Well, it’s open season on Poles, by the look of things, what with half a million of them having had the bad taste to come here when the Government said that 13,000 at most would arrive. In fact, two years before Poland joined the EU, I rang the Home Office to check how many people ministers thought would be arriving from the new member states. They were expecting, said the press officer, 10,000 new arrivals. Even back then I could tell when I was being had.
“Would you like to put money on that?” I asked. The man was silent for a moment. “No,” he said. And I’ve always regretted not pressing him to put £1 on the line for every 1,000 people by which his estimate was out.
But I digress. What I wanted to say is that it’s not just Britain finding that there are Poles everywhere. Ireland was one of the two other countries that admitted free access to its labour markets from the new EU states (the third being Sweden). The upshot is that about 8 per cent of the Irish labour force is Polish, though there, as here, no one quite knows the real number, what with all the coming and going courtesy of Ryanair and the daily buses from Dublin to Cracow. The last time I went home to Arklow — a seaside town south of Dublin — even I was struck by the influx.
Many of them work in construction, which is weird because that was always what the Irish went abroad to do, and in the service industries. And two work in a Polish shop that they have set up to provide their community with pickled cabbage, bottled cherry juice and Polish cocoa, for which you would look in vain elsewhere, even in the local mega branch of Tesco.
In fact, there are no parts of the economy that the Poles haven’t reached.
There is no more conservative individual than the Irish small farmer, and I mean that in a nice way. But my friend’s 78-year-old father, who has a cattle farm, has employed, successively, two Polish farmhands. “He’s a treasure,” marvelled my friend, of the present one. “Works a 12-hour day, six days a week. If he’s not busy he’s looking for something else to do. When they go in to dinner he does the washing up, and sweeps the floor afterwards.”
I asked whether it wasn’t possible to get an Irish farm labourer these days. “Well,” she said, “we did have one fellow, very nice but he wouldn’t do any heavy work with a shovel. He wanted to do everything sitting in a tractor.” There, I’m afraid, you have it.
As another friend, a priest in Dublin, summed up the Poles, “they’re no trouble”. Or, as I put it crudely, “at least they’re not trying to blow you up”.
My cousin was more reserved: “There is resentment — and a lot of it is from [local] parents. There are no holiday jobs for the children any more. All the jobs in cafés and hotels and supermarkets get taken.”
And there are more heavyweight concerns. As Pat Rabbitt, the Irish Labour Party leader, points out, the construction boom in Ireland is nearly at saturation point. If there is an economic downturn, it may be the Eastern Europeans — lower-wage, malleable — whom employers retain. And then there’ll be trouble.
Back here, pundits fancy themselves terribly prescient when they point out that there will be more of the same problem if the Bulgarians and Romanians get access to the labour market when they join the EU. But if we’re playing Cassandra, can I point out that this is as nothing compared with the likely impact on the labour market and community relations when Turkey finally joins the European Union.
Cast your mind back, dear reader, to just over six months ago, when Britain held the EU presidency. That inglorious period was distinguished by one single achievement on the part of Jack Straw (remember him?) and the Prime Minister. They made it their aim to get Turkey on track for membership of the EU. They did so by bludgeoning the Austrian foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, into submission — she wanted to give Turkey a privileged relationship with the EU without full membership.
But no, nothing would do for Straw, backed by his special friend Condoleezza Rice, but to get Turkey into the club. It was a cost-free way of proving his Muslim-friendly credentials, notwithstanding the Iraq war.
Trouble is, Turkey is a country with 80 million people now, and growing fast. And it’s barely European. A mere 3 per cent of Turkey, geographically, is in Europe; the rest is in Asia. It’s Islamic, with a potential for Muslim extremism which is not true of the C of E-style European Muslims of Bosnia and Albania.
In short, if you think we’ve got problems now with EU immigration, they are nothing compared with the upheavals that we can expect when Blair and Straw’s achievement reaches fruition and Turks have free access to European labour markets. But by then, of course, both of them will have moved on.
No sympathy for death plunge dad
The Greeks, who feel strongly about family values, take a dim view of the actions of John Hogan, who apparently threw himself and his two children over the balcony of a hotel in Crete, distraught at the thought of his wife leaving him. And the inmates of the jail that is probably awaiting him are likely to express their outraged sentiments in ways that would be foreign to Wormwood Scrubs. My husband is Albanian and I am afraid that his initial reaction when he heard what had happened is probably typical of the Balkans. “What an idiot,” he remarked. “Why didn’t he just throw his wife over the balcony?”
Only cosmetic?
Just when you thought the luggage restrictions at Heathrow could hardly get worse, BAA has banned travellers from taking cosmetics in hand luggage. That means no talcum powder, lipstick, eyeliner or mascara.
Talc, frankly, most of us can do without. But lipstick? Mascara? Eyeliner? Mascara is neither a fluid nor a gel. Lipstick isn’t, either, unless we’re talking lipgloss. And eyeliner — well, unless they are worried that terrorists will poke a stewardess in the eye with the pencil, it’s hard to see quite where prohibition gets us. It makes you brood about the dearth of women at senior management level in aviation.
But if this is madness, there’s method in’t. If the only cosmetics you can take on board are those purchased on the other side of the security barrier, that is good news for MAC, Lancôme and the rest, sold in duty-free. From which, I understand, BAA makes a handy profit.
