work or to equal benefits is being flouted, there would be no requirement for a treaty change or any new referendum in other countries but it could satisfy one of the major concerns of the British electorate over abuse of benefits and could help the pro-EU lobby to win the referendum. It would also remove the current veil of suspicion and tension which currently clouds attitudes to Polish and other EU citizens working and setting up families in the UK. Wiktor Moszczyński Appear in in www.polishlondoner.blogspot.co.uk and published in the London “Polish Daily” on June 12 2015.

Labour Party should call for an English Referendum in 2017

Dear Sir, Steve Richards is right in his article "Forget devolution, the only thing that matters in Westminster is the next general election" about the political opportunism of David Cameron in bringing forward a contrived constitutional solution to other parts of the UK as well as for Scotland by November. The "Vow" in the Daily Record applied only to Scotland. The constitutional implications for England, Wales and possibly even Northern Ireland should not be hurried for the electoral convenience of one party, if for no other reason than they would complicate and possibly delay the promised required constitutional solutions for Scotland. The Electoral Reform Society has already called for a non-party political constitutional convention to consider the various options. Such a convention should be given at least 2 years to consider the options away from the heat of elections and all concerned parties could have their input. Solutions could include a more federal structure as in Germany with increased powers to regional and local authorities, the abolition of the House of Lords and also the possibility of new political institutions in place of the House of Commons.. The Labour Party should support this and, in order to avoid being accused of seeking to kick the problem into the long grass, Labour should supplement their support for such a convention by promising that a future Labour Government would call an English and Welsh referendum in 2017 to confirm the proposed constitutional reforms. It could be a electrifying and popular decision showing that Labour was prepared to grasp the nettle and offer the English and Welsh public a choice. It would also place the Tory promise of an EU referendum in its cynical and limited context. If the Liberal Democrats had any sense they should follow suit. The opportunism of David Cameron would be exposed and the Conservatives could not follow the same path and offer a referendum. To have called for one referendum in 2017 may have looked like political necessity; to offer two would appear to be carelessness. Yours faithfully, Wiktor Moszczynski letter published in "The Independent" 22/09/14

Katyn the crime; Katyn the deliberate falsehood

They roused them in the prison train truck in the early April morning as the dew still settled on the grass. The day before they had transported them from the monastery prison at Kozhelsk in a prison train. Now still tired, and wearing their winter coats, groups of 25 men were bundled into black prison buses divided into tiny cramped individual cells. After a short drive they arrived in a clearing in the forest. To the officers it looked like a summer vacation spot. As they looked round the barbed wired fence perimeter of the clearing, NKVD officers armed with guns and bayonets subjected each prisoner to a thorough search. All their money and valuables were removed, including watches, rings, pen-knives. Their hands were tied behind their backs with a cord, they were identified individually against their individual file, which none of them had ever seen. Then they were lined up in front of a low wooden fence. Sensing their end they waited for the execution squad to appear in front to them. Suddenly from behind the fence a soldier appeared behind each officer with a German Walther pistol and shot each prisoner in the back of the head. Others who sensed the danger and resisted were bayoneted to death. Their bodies were lifted by assistants and thrown into deep mass graves. The prison buses returned to the prison train for their next victims. Their files were bundled together and taken by train to a hidden NKVD archive in Moscow. Some 4421 prisoners of war from Kozhelsk were murdered this way and their bodies buried in 8 massive pits in the Katyn Forest between 3rd April and 12th May 1940 not far from Smolensk deep in the heart of European Russia. There they were found 3 years later in April 1943 by German army units who denounced this publicly by German Radio as a Soviet crime. The bodies were badly decomposed but still identifiable, their uniforms tattered but recognizable, the cords that tied their hands still in place and their personal documents and personal photographs intact. Also recoverable were the bullets in the back of the skull. On the basis of thousands of such documents it was possible to identify a large proportion of the bodies and to announce within a few days of discovery the identity of some of the officers, including General Mieczysław Smorawiński. The announcement of the discovery by German radio of 15,000 dead Polish officers was followed by a Soviet counter-claim that these murders were committed by the Germans themselves in the summer of 1941 after Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The Polish government in London under General Sikorski was shocked to the core when it realised that here were the missing 15,000 officers they had been searching for ever since the Soviet government recognized the Polish government after Hitler’s invasion in 1941 and when a Polish Army was being formed in the Soviet Union. Every attempt to find these officers was met with awkward excuses and unlikely stories about a mass escape to Manchuria. Now they had been discovered by Germany, the common enemy of Poland, Russia and the western Allies. The Polish exile Government in London was aware that on this occasion the German claims were right, but it did not want to break with Soviet Russia. It sought a middle way by asking the International Red Cross to investigate the truth about the massacre. The Soviet Government used that moment as the excuse to break off relations with the Polish Government accusing them of being collaborators with Nazi Germany and began their efforts to recreate a new Poland in the Soviet image by-passing Poland’s legal authorities and historic traditions. The officers they had killed in 1940 were now the useful excuse for ensuring that a legitimate independent Poland would not be restored after the War once the Red Army had pushed the German troops back across Poland to Germany. The Soviets confirmed their version in 1944 when they sent a delegation to Katyn, once it had been recovered from the Germans, to bring up the bodies once more, add a few false artefacts dated later than 1940 and then declare that the massacre at Katyn was a German crime. After Katyn the crime came Katyn the deliberate falsehood. It became a mark of loyalty to the new Soviet-controlled regime in post-war Poland not to question that Katyn was indeed a German crime, but more importantly still to fail to raise the issue at all. Encyclopaedias published in Poland and Russia never mentioned the issue at all. Katyn had become not only the crime that alienated for ever any possibility of a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and a free independent Poland, but the symbol of that oppression which denied Poland that freedom and independence. It was the great taboo subject that dared not speak its name and a vital element in the subjugation of post-war Poland in the Soviet bloc. Employees could lose their jobs and could go to prison for stating that it was a Soviet crime. Schoolchildren would be expelled from school for mentioning the word. The massacre was so all-encompassing that even foreign states, including the United Kingdom, refused to recognize that Katyn was a Soviet crime until the Russians themselves admitted it. Only when Katyn could be openly discussed was it possible to have a free Poland, and it was only when Russia under President Yeltsin recognized that Katyn was a Soviet crime in 1992, was it possible for the two countries to have proper relations again as friendly neighbouring nations. So how did those 4421 officers find themselves in Katyn, and why were they killed? In 1939 there were two totalitarian states in Europe whose mutual hatred and ideological rivalry transcended most other issues of European diplomacy. The bitterness of the confrontation was played out in the Spanish Civil War as troops from both sides volunteered their services transforming a brutal bitter conflict in to a testing ground for the new concept of total war. Hitler’s then system of alliances was actually called the Anti-Comintern Pact. Both also treated their own people with immense cruelty. Hitler had abolished democracy and freedom of speech and transformed all social, political and trade organizations into instruments of the Nazi Party’s ideology and propaganda, and had taken away all civil rights from Jewish citizens. Jews and enemies of the state were beaten up, sent to concentration camps and killed. The Soviet system was far further advanced in totalitarian control, repression and slaughter. The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 had actually destroyed the infant democratic state which the original Russian Revolution had sought to set up in February 1917 after overthrowing the Tsar. Since the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the new regime had used the mass murder of hostages, nations and classes by killings, starvation, imprisonment and torture as a system of propping up their one party state. This had reached a climax in the 1930’s when 700,000 were shot in the internal purge of the party by a shot in the back of the head, some 376,000 peasants were shot in the collectivization drive, 724,000 were shot for not performing tasks assigned to them such as denouncing others and this had also extended to the mass killing of pre-war minorities including the shooting of 111,000 Poles in the Soviet Union as spies (a fact that even Poles today do not appear fully to comprehend). 35,000 Mongolians were killed and a policy of deliberate starvation killed some 3.5 million Ukrainians. Yet these two antagonistic murderous regimes did have one common enemy, the creation of a free independent Polish state. The destruction and obliteration of Poland, as the so-called Bastard of Versailles, became a common aim and led to the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in August 1939 in which a secret protocol described the elimination of the Polish state. On August 31st. 1939 the German Reichstag and the Supreme Council of the USSR simultaneously ratified the Treaty and this effectively unleashed the Second World War following the invasion of Poland by Germany on September 1st 1939 and the Soviet Union on September 17th. Cooperation between the two regimes was consistent throughout the next 2 years. On September 24th 1939 as the armies of the two countries met on the new demarcation lines in central Poland a new secret protocol was agreed by both governments which stated “Neither side will allow any Polish agitation on its territories against the territory on the other side. They will suppress on their territories the beginnings of any such agitation and allow exchanges of mutual information on the official measures they have taken to do so.” What followed in 1939 and 1940 was exactly that, a joint operation by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to destroy the Polish state by mass terror and the mass killing of Polish elites, planned and jointly approved by Soviet and Nazi officials in a conference in Krakow at the end of 1939. This came to be known as the Polish Golgotha, as personal to Poland as the Holocaust is to the Jews. The Germans isolated the Jewish population by setting up ghettoes in the major cities and then starving them and introduced a mass pacification programme called Action AB which killed 6,500 Polish hostages emanating from the Polish elites by firing squad. The largest single site for these massacres was at Palmiry on the outskirts of the Kampinos Forest near Warsaw, where 1700 were shot. On the Soviet side, in accordance with an agreement between Germany and the USSR, officer prisoners of war were retained by the NKVD and the lower ranks transferred to German custody or transferred to the Gulags. The remaining officers, policemen, border guards, prison staff, landowners and administrators, totalling some 15,000 people, were detained in 3 camps; Kozhelsk, Ostashkov and Starobielsk. There was an investigation of each officer and segregation of those deemed favourable to Soviet rule or who could otherwise be useful to the Soviets. 395 officers thus survived and were transferred to Grazovyets camp from where they were able to join the Polish Army in Russia in 1941. Then on March 2nd 1940 Lavrentij Beria, Commissar for Internal Affairs, sent secret memorandum nr. 794/B to Stalin in which he stated that 14736 prisoners of war and 18,632 Poles in Russian prisons, including 5141 policemen, were “declared and unreformable enemies of Soviet rule” and that on those grounds they should be summarily shot without being confronted or responding to the charges against them. This note was countersigned as approved by Stalin and his 5 closest henchmen. In this way the Soviets were eliminating national and class enemies who would be hostile to continuing Soviet rule in Poland, and at the same time taking revenge for the defeat of the Red Army outside the gates of Warsaw in 1920 when the Poles had prevented the spread of revolutionary terror into Central Europe. Polish officers and soldiers had been asked earlier, during the screening, if they had participated in the 1920 campaign and if so, then whether drafted or as volunteers. Following the approval of Memorandum 794/B the killings began in that same month. Probably they were decided on earlier and the memorandum was just a formality. As mentioned already 4421 officer reserves in the Kozhelsk camp were shot in the Katyn Forest between 3rd April and 12th May 1940. They included the only woman Janina Lewandowska, an ace pilot. Significantly her sister was killed in the same month in Palmiry by the Germans, both victims of the same campaign of mass murder by two different enemies. 3820 officers from Starobielsk camp, including prominent generals such as Stanislaw Haller and Leonard Skierski, were shot at night in the back of the neck in the cellars of the NKVD headquarters in Kharkov between 5th April and 12th May 1940. The heads of the bodies were covered to hide the blood and then driven in lorries with 25 bodies each laid alternatively head to toe and then buried secretly in Pyatykhatki in unmarked mass graves dug every day just before dawn until the massacre was finished. 6311 policemen and border guards from Ostashkov camp were killed by a shot in the back of the head in the NKVD HQ in Kalinin (now Tver) between 4th April and 16th May 1940. The executioners dressed bizarrely in brown leather aprons and long leather gloves identified each officer by name in one room with walls painted red, then handcuffed him and led him to a black padded cellar with a drain and there the officers were shot in the back of the head at a rate of 250 every night and their bodies carried through a small exit to waiting lorries which transferred them to be buried in long trenches opened and covered every day with a bulldozer at an unfenced site in Miednoye, 30km from the execution spot. That same month a further 3435 political prisoners, policemen and officers brought in from Soviet jails in South Eastern Poland were killed in Kiev and Kharkov and also 3870 executed in Minsk from various Soviet jails in North Eastern Poland. This is a total of 24,357 Polish officers, doctors, engineers, administrators, policemen, landowners, forestry officials, Jewish elders, priests and rabbis and other prominent figures from the Polish elites who would have been considered hostile to Soviet rule in Poland. Although the total found at Katyn totalled 4400, the name “Katyn massacre” is now extended to cover all those mass murders. This is recognized as a war crime by the European Court of Human Rights and it was committed on an industrial scale. All this occurred while Polish families and settlers, more than 1.5 million Poles in total, were being deported to suffer heavy labour and slow lingering deaths in the wastes of Siberia or Kazakhstan of whom barely half survived until the amnesty in late 1941. Katyn was one of the worst crimes of the XXth century. Others like the Holocaust or the killings in Cambodia were on a vaster scale but at least the perpetrators were largely identified and often punished. This was not true of Katyn for which crime not one single perpetrator was arrested or punished. Katyn, the crime, and Katyn, the deliberate falsehood, acted as an open festering wound, precisely because not only the families of those killed, but also the nation as a whole, could not come to a closure for 50 years as one Soviet Government after another lived in denial. The dead officers could only be honoured abroad, mostly by exiled Polish communities, but without the recognition of the governments of the countries in which they lived. Only after 1989 was it possible to honour and mourn the victims in Poland and only after 1992 was it possible to do so in Russia. Here the bodies were located, identified and then given a proper burial in a new cemetery. Indeed it was on such a flight to Smolensk to honour the dead at Katyn in 2010 that the presidential plane carrying a 94 strong Polish delegation, headed by President Lech Kaczyński and ex-President Ryszard Kaczorowski, crashed and all on board were killed. It adds a particular poignancy and a further sense of deep loss whenever this massacre is remembered. However with added tensions this year in Eastern Europe it is worth continuing to remember this terrible crime in the hope that memory of the victims will not again be tarnished by cynical deceit. So let us honour them now for their sacrifice and for the values for which they were killed, love of their country, love of freedom and rejection of foreign tyranny. Wiktor Moszczynski 18th May 2014

1834 - The Polish "Windrush"

180th anniversary of the arrival of Polish revolutionaries in Portsmouth Your Worship the Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, Most British schoolchildren now know about the vessel Windrush which arrived in 1948 in Tilbury from Jamaica with 492 passengers who were to be the precursors of the large West Indian community that settled in this country over the following decades. In the case of the large Polish community in this country their first vessel of 212 settlers arrived in Portsmouth on the vessel Marianne more than a hundred years earlier in 1834. However these were not workers but warriors, beaten but unbowed, who had survived the failed uprising against the Russian Tsar in 1831 and more than 2 years of beatings, torture and occasional killings in Prussian prisons. Because their Polish prisoners were largely without officers the Prussians had tried to get them to surrender to the Russians. When these attempts failed they placed their remaining 650 obstinate prisoners on 3 vessels bound for America. They set sail from Gdansk but a storm in the North Sea scattered and damaged the vessels. The Elisabeth reached Le Havre and the soldiers disembarked there in support of the Polish government in exile much to the alarm of the French government. The Union, the second vessel, reached Harwich and its passengers wanted to sail to France too but in the end the French Government diverted them to Algeria to join the French Foreign Legion. When the damaged Marianne anchored in Spithead the Polish soldiers, still technically prisoners, refused to allow the vessel to sail to America and demanded passage to France. The French urged them to go to Algeria as well but the Polish freedom fighters refused to serve in an army of occupation in North Africa against rebelling Arabs. After 5 weeks’ stand off, thanks to great pressure from the citizens of Portsmouth, a reluctant British government agreed to allow them temporary stay. Within 3 days of their disembarking the citizens of Portsmouth had set up a Committee for the Welfare of the Polish Soldiers, headed by the lawyer Nathaniel Griffin who sent a public appeal to Parliament entitled “The Case of Poles now at Portsmouth”. The Treasurer was Augustine Creuze, architect of the local Naval Arsenal and an active member was the writer Amelia Opie and the Quaker Anna Cruikshank. The Literary Association of the Friends of Poland in London also raised money for them and under the influence of Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart and great pressure from Portsmouth citizens the British Government gave the Portsmouth Poles a single subsidy of £10,000 and an annual grant which amounted to a payment of 5 shillings and 3 pence a week to each soldier. Initially the soldiers were put up in the local customs warehouse near Bath Square and later they were moved to a wooden barrack in Portsea which had previously been a hospital for victims of cholera. It was near Unicorn Gate and served as their communal home until 1846. The building was pulled down in 1870 but the site is now covered by the walls of the shipyard alongside York Place. Many of the soldiers worked in the fields, especially at harvest time and in neighbouring factories. “All residents having contacts with them praise their conduct and diligence”, said an article in “The Times” in 1834. They had a communal kitchen and shared their property. This was not only to save money but also because it reflected their radical social views. They were largely of landless peasant stock and many of them were initially illiterate. They were very critical of the Polish landlords and officer class, who, they felt, betrayed them, and they had set up a political groupings called Lud Polski – Polish People which was seen as an idealistic socialist organization. Yet they had all been soldiers from different branches of Poland’s Army, cavalry, infantry, grenadiers, artillery and engineers and several of them had the Virtuti Militari, the Polish equivalent of the Victoria Cross. The largest contingent came from the crack 4th Infantry Regiment, called the Czwartacy. They retained military discipline amongst themselves and continued to wear uniforms. Some actually went on to America, their passage paid by a generous donation from Portsmouth citizens. They were still keen to fight for Poland’s freedom against the 3 occupying powers Russia, Prussia and Austria, who had divided Poland between them and in 1848 when the opportunity came a number of them returned surreptitiously to Poland to fight the Austrians and Russians in support of the Hungarian uprising. In 1848 there were still 78 soldiers left in Portsmouth, and by now they had integrated well into the community and married English women. A descendant of Joseph Sosnowski is Len Goodman, one of the judges of Strictly Come Dancing. They retained their radical views; strongly supported the Chartists in their fight for democracy and social justice in Britain and their delegates were at the First Socialist International where they defended Poland’s right to independence. The last of the 212 from the Marianne survived in Portsmouth until 1899. When Poles arrived here in the 1940s after Poland was again divided between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia they fought alongside the British while Portsmouth, London and other cities were bombed, took part in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic and participated in the reconquest of Europe from under Nazi rule. But like their predecessors in 1834 they too found in 1945 that they had lost their country and they too had to settle in the UK which welcomed them, though not perhaps always with the same enthusiasm. With the help of the Polish Resettlement Corps Poles were able to learn the language and find a trade and integrate into the British social and economic fabric. But like their XIXth century precursors they retained their loyalty to Poland and campaigned for its independence. They did not forget about the survivors of the “Marianne”. In 1970 they set up a fund supported by members of the wartime 4th Infantry Division, who saw themselves as the heirs of the Czwartacy of the 1830 rebellion. Otto Hulacki was one of the prime movers. A monument was erected in Kingston Cemetery but after a few years the funds ran out and the half-finished monument decayed. Now with the new Polish intake, equally proud of their 1834 forbears, the Polish community has successfully sought to renovate this monument. A new Committee to restore the monument was revived in 1998 and the monument unveiled in 2004 in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth and the Polish Ambassador. As we can see from those here present today, the new XXI century Polish intake still carries on the traditions and pride in their troubled history even though Poland is now free and independent and they have arrived here primarily as free EU citizens without the need to fight as soldiers for their countries’ freedom. Yet that “Times “article about the positive conduct and diligence of the Poles in 1834 could just as easily be a description of the hard-working Poles of today. Today we honour the soldiers of the Marianne for their courage steadfast loyalty to Poland and we honour the citizens of the City of Portsmouth for their bold support and their generous hospitality to their Polish visitors. Wiktor Moszczynski 23rd February 2014

Stop Victimization of UK Poles

P R E S S R E L E A S E London 23/08/2013

As long standing British citizens of Polish origin who have lived and worked here since our parents had fought alongside the British Armed Forces to defeat Nazi Germany during World War Two, our generation was largely supportive when the United Kingdom joined the then European Common Market in 1973 and very enthusiastic indeed when a free independent post-Communist Poland was able to accede to the EU in 2004. Many young Poles were finally given the same opportunity that Western Europeans had enjoyed for two generations, namely access to a Europe-wide free market economy which also guaranteed democracy, human rights and safety from external invasion. Although the Polish economy still has much catching up to do to match Western European living standards, yet its younger generation has impressed the UK with its industrious and entrepreneurial work ethic as well as its growing contribution to Western culture and education. More than 700,000 Polish citizens have remained here, many of them setting up families here and ensuring a steady input into the British economy and UK exchequer. Largely, with some inevitable exceptions, they are integrating into the UK economic and social mainstream as smoothly as our generations did more than half a century ago, while retaining also the best of their distinct Polish culture and national traditions. It is understandable that, with the current stagnation in the Eurozone and with the on-going crisis in the British economy, British citizens and their political parties are seeking to redefine how the EU should work and also their own relationship to the Union. However we are increasingly aware that the newer communities of Poles and other Central Europeans who have lived and worked here legally since 2004 are being singled out as scapegoats by irresponsible politicians from all parties, anxious to curry favour with the recent upsurge in a more intense anti-European sentiment in this country. There are threats and insinuations about their right to work and travel, to their access to the health service and basic benefits, despite the fact that they are now long-term UK taxpayers. EU citizens from Central Europe have every right to live and work here not only under current EU regulations on the free movement of labour but also under UK immigration laws on permanent residence and UK citizenship. I would appeal to these irresponsible politicians to desist from the insidious and cowardly sniping at Poles and other EU citizens. While this behaviour strengthens the prejudices of those seeking to blame the current crisis on foreigners, I doubt that it will convert any of them to support a mainstream party, and it will not impress the electorate at large and convince it of the sincerity of those politicians most of whom expressed quite different opinions barely five years ago. Nor should they think that making Poles scapegoats for the ills of the British economy is an electorally win/win strategy. In the spring of this year the total number of Polish citizens on the London electoral register amounted to 98,799, nearly as large as that of an Inner London Borough. As a quarter of the Polish population in the UK lives in London that indicates a total of some 400,000 votes of Polish citizens in this country eligible to vote next May in the European and local elections. That figure also does not include some tens of thousands of second and third generation British citizens of Polish origin who will object strongly to parties and candidates that seek to gain short term popularity by making derogatory comments about their fellow countrymen. Is this a sleeping giant that those errant politicians are seeking to raise against themselves? Our organization members urges that any future debate on UK-EU relations will be conducted on a more rational and less chauvinistic basis paying proper respect to all those who contribute to the UK economy and way of life. Issued by Wiktor Moszczyński, Chair, Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów Ltd, (Polish Veteran Support Association) 48 Inglis Road, London W5 3RW - tel 0208 992 7816 ; 07553018956