EU expats are flocking back to the continent as “everything in Britain is collapsing”, according to a Polish national living in Glasgow.
Polish freelance journalist Tomasz Oryński, who left Britain less than two years ago after 17 years here, took to X (formerly Twitter) this week to share a conversation he had with a friend still living in Glasgow.
She told him that she is planning on moving back to Poland soon, and that EU nationals are moving back “left and right” for various reasons – from the cost of living crisis to access to healthcare.
She said she is “the only person in her work who still has access to a dentist”, as dentists surgeries are “so overwhelmed” that they refuse to see patients “even privately”.
In Battlefield, Glasgow, where both Tomasz and his friend used to live, she claimed rents were so high that even people who earned more than them “can’t afford to live there”.
“Everything is so bloody expensive that even though I make £60,000 in my current job I feel just as when I was making less than £35,000 in the last one,” Tomasz’s friend said.
The journalist went on to say that some of his other friends still living in Scotland “haven’t seen a pay rise for five years now”.
He also recalled another conversation with a different friend, in which he asked “if it’s true that the roads in Scotland are ridden with potholes at [an] unprecedented scale”. The friend replied: “Don’t even get me started on it. I need to align my steering every three to four months now, I lost two tires this year already and my daughter nearly ripped off her whole wheel with suspension last winter.”
Incredibly, Tomasz claimed that friend then had to take another phone call and promised to call him back. When he did call back, he supposedly said: “A friend called me, he hit a pothole and damaged two wheels and asked me if I can come and meet him and lend him my spare. You could not make it up!”
Tomasz concluded his thread on X by referring back to the first friend. He wrote: “Ah, and by the way, apparently there is plenty of English speaking EU citizens working in her hometown in Poland now – as she was already making some enquiries around jobwise. I wonder how many of them used to work in Britain?”
