‘It’s bankrupting us!’ Polish MP savages EU free movement over high migration to Britain
EUROPE’S cherished principle of free movement is bankrupting Eastern European countries because so many young people of working age are quitting the region to head to Britain, a Polish MP has warned.
By NICK GUTTERIDGE, BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT
Express.co.uk
Tue, May 30, 2017
In an extraordinary intervention Anna Marie Siarkowska said many eastern member states, including her home country, are heading for economic catastrophe due to mass emigration of talent.
Millions of Eastern Europeans, predominantly the young and educated, have left their homelands to seek new opportunities in the West of the continent since the accession of the eastern bloc in 2004.
There are estimated to be 831,000 Poles in the UK alone, and 300,000 Romanians and Bulgarians, out of a total of 3.2 million EU citizens in the country over all.
But whilst countries like Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have profited from cheaper labour, politicians in the East are now warning this mass emigration is starting to have disastrous consequences back home.
Mrs Siarkowska, an independent MP in the Polish parliament, said her country’s public pension scheme was close to collapse because so few working age Poles are now paying taxes to support the elderly.
Speaking at a conference organised by the European Alliance for Freedom at the parliament in Warsaw, she warned Poland was starting to face a serious problem of “demographic decline”.
She told delegates: “Demographic decline is already being felt in Poland: There will be a pensions crisis due to the number of young people leaving Poland rather than staying in to work and pay in to pension funds.
“We have no generational substitution, which means effectively the state will go bankrupt due to the two billion Zloty (£416m) of pension contributions with no one to pay for it.”
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