The Long Review of 2025: Pt I

What a year! Two life-changing events for me (more on both in subsequent posts), namely a heart attack in April and the shift from being pet-free to sharing my small house six cats. Just kind of happened.

But I'd like to start this cycle of posts reviewing 2025 with something else that interests me – Poland's development, as seen from the local, regional and national level. I have now lived 28 years in Poland, and during that time, the national quality of life has gone up and up and up, though it must be said, from a modest base. This blog records 18 of those 28 years, and looking back, I can see numerous tipping points, technological and infrastructural, that make life more comfortable, easier.

This year, that progress has been equally visible. Poland's improvement makes a contrast with the austerity-level stasis that the UK is experiencing since the global financial crisis of 2008. Poles today are on average 50% better off than they were 20 years ago, whilst Britons are earning less in real terms than they were 20 years ago. And unlike the UK, where the nation's wealth remains resolutely concentrated in London, one can see Poland flourishing in every corner.

This year, most of my longer journeys took me to destinations east of the Vistula, which makes up for absence there in recent years. I visited Kazimierz Dolny, Białowieża, Przemyśl, Zamość and Rzeszów, by car and by train and was impressed at the huge improvement in the road network. Two major station remonts were completed this year, Warsaw West (W-wa Zachodnia) and Rzeszów Główny, although the former still awaits its underground tram connection. Warsaw's tram network remains a work-in-progress, although it's now possible to take one down ulica Rakowiecka (finally finished). 

A propos of my travels in 2025, worthy of note is my overnight stay in Wawel Castle ("free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can't"). Kraków, south of the river, has also seen big leaps forward in construction and infrastructure, although it does remain the victim of over-tourism.

Locally here in Chynów, many infrastructure improvement projects were carried out and completed this year (for instance here and here and here), with many more in the pipeline for next year. Chynów has a new supermarket (Deko Market, its third), and a second kebab outlet (Amigo Kebab), though unlike the Luxor Kebab, which opened in 2024, there's no indoor seating. Maybe the new retail centre next door to the old retail centre, completed but not yet let out, will see another eaterie. The old BP petrol station, which became a TransOil petrol station in April, has a great little restaurant opening by it, Zajazd u Latoszków. Weekday lunch menu 30zł (soup and generous main course).

I mentioned recently that a new, long, pavement will be built connecting the level crossing in Jakubowizna to Chynów station and then on to ulica Wolska. Below: ul. Kolejowa, Chynów station behind me and to the right. The asphalt is recent (before, the road would flood from edge to edge after any thunderstorm), the posts preventing pavement parking appeared this spring. By next spring the pavement on the other side of the road should be complete too. And parking facilities. As I wrote earlier this month, the number of bicycle stands on the Jakubowizna side of the station has tripled.

The election of a young and dynamic wójt (mayor of a rural municipality) will see greater dialogue and transparency when it comes to choosing priorities for further roll-outs of local infrastructure.

Below: fibre roll-out... optical fibre has been laid along the entire length of my lane. This roll, just outside my front gate (I presume looking at its length) is long enough to stretch to my house, but not to the houses beyond in Grobice. One gigabyte per second here we come!

Meanwhile, back in Jeziorki, ulica Karczunkowska still doesn't have a pavement.

This time last year:|
Jacek Malczewski exhibition, Radom

This time two years ago:
Back out into the open

This time three years ago:
The UK's year of Two Monarchs, Three Premiers and Four Chancellors

This time four years ago:
Wintery gorgeousness and filthy air

This time five years ago:
Jakubowizna – moonrise kingdom

This time eight years ago:

Rural sunlight, Derbyshire

This time 11 years ago:
Derbyshire in the snow

This time 12 years ago:
Is Britain over-golfed?

This time 14 years:
Everybody's out on the road today

This time 15 years ago:
50% off and nothing to pay till June 2016

The Long Review of 2022 (Pt. II)

For the land of my birth, 2022 was the Year of the Two Monarchs, the Three Premiers and the Four Chancellors. The death of Queen Elizabeth II was sudden and unexpected; but once the news had been digested, a process of acclimatisation began immediately. Getting used to saying 'the king' instead of 'the queen'; talking about 'His Majesty's Ambassador' instead of  'Her Majesty's Ambassador' when referring to the same person; realising that the monarch who had ruled since before my birth was no longer on the throne. 

A change of prime minister is something that happens far more often than a change of monarch - in my lifetime one monarch per 64 years, compared to one premier every four-and-half years. But to see three prime ministers in one year - and that's a year without a general election - has been unprecedented.

Brexit is the underlying cause; the liar Johnson was finally thrown out of No 10 by his own party, to be replaced by the hapless Liz Truss, a weak and wavering human being, unsure of whether she was against the monarchy or for it, which party she was in, or if she was in favour of remaining in the EU or a Brexiteer. Her innate weakness was seized upon by the 'ultras' in the Tory party who wanted someone pliant in No 10 who they could manipulate to push their radical agenda - lowering taxes for the wealthiest in society. Together with her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, she terrified the markets with a combination of cash hand-outs (to help cope with the energy crisis) and tax cuts. Kwarteng's budget resulted in the pound falling to $1.03 and almost £20 billion being spent over the next four weeks by the Bank of England on a bail-out to save the value of pensions.

Truss was out after 45 days - an absolute record, "a shorter shelf-life than a lettuce", also ousted by her own party. She was replaced by Rishi Sunak, the first British prime minister that I don't viscerally object to since pre-referendum Cameron. I found myself hurling abuse at the TV set or monitor whenever May, Johnson or Truss spoke about Brexit - but somehow Sunak doesn't fire up the same emotions in me. Yet his stunning wealth (richer than King Charles III, richer than Trump) makes him out of touch with people's everyday concerns - and it shows at every PR stunt that has him interfacing with reality (buying fuel in a petrol station, serving homeless people at Christmas).

The upshot of all political turmoil is tragic for me; the country that was once the world's number one soft power, an exemplar of good governance and common-sense solutions, has in just a few years become a global laughing stock. Once upon a time, "examples of British best practice" were usually worth following or at least making note of. A mere six and half years it took to turn this situation around diametrically.

Brexit is damaging the UK economy way beyond what one would expect from cyclical downturns - even those exacerbated by a European war and a global pandemic. Britain's growth next year (-0.4%) and into 2024 (+0.2%) is forecast to be among the lowest among the OECD group of the world's richest nations. It's clear that life in the UK for the average citizen is worse today than it was in 2019, before Covid, before the UK left the single European market, and before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. All those three factors need to be taken together, yet other European economies affected by the pandemic and the war are faring better - not having cut themselves off from the world's richest trading bloc.

I do not feel the chill winds of the British economy directly - only in the way Brexit impinges on my freedom of movement and increasing financial restrictions, inability to send gifts to the UK without them being intercepted by customs for duty payment etc. However, at work I see this every day - the UK has cut off its nose to spite its face. Brexit is working asymmetrically - hurting British exporters much more than it's hurting Polish exporters. Why should any Polish firm bother importing goods from the UK and deal with 17 new onerous procedures when it can buy similar goods from Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Holland or Sweden? British corporates can pay for the necessary legal advice, accountancy services and logistics to ensure their goods continue to reach their EU customers - but Britain's small- and medium-sized exporters - selling pallet-loads rather than truckloads - are at a clear disadvantage.

Trading the other way, Britain has still not imposed border controls on food and products of plant or animal origin (postponed until 1 Jan 2024), nor changed from the CE conformity mark to the new UKCA standard (postponed to 1 Jan 2025). So British food producers have massively lost out in competitiveness to their EU-based rivals.

In the long term, Britain's return to the EU is inevitable - the only question is when it will happen. Mere demographics will make this so; of the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit, maybe around a million and half are dead, whilst no one born this century voted to leave the EU. Generation Z has had its prospects blighted by Brexit - freedom of movement, freedom to work and study across the EU, but above all the fact that the UK economy will be shrinking in size relative to where it could have been had it stayed in.

The next few years will see Britain eating humble pie. Its economy will be increasingly lagging behind those of EU member states - Poland's GDP per capita is expected to exceed the UK's  by 2035 (and if you strip out London by 2030). Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted 'growth'. Growth is hard to achieve if there are around 1.2 million job vacancies in the economy. But then the referendum was about 'taking control of our borders' and stopping highly motivated workers from across the EU coming to the UK to pick fruit, work in bars, hotels and restaurants and look after Britons in their hospitals and care homes. So there you have it - low growth (and indeed, low unemployment), high inflation and far less choice in the shops.

I will return to the UK to celebrate the day it rejoins the EU - and not a day sooner. If you voted Leave and have not yet repented - you are my life-long foe.

This time last year:
Wintery gorgeousness and filthy air

This time two years ago:
Jakubowizna - moonrise kingdom

This time five years ago:

Rural sunlight, Derbyshire

This time eight years ago:
Derbyshire in the snow

This time nine years ago:
Is Britain over-golfed?

This time 11 years:
Everybody's out on the road today

This time 12 years ago:
50% off and nothing to pay till June 2016

Nostalgia, aesthetics, ideology, emotions - Brexit one year on

I'll never forget the gut-wrenching shock of waking up at 4am on 24 June last year and seeing that Sunderland voted Leave, upturning the forecasts from the night before that Remain would narrowly win. It hit me like a punch in the face. What have these people done? WHY have they done it?

*******

How would have my favourite poet, Sir John Betjeman (1906-84) voted had he still been alive? Would that part of him which yearned for the past have prompted him to vote Leave? One of the recurring themes in his poetry was the sense of loss that progress brings with it. The sprawling suburbs, industrial estates, shopping arcades and dual carriageways that encroached his Home County haunts made him mourn for the lost Edwardian era of his childhood.

Where are the wains with garlanded swathes a-swaying?
Where are the swains to wend through the lanes a-maying?
Where are the blythe and jocund to ted the hay?
Where are the free folk of England? Where are they? 

Ask of the Abingdon bus with full load creeping
Down into denser suburbs.
Ask of the cinema manager. Night airs die
Ask at the fish and chips at the Market Square.

[from The Old Liberals, 1954]

I suspect many older British voters would have voted to leave the EU on the basis of emotion. No longer recognising the land where they were born, not really understanding the economic and legal ramifications of exiting the EU, a cross on the ballot paper to leave was an act of defiance against the march of time. An almost aesthetic decision

Good-bye high hopes and over confidence -
In fact it's probably good-bye England

[from Metro-land, 1973]

I can understand this form of nostalgia-based emotion, but life moves on. In the 1930s, Betjeman railed against the architectural modernism that by the 1970s he was keen to see preserved. And the 'free folk of England' of Betjeman's childhood had no hot water, no free healthcare, poor sanitation and very little by way of consumer goods or leisure time.

The rich and the powerful who militated for Brexit - press barons who aren't tax-resident in the UK; wealthy scions of wealthy families; entrepreneurs with off-shore treasures - convinced the intellectually less-gifted that it is indeed the rich and the powerful that are doing them down - by keeping them in the EU.

Then there's the alt-right, a pernicious mental aberration that affects men in their 20s and 30s (the peak age for indoctrination by dangerous ideologies), who are kicking out against order, political correctness, regulation, health and safety, libtards, feminazis and other distractions. To them, Brussels and its 'unelected bureaucrats' and its Directives are merely a re-run of the Soviet Union. [I get very annoyed when I hear such people talk of 'EUSSR'. Where are the EU's Gulags? Where's the EU's Holodomor? Where's the EU's NKVD? Where's the EU's Great Terror? Where's the EU's Katyń? My mother experienced what 'USSR' meant. If you equate 'EU' and 'USSR' in my earshot, I will fucking slap you.]

And then there's the less-well educated English and Welsh person, the tabloid-headline skim-reader with poor spelling and punctuation skills, who sees uncontrolled migration from poorer EU countries to the UK as a threat. They see skilled, motivated, hard-working migrants coming over, speaking foreign in the streets, dropping their empty tins of Zywiec and Tyskie beer, mostly young males coming over at first - who then bring their girlfriends and children and in-laws over and start making demands on council housing, local schools and the NHS.

Whereas there is the Sports Direct argument - that unscrupulous employers know they can get low-skilled labour from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria for less than what the locals would work for. Yet in many cases, without such labour, the UK economy would not have bounced back so strongly from recession. If you are an employer in the agriculture, horticulture  or food-processing sectors out in East Anglia, where local unemployment can be less than 2%, you will simply not be able to recruit natives to do the work.

Migration could have been managed much better, within the framework of EU law, by Home Secretary Theresa May (five years, two months in the job). The UK could have made it harder for low-skilled, long-term migration from the EU.

The subsequent 12 months have left Britain - and the EU - none the wiser. On Twitter, the brave Brexiteers have all but skulked away. There's been no coherent, plausible vision presented of just how the UK can become this great, open (yet closed to EU migrants), free-trading (except with the EU) nation. All those seductive arguments have fizzled out when confronted with reality. Example: "The Commonwealth has 51 members!" Yes, but the smaller 25 members' combined population is around that of Greater London.

Do Brexiteers have a clue as to how bilateral trade deals have to be negotiated? How big a staff is required? How long it takes? The Canadians, with 500 trade negotiators, analysts, sector specialists and ancillary staff on the case, took seven years to hammer out their Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the EU. The UK will need one with the EU, the US, China, India, Japan, Brazil, as well as Nauru, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu. Who will do that work?

The kind of detail overlooked by Brexit proponents during the referendum debate - on leaving the EU, London will no longer host the European Medicines Agency. The EMA will have to leave its offices in Canary Wharf. The cost of getting out early from a 39-year lease is said to be £300m. The EMA will not pay - it's not its fault that it must leave to set up in another country that's still in the EU. So the British government will pay end up paying the landlord. Funded by the British taxpayer. That's £4.60 per every man, woman and child in the UK. For this one example.

If a transitional arrangement isn't reached, and Britain leaves the EU by 29 March 2019, by default, WTO tariffs will kick in. These range from tiny to huge. Beef, for example, is 59%. The UK imports half of its food, a half of that coming from the EU. Britain imports beef from Ireland in large quantities. As prices of imported beef go up - what will British farmers do? Keep their prices at current levels? Or see an opportunity to raise them?

If a transitional arrangement is reached, and Britain ends up (somehow) clinging on to some form of preferred access to the single European market, and remains in the customs union, still allowing in high-skilled and short-term EU migrant labour, but without any say in Brussels as to the rules - what was it all for?

The whole thing is as bloody a mess as it was on that God-awful morning of 24 June 2016. I can only hope that Brexit won't happen, that sense will dawn on a majority of Britons that it really isn't worth it. Especially the young. A hard Brexit has the potential to harm them economically, to curtail their freedom of movement, their ability to study and work across other EU nations. It will lead to an economic slowdown if not recession, inflation will rear up from next to zero, and the pain endured during the Great Recession will linger on for several years. Several crucial years for Britain's young.

Over a quarter of a million Leave voters have died since the referendum, it is estimated (based on the polling preference of the older age groups), while the number of Remain voters who've died in the past 12 months is around 60,000. Meanwhile, the number of young people who are likely to vote Leave who have reached voting age in the past year is around 90,000 - outnumbered by likely Remain voters who've had their 18th birthdays since then, which is over 260,000. So in the UK today, there are around 190,000 fewer Leave voters and 170,000 more Remain voters - and that's just the demographics. There are also far more Leave voters regretting their decision than Remain voters who now say they should have voted Leave. Should the government be forced to put the results of its negotiations to another referendum - who knows.

Give it a while, it may all blow over... Or it may not. Uncertainty. Not good for business, for investment decisions, for trade, for supply chains. I was right to feel sick on the morning of 24 June 2016. And then there's the personal hit - my UK pension (in pounds), is now worth in zloty terms (how I intend spending it) around 15% less than it was before the referendum.

This time two years ago:
Civilisation and barbarism - how the former deals with the latter

This time three years ago:
Ahead of the opening of Jeziorki's Biedronka

This time four years ago:
New views of Jeziorki

This time five years ago:
Motorway finally links (the outskirts of) Łódź and (the outskirts of) Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Kraków Air Museum

This time nine years ago:
Quintessential Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Little boxes, Mysiadło

No 'in-work benefits' for four years? What are 'in-work benefits' anyway?

No sooner had David Cameron finished his speech at the JCB factory about limiting the UK's attractiveness for EU migrant workers than my phone rang - it was TVN24 Biznes i Swiat wanting a comment about what this would mean to Poles headed for the UK. [Full text of Mr Cameron's speech here.]

I must confess to being amazed that EU migrants were eligible for in-work benefits - surely the whole point of tax credits was to incentivise the native British long-term unemployed to get a job. As the spectrum of benefits steadily increased over the decades since the war job-seeker's allowance, child benefits, housing benefits etc, the incentive to find low-paid employment withered away. If you are on 250 quid benefits a week, why bother to go to work for 300 quid a week - a mere £50 pounds for surrendering 40 hours of your time - it works out at £1.25 an hour.

So Tony Blair's government introduced a system of Working Tax Credits in 2002 to ease the way off benefits and into paid employment via a complex system of tapering the credits as pay rises. According to Wikipedia, seven million people in low-paid jobs are entitled to in-work benefits.

Now, Poland has been in the EU for a decade, over a million Poles have at one time or another during that decade worked in the UK, and probably over 600,000 have decided to stay permanently.

I would argue that the existence of Working Tax Credits played no part in any Pole's decision to travel to the UK in search of work. However, once they were in Britain, and working - in a factory, warehouse, hotel, farm etc, and the regular wage packets started coming in, and they got talking to the natives, they realised that Working Tax Credits made it worthwhile to bring over kith and kin - and indeed to start a family in Britain.

Mr Cameron's pledge to only allow EU migrant workers access to in-work benefits and social housing until they have been in the UK for four years will take the shine off Britain's reputation as a welfare paradise - for that tiny proportion of migrants from EU countries that see it that way.

I'm sure that across the UK, few British taxpayers will argue against Mr Cameron's proposals. If you've not paid into the system, why should you be entitled to its benefits after a mere three months?

The problem with the migration debate, UKIP and the UK's possible departure from the EU, is that leaving the EU will not solve the far deeper problem that Britain faces. From the Office of National Statistics' Migration Statistics Quarterly: "The statistically significant increase of 30,000 in immigration of non-EU citizens to 272,000 was in part driven by an increase in immigration to accompany/join others up 19,000 to 54,000."

Look at the graph below:

The rising green line of EU migrants since 2012 has been predicated by the UK's economic turnaround, the moribund state of the eurozone economies, the entry of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU, and a rising number of Poles heading to the UK to work. The vast majority of the green line is in Britain to work. Last week's survey by University College London showing the UK is £20 billion a year better off as a result of EU migration is yet another piece of research which emphatically proves that Britain's economy is in better shape being inside an open EU than out of it.

The orange line is a different story. Yes, it includes Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders etc, in the UK to work. But it also includes 54,000 relatives of non-EU migrants who are coming over from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia and Ghana to join their families.

The graph below shows that EU migrants contribute far more to the UK economy than the larger number of non-EU migrants:

So 1.7 million EU migrants are working in the UK, compared to 1.2 million non-EU migrants. And yet the UK is now home to far more non-EU migrants than EU migrants, who are more likely to contribute into the economy.

I was in Birmingham on Thursday. In the centre of the city, amid the bustling throng of shoppers, there was stand in the pedestrian precinct, from which a couple of heavily-bearded mullahs preaching Islam to the people. Once again, I'd point out that leaving the EU would not make a jot of difference. These people will continue coming to Britain in their hundreds of thousands, whether the UK was to be in the EU or not. But once outside the EU, British employers would not be able to easily find willing hands to work, and the economy would slow to growth rates now associated with the eurozone.

Would British employers find those native workers easier if there was a four-year moratorium on in-work benefits for EU migrants? I very much doubt it. Only if there was a persistent increase in the gap between being on benefits and being in work, and that consisted not of tax credits, but of reduced benefits, and increased National Minimum Wage. But the latter might prove to be an even greater magnet to EU migrants than the nebulous attractions of tax credits.

In Poland, there must be more effort made by the UK government to explain just how sore an issue migration is among Britons, and why that is reflected in the growing strength of Ukip, a one-man, one-policy party. The Polish government, realising how important the UK's membership is for Poland's raison d'etre, must back Mr Cameron in Brussels in allowing him to trim back the generosity of the benefits for EU migrant workers. The prospect of letting Ukip pull the UK out of the EU because of loud criticism from the Polish government is worryingly real. Poland needs to appreciate how Britons feel about immigration, and speak accordingly.

This time last year:

Third snow-free November in a row

(if you don't count the spoonfuls that fell on 24/25 Nov, this would be the fourth)

This time two years ago:

Another November without snow

This time three years ago:
Snow-free November

This time four years ago:
Krakowskie Przedmieście in the snow

This time five years ago:
Ul. Poloneza closed for the building of the S2