Ed West Ed West

Could a strike by Poles bring down Britain?

Britain’s Poles go on strike tomorrow to protest the widespread anti-Polish xenophobia across the country, which is literally everywhere. There are about one million Polish people in Great Britain, and many sectors of the economy depend on them, so in theory they could hold the country to ransom by striking. But they wont, and this is the beauty of open orders.

Firstly, they won’t because so many eastern Europeans work in areas where they have so few working rights. That’s why big business likes them, and why many working-class natives resent their arrival.

So if your Polish worker goes on strike, you can just sack him and hire a Romanian for even less; that is how our forward-looking, globalised labour force works. Historically one of the reasons given for America’s relatively weak trades union and socialist movement is its diversity; workforces thrown together from different countries lack the cohesion to take on the bosses. Socialism of any sorts only made any in-roads in the heavily German and Scandinavian Great Lakes region, which tended to resemble Germany and Scandinavia socially.

But there is a less cynical, more positive reason for why the Poles will not strike, and that is that anti-Polish prejudice in Britain is vanishingly small. There is some unease in areas where E8 migration has been intense, such as the East Midlands, but even there it is mainly about economic competition. Most English people are not remotely hostile to Poles, are aware of their heroics in saving Europe in 1940 and even 1683, and, as always, are happy with newcomers as long as they don’t bother them when they go to the park. Much of the Ukip rhetoric about Europeans is, I suspect, to avoid the more toxic subject of non-European migration – in fact, the Polish ambassador said himself that a number of Poles support Ukip and would vote for them.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in