Poles will be richer than Britons in five years time because of Brexit, Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, has said.
Mr Tusk, who was the president of the European Council during the Brexit negotiations, was notorious among Brexiteers for his scathing criticism of the decision to leave the EU.
He referred to a Labour forecast based on World Bank data that said Poland would outstrip the UK in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 2030.
“A fierce debate is taking place in Great Britain, caused by the World Bank’s forecast that GDP per capita will be higher in Poland than in the UK in 2025,” said Mr Tusk on the 20th anniversary of Poland’s membership of the EU.
“And I promise this: on the 25th anniversary, Poles will be richer than the British. It’s better to be in the EU.”
The World Bank data shows GDP per capita in 2021 was $44,979 (£35,935) in Britain and $34,915 (£27,894) in Poland, which has an average growth of 3.6 per cent annually. That would mean Poland would overtake the UK by 2030, according to the calculations.
In February, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, used the data to bolster his arguments for a change of government at the next election.
The Office for National Statistics estimated that the Polish-born population of the UK was 691,000 in 2020. Polish is the most spoken non-native language in Britain, and it is estimated almost a million Poles lived in the UK before the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Mr Tusk won his second stint as prime minister, the job he left to become European Council president, last year. He campaigned on a pro-EU ticket against the nationalist Law and Justice government.
While in Brussels, he said there was “a special place in hell” for Brexiteers who had campaigned for Brexit without “even a sketch of a plan”.
He prompted a dismayed response when he posted a picture on Instagram of him offering Theresa May a cake at a tense 2018 summit in Salzburg, captioning the shot: “Sorry, no cherries”.
The joke was a reference to the regular accusations from Brussels that Britain wanted to “have its cake and eat it” in the Brexit negotiations by “cherry-picking” access to the Single Market.
Mark Francois is chairman of the European Research Group of Tory backbenchers, which played an influential role during the Brexit talks.
“I am generally very pro-Polish but as Donald Tusk once suggested that I and fellow Eurosceptics should be sent to ‘a special place in hell’, I can only say that I’ll believe this when I see it,” he told The Telegraph.
