Ross Clark
which would have been created had more entrepreneurial citizens stayed.
EU membership ought to have been a boon for Poland, a country which in 2004 was still recovering from the dead years of communism. Access to Western European markets ought to have supercharged that recovery. Initially that is what seemed to happen. Between 1992-2004 the Polish economy more than doubled in size from just under $100billion to $250billion, according to the World Bank. Between 2004 and 2008 it doubled again to peak at $500billion.
But since then Polish GDP has flatlined. Of course the global recession of 2008/09 affected all economies yet for the Polish economy to be a little smaller in 2015 than it was in 2008 is a shocking indictment of EU membership. The EU has managed to turn a high-growth economy into a stagnant one.
EU accession of former Soviet bloc countries has been horribly mismanaged. The aim should have been to raise the GDP per capita of Eastern European countries to something approaching that of Western European countries – and then to remove barriers to the free movement of people.
If wages in Poland were similar to those in Britain we wouldn’t have a problem with migration because the flow of people would be more balanced. No one bothers about open migration between Britain and France or Germany because the numbers roughly cancel each other out.
Instead the doors were thrown open far too early. The EU allowed Western European countries a period of seven years before they were obliged to accept migrant workers from Eastern Europe. But a few – Britain included – allowed free movement from day one.
Worse, the EU has forced other member states to allow Eastern Europeans full access to their welfare systems from the moment they arrive. It has become too easy for Poles, Latvians and so on to flee their countries. If they land a job in
HOW much better for both Britain and Poland if we’d opened up our markets to Eastern Europe but stuck to a system of work permits. We could have boosted wealth across Europe while avoiding the problems associated with the mass movement of people.
We wouldn’t have had surgeries overflowing and our housing stock unable to cope. Poland wouldn’t have found itself losing its workforce. There would have been an incentive for businesses to set up in Poland, rather than Western Europe.
Unfortunately the EU’s unelected leaders treated free movement as an ideology which must be observed no matter what the consequences.
Poor Poland and her neighbours have already suffered enough from one ideology: communism. The last thing they needed was another set of inflexible beliefs foisted upon them.
Hopefully Britain’s exit will jolt the EU into a pragmatic way of doing things which promotes trade and the opportunity of people to travel and work abroad but which recognises that over-rapid liberalisation of free movement has caused enormous harm.
‘Declining population, a brain drain of talent’