I spent nearly a month in Poland this summer because my widowed, childless aunt died unexpectedly and left me and my mother with a mountain of “death-min” which we have still nowhere near dealt with.
The media and political classes present us with a confused portrait of what Poland is really like. On the one hand, we hear reports that the country is thriving economically, on course to overtake Britain’s GDP by 2034.
On the other hand, we hear that it is effectively a dictatorship, run by an “extreme right”, “populist” government because, for example, it has banned abortion, supports the Catholic Church and controls its people by giving them handouts (every family with children gets 800 złotys a month which is the equivalent of about £200).
