One Polish spud fewer

After the election as prime minister two years ago of the Kaczynski Brother - the one without cat hairs on his suit - two million young Poles voted with their feet, going to work in the UK, the Netherlands, France, and other old member states. Now the same young people, all over the old West, have voted him out.

The one with cat ­hairs remains president, but much-weakened, and all of us up North now hope that Poland will fin-ally become a civilized European society.

The anti-communist movement failed to root out the worst legacies of communism, namely nepotism and corruption. Instead the twins’ Law and Justice party opted for serving up endlessly re-heated dishes of anti-Europeanism.

It does not have to be so. Estonia did not have a great time with the Reds either, but it has done the opposite. Radical economic reforms and liberalisation have created a transparent society. Screwing the population is a lot more difficult in an open society than in gangland, whether it calls itself a republic or people’s republic.

The extreme right, as some of us knew before, is as destructive as the extreme left and often barely distinguishable from the other. A united Europe is eventually based on neither, but on those boring middle-class values which allow some cheating on your people some of the time, but not all the time - which is roughly the story of market-oriented Poland since the collapse of communism.

The young people who fled westwards did not just send money home, but also ideas about the way business and politics are conducted in a normal European nation. People should not be afraid to call a police officer or see a doctor; in a corrupt system you cannot trust even those whose job is supposed to be helping people.

Communist corruption, spectacular as it was, is not the only variety. Post-Communist Polish bureaucracy has a deja-vu feel about it, the faces of the civil servants demanding bribes often being the same ones as before (or possibly it’s just a family resemblance).

This, or most of it, will hopefully change when young Poles come back to their native country some day and start their businesses and politics at home.

We up North are especially concerned about Polish agriculture, adding its poisons to the phosphorus and other harmful substances pouring into the Baltic from Sweden and Finland. A German-Russian gas pipeline will look like a bagatelle compared with the destruction of the Nordic Mare Nostrum.

Marine pollution is a European problem, susceptible to European solutions, unlike such favourites of the twins as gay priests, as the outgoing government attempted to suggest. Will Donald Tusk, a historian and footballer, and now prime minister, be the man who initiates the reforms that Poland has needed for so long?

After the election as prime minister two years ago of the Kaczynski Brother - the one without cat hairs on his suit - two million young Poles voted with their feet, going to work in the UK, the Netherlands, France, and other old member states. Now the same young people, all over the old West, have voted him out.

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