An English Migrant to Poland
Jim Parton - Fri 14 Dec, 2007
My wife Anna and I have just emigrated to Poland. Were a little contra-eddy in the tide of Poles going to Britain. Obviously there are plenty of UK businessmen in Warsaw already, and Tesco is one of Poland's largest supermarket chains, but as an independent Brit, not backed by a large company, I am unusual...
My wife Anna and I have just emigrated to Poland. We’re a little contra-eddy in the tide of Poles going to Britain.
Obviously there are plenty of UK businessmen in Warsaw already, and Tesco is one of Poland's largest supermarket chains, but as an independent Brit, not backed by a large company, I am unusual.
Tides change. A Daily Mail headline at the end of November wailed, “The Polish baby boom: Fears for NHS and schools as 1,000 Polish children are born here EVERY month”. There is a photo captioned, “Poles queue outside their embassy in order to gain a visa to remain in Britain”.
A peculiar story, because Poles don’t need a visa to remain in Britain. And not since communist times have they needed an exit visa from their own embassy. Almost certainly the caption should have read, “Poles queuing to vote in the recent general election in the country they are about to return to...”
Some Poles will settle in the UK, of course. But very many are buying a little parcel of land to build their new house on when they return. Anna is Polish, and enough of her friends are doing it for it to be called a trend. The tide is turning. Poland is under construction, the entire place is a building site.
Some people think it odd we want to leave Britain. Of course Anna's happy to be returning after six years of doing the economic migrant thing of cleaning your houses, looking after your children (she worked in a Chiswick nursery school) and serving you (and me) beer from behind a bar.
Three jobs. The bar job was how I met her; she was the girl behind the bar at my tennis club near Holland Park.
Poles make great servants, but I doubt – and don’t you agree with me – that they see their long-term destiny as being a new servant class in Britain. Especially as, quite often, they are better educated, and work harder than the people they serve.
Anna was a maths teacher, her half brother, who loads Tesco shelves in London on behalf of Crispy Crème Donuts, was a professional pianist. They don’t want to be servants.
Still, Anna liked Britain, the idea to leave was mine. Poland is clearly on the launch pad to prosperity, while Britain will be lucky to escape a nasty little recession caused by the bursting of the property bubble. So we’ve cashed in our three-bed semi in South East London, and bought a former Bishop’s palace, built in 1660, with 50 or so rooms, a few kilometres from the Czech border and the Sudety mountains.
Our money could have bought us four bishop’s palaces. Some mispricing going on, I felt, in Poland’s and Britain’s property markets.
Ravished by the Nazis then effectively annexed by Stalin, Poland emerged in 1990 with an economy in ruins. In 2007, it is still dowdy and run down, but beginning to motor. In another decade or so, it will have more or less caught up Germany, and dare I venture, Great Britain too?
As economic forecasts are nearly always wrong, I prefer to look at how forecasts change. Poland’s numbers have spent the last year being revised in a good way. GDP better than expected, unemployment dropping far quicker than expected, and so on.
At the start of 2007, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s forecast for GDP growth was “5.5% expected for 2006, easing to an annual average of 4.7% in 2007…”
After three quarters, 2007 is looking like 6.5%. The EIU has now upgraded forecasts for 2008 and onwards.
On the downside, inflation is at 3.0% (against 2.3% expected) … and where central banks have been cutting to stave off a credit crunch induced recession, Poland’s bank has been tightening. Some urban property development prices – not bishop’s palaces – look to be in bubble territory. Wage costs are rising, and the Zloty is strong, up even against the Euro. (The plan is to join the Euro zone in about 2012 – the plan keeps changing, so I’m vague about the date).
Taking into account such risks, Forbes magazine has just published a beauty parade of countries good to manufacture in. Compiled by accountants Price Waterhouse Cooper, Poland came top.
Anyway, no need to worry about rising labour costs, or shortages. Just as the UK’s labour costs have been kept down by an influx of labour from abroad, so it will happen, I predict, in Poland.
Where will Poland’s labour influx come from? Why, Great Britain, of course.
In reference to the bishop’s palace, I get asked all the time, “But can you find any Polish builders, they’re all over here? Ha, ha, ha.”
True, the Polish government is even talking of making it easier for Indians to work on the stadiums and roads being upgraded for Euro football 2012.
But I type this to the merry background noise of our new shower going in. It’s being put in by a local plumber, called Slawek. He’s quite a bit older than the Pole working on your new conservatory in the UK, but he’s available and keen. You see, the Poles in the UK have left their dads behind.
Slawek’s son, Bronislaw (Bronek for short), works in England. The conservatory he’s working on right now was paid for by a little bit of “equity release”. The UK equity release game will end with falling house prices. In fact it probably already has.
Bronek is finishing off the conservatory just in time for Christmas, and finding that the loft conversion that he was booked to do next year is no longer wanted. Meanwhile, Bronek’s wife Gosia, is a waitress at your local gastropub. Their two small children, as the Daily Mail observes, are “clogging up” a local primary school.
Come January, when bar sales are at the lowest for the year, the manager will regretfully shake his head and say to Gosia, “You were fantastic during the Christmas party season, but as you can see, my tables are empty, I’m sorry, I’m not going to be able to give you any hours this month…”
Bronek, Gosia and the kids may not know it yet, but they are coming back to Poland next year. Upward wage pressure and labour shortages in Poland will ease. At first, they’ll move back into Slawek’s two bedroom communist flat. Not that they were more comfortable in England. There, to save rent, they all piled into a one bedroom flat.
But luckily, they bought their plot of land. With their English savings, and time on their hands, they’ll start building…
Meanwhile, while Slawek may be monoglot (and old), but Bronek and Gosia speak pretty good English (and are young). They’ll be a real asset to any company thinking of setting up a plant in Poland, as will their totally bilingual children. They won’t be unemployed for long.
Editor’s note: Jim Parton’s hilarious 1991 account of City redundancy, The Buck Stop Here (“Money talks, mine said goodbye”), is to be republished in February next year. There’s more on Jim in this article from yesterday’s Guardian.
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