This is the real reason for the fudging of the data. People don't want an ethnicity/citizenship status/birth country breakdown of things like benefit use.
At a large company I know, offshored Polish developers now cost more than ones in the North of the UK. So I think Poland has come up as much as parts of the UK have gone down.
Oh yeah, Poland has grown tremendously. I still remember Poland at the end of the 1980s when the Jaruzelski junta relinquished power: poor, shabby, nothing in the shops, badly dressed people looking for oblivion in wodka wyborowa.
Nowadays it is an optimistic and rich country. A few weeks ago, I walked around Chalupki, a relatively unknown small Silesian town on the border. I noticed that most of the family houses just shone with new facades and generally had the "we are fairly wealthy" look; they could have stood in Switzerland. And you could find all sorts of high-brow food in the local Zabka store, like seven types of Kombucha.
> However, net-net, I'd rather have one shite layer of government, rather than two.
To make a parallel that might work for California or NY. In Europe however there is no single country that is so much better than the others at making money, in the same way as those two. Even countries that didn't enter the EU (Switzerland, Norway) accepted most of the EU regulations because they need some of them.
The UK in that respect already had the sweetest deal of all EU members; and, unlike Switzerland or Norway, actually had a say on the regulations that it had to follow. Plus, they had and have a messy situation due to (non-EU-related and therefore unaffected by Brexit) agreements that the border with Ireland cannot be a customs union, so the only thing a competent national government could do was to tell people they had been duped and promised something impossible. The result would have been a Switzerland- or Norway-like non-membership, with small benefits and less power in the EU.
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