The EU can’t resist empire-building

A wearisome aspect of modern political polarisation is feeling forced to take sides. Until recently, I felt I could contemplate last Sunday’s Polish presidential election with friendly neutrality. Both sides, after all, strongly resist Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In my one visit of any length to Poland, I was most kindly looked after by my publisher, all of whose friends supported the Civic Platform and mostly came out of Solidarity and related anti-communist dissident movements of the 1980s. On the other hand, I liked the way the Law and Justice party (in office at that time) opposed the extension of EU power and appeared to stick up for peasants and lower-paid workers against the Brussels satrap, Donald Tusk, who is now the Polish prime minister. As the election approached, however, I noticed the BBC constantly pushing the cause of Rafal Trzaskowski, ‘liberal mayor’ of Warsaw, and I started to lean towards the ‘hard-right historian’, Karol Nawrocki, the Law and Justice man. I was finally tipped in his favour by a biased BBC report about the terrible wickedness of abortion restrictions in Poland and how a Trzaskowski victory would put all that right. Against BBC hopes and predictions (it often confuses the two), Nawrocki won. With a bit of luck, the resulting cohabitation between a leftish government and a rightish president might prove Poland’s democratic maturity. Perhaps its voters, irritated by Tusk’s dominant media and political establishment, resist the ever-greater sublimation of Polish sovereignty which eliminates the national veto and extends EU ‘competences’. It is tragic that Brussels thinks the best way to resist the Russian empire is to extend its own.

On the subject of abortion, I partly share people’s irritation that J.D. Vance sees fit to intervene over our ban of protests outside abortion clinics. It is not his business, any more than it was ours to protest about the death of George Floyd.