When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?"

Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean?

Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus:

  • a small number of now rather elderly Poles who arrived in the UK before WW2 and their families who to varying degrees associate with Poland or maintain active links. See eg George Dobry QC, one of the most distinguished of them. But by now many of them are for all practical purposes more British than Polish, usually having UK citizenship and passports.
  • then there are those Poles and their descendants who came to the UK in sizeable numbers during and after WW2, not least to fly against the Nazis with the RAF – a contribution not always remembered as it should be. Here too many are now British citizens for counting purposes.
  • various Poles made their way to the UK during the Communist period to work unobtrusively or to study or both. See eg ex-President Kwasniewski or today’s Polish Foreign Minister and former Bullingdon Club member Radek Sikorski. Professor Zbigniew Pelczynski who came to the UK after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising helped set up a memorable programme for Polish students at Oxford University – many graduates of that programme are now leading figures in Poland and elsewhere. But no doubt some also stayed on here.
  • when the Cold War ended the UK took what was then a bold step and lifted visa requirements on Poles. This did not mean that Poles who came to the UK could work freely, but plenty of them did and stayed to work ‘illegally’. A number of them will have acquired UK citizenship and/or stayed on.
  • and then when Poland joined the EU in May 2004 the UK announced that any Pole who wanted to do so could come to the UK to work, subject only to a registration process so that the process might be monitored. Moreover, any Pole who had arrived previously but had been working illegally could regularise his/her status by registering with the scheme with no further ado.
  • This development was all the more sensational in Poland because only Ireland and Sweden unconditionally opened their labour markets at the same time. So a predominance of those Poles inclined to move elsewhere in the EU following Poland’s accession were in effect funnelled in our direction.
  • Hundreds of thousands of them (or even millions?) duly did so.
  • But now it seems that the tide is turning
  • and in any case plenty of Poles dip in and out of the UK labour market for short-term jobs here and there, travelling backwards and forwards. These people are in effect ‘in’ both Poland and the UK and maybe other EU countries simultaneously

So, the original question can not be answered meaningfully to any degree of accuracy. 

What we have been seeing since 2004 is what those of us in the business quietly expected to happen, namely an initial large surge of Poles coming to the UK to find jobs; a surge which in due course would peak and then steadily decline as the Poles concerned either had enough of living away from their families or felt they had saved enough to relocate back to Poland with a better start from a small pile of savings.

And let’s not forget that Poles also have been invading Germany. In fact, far more Poles work in Germany than in the UK, despite the fact that Germany has not been as flexible as the UK since Poland’s accession. 

In short, what inevitably looks to some people like a scary mass Polish invasion of the UK will in a few years’ time be accepted as having been a largely benign and (in the great scheme of things) effectively temporary phenomenon. 

But the impact on the British diet may be more … profound?