UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has visited Poland.

Various Foreign Secretaries have swung through Poland for commemorative or other events. But straightforward bilateral visits by British Foreign Secretaries have been few and far between in recent years.

None in my time from 2003-2007 (although Jack Straw took part in the Auschwitz commemorations in 2005). Is David Miliband’s visit the first in some eight years – maybe even longer? The British Embassy website does not tell us.

This is a good example of how EU business dumbs down conventional diplomacy. EU Foreign Ministers meet regularly in all sorts of fora and get to know each other well. Which makes it all the harder to persuade them to make the effort to take a bilateral visit and spend a little time learning more about any one country.

Mr Miliband made a speech. Here it is.

A couple of stylistic points.

First, the opening passages are clunky. An attempt by a speech-writer who knows little of Poland to rummage around and find a few historical examples by way of ‘filler’. The examples used cast no light of insight on what follows, and might as well have been omitted. It is striking that there is no reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by name in this its 70th anniversary year.

The personal passages are coy:

I am one of the million Britons who have Polish blood. My father’s parents lived in Poland, leaving the country at the end of the First World War. My mother was born here; her life saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression. After the war, in 1946, she left the country for the UK.  

I come here with a curiosity about the place where my grandparents and my mother were born alongside an acute sense of tragedy for the terrible losses suffered during the Second World War. I come here with an admiration for the strength of the Polish spirit, the flame which continued to burn through 44 dark years of Communism …

Hmm. His grandfather fought in the Red Army, which greedily tried to conquer Poland after WW1 ended and was famously defeated by Polish heroism in 1920. His father was a noted Marxist.

Do we know what such senior Milibands made of Soviet communism and Poland’s enforced subordination to the Soviet Union after WW2? Did they ever talk about it at home with young David and Ed? The speech leaves us none the wiser.

No mention of Pope John Paul II in connection with the end of communism in Poland?

As for the main part of the speech, it’s the familiar Miliband mix: lots of To-Do lists, Climate Change, Energy, lots more ‘Europe’ as an answer to most problems, rather more regulation.

The passage on EU enlargement is good:

The effects of instability and division in the Balkans and the Caucasus will spill over across Europe. The European Union’s power to stabilise these areas comes from the fact that those countries are prepared to undergo the reforms necessary to be part of the single market. Europe is an anchor for stability. If we give up on enlargement, we lose that power and we will be powerless to address instability and insecurity on our borders.

Our first priority in taking forward enlargement is to stick to the commitments we have made to Turkey and to the Western Balkans. It is vital to our credibility and cohesion that the EU keeps its side of the bargain…

Beyond those already on the road to membership, we need to deepen cooperation and incentivise reform.  As I said last summer in Kiev Article 49 of the EU Treaty gives all European countries the right to apply for membership, and Ukraine is most certainly a European country.

A key point, folks. The EU studiously refuses to describe Ukraine as a ‘European country’ whenever it gets the chance to do. Saying this unambiguously sends the right messages to Kiev and Moscow and Brussels alike.

All in all, a curiously unthematic or even unambitious job.

Nothing about Poland as an example of why enlargement works. Or on all those Poles who have come to work in the UK. Or on the recent European Parliament elections (admittedly not a subject on which Labour politicians have much to say, of course), or where the UK and Poland might work closely on EU reform agendas in the years to come. Or does Mr Miliband expect not to be part of that process and so avoids the subject?

Boxes ticked. Back to the plane.

Preferably not leaving key briefing folders behind…