The average British person on here has a good opinion of Poles because they work with them. And rightly so.. they are probably mostly good people
The average person doesn't get to meet the criminal gangs, the single mummies and the benefit scroungers.
I'm not sure that the average British person has much contact with Poles ... and those who persevere on here are not really average (she says ; ).
I kind of work with Poles, in a freelance way, and I sleep with one, and have a child with him, so I suppose I am on the inside. Do I think they are mostly good people? Hmm. Yes, but not in the British sense of good. They do things that in a British person would make them not good, but in a Polish person that doesn't make them not good. One has to judge them according to original context.
I have to say that I find the men more 'good' than the women, in general. I know Polish guys who are just the people I would have wanted with me in Colditz. The women I wouldn't have trusted - they would have slept with the Germans in a flash, and slit the throats of any other women coming close.
And that war reference isn't unintentional. I absolutely hold by it that the Poles mostly still live in a wartime mentality. And the rules are different.
As for the gangs and scroungers, that is just native Polish survivalism at its best. I have an admiration for it in some ways. Why not?
"I'm Pregnant and comming to England"
"Can i bring my old disabled family to the UK, what will they get"
hardly my doing is it?
And I, as a British citizen, say ... GREAT. If we have such a silly system that it can be so obviously and openly used, then hey, why not. They are not doing anything wrong. It is all legal in the EU. If the system is so stupid, then it doesn't deserve any respect.
It is a system that also syphons millions if not billions of revenue into wars in Afghanistan, etc, which is a ludicrous abuse of money and responsibility. Why can't we be like those Scandinavian countries that always keep out of it all? They are happy, and women have two years' paid maternity leave there!
Every Thursday in Oxford, on the way to the hospital, they have a sign up. 'Delays due to Repatriation'. For a while I wondered what that meant. Repatriation? Sending immigrants back to their country? What could it mean? Why the roadblock???
And then I found out. Repatriation means bringing back soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. Bringing them back and blocking the road so their funeral cortege can make its way up to the crematorial wing of the hospital. And it happens every week, so there must be at least one local person a week who has been killed.
Now if we are so stupid as to spend millions on sending our compatriots off to die horribly for someone else's oil issues, then ... who are we to be taken seriously? And if some other EU members can legally exploit the system then ... why not. It is all bo**cks.