Poland hints that the UK will have to soften its hard line on immigration during Brexit talks
Poland's prime minister says the UK must be prepared to "compromise" in Brexit negotiations with the EU.
Prime Minister Beata Szydlo writes in an article for The Telegraph newspaper on Monday that the relationship between Britain and her country is of a "special nature" and says: "We need a good compromise which gives both our countries the best possible options for economic and security cooperation."
"In the referendum, the British people expressed their will to regain full control over their political life, and so Brexit is inevitably about their readiness to propose and effect a new arrangement for their relations with the EU," she adds.
Szydlo is due to meet with Theresa May in London this week to discuss Britain's relationship with the UK post-Brexit.
The British government is putting immigration control at the forefront of Brexit talks and also pushing for Single Market access - in other words, it wants economic access but to be socially and politically closed off. The Polish prime minister's hints in the article are yet another sign this will not be possible.
The EU parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt said in a recent interview with Business Insider that the deal Britain has discussed so far makes no sense.
Earlier in November, the prime minister of Malta Joseph Muscat also said the EU is not "bluffing" when it says it will push Britain into a "hard Brexit" - kicking it out of the 27-member Single Market - if Theresa May insists on opting out of freedom of movement. He said that staying in the single market and placing restrictions on the freedom of movement of EU citizens is "just not happening."
May says she will not give a "running commentary" on how negotiations are going but has made it clear in various speeches that her government is prioritising immigration restrictions. This would imply a "hard Brexit."
It is in Poland's interest to push Britain to keep the Freedom of Movement act. In August this year, data from the Office for National Statistics showed that Poland overtook India as the most common non-UK country of birth for people living in Britain for the first time. That data showed that there were 831,000 Polish-born residents in Britain in 2015, 750,000 more than a decade earlier.
To put this into perspective, 4.5 million Britons live abroad but only 1.3 million of them live in Europe, according to United Nations data - primarily in Spain, Ireland, and France.
Britain voted for a Brexit by a slim majority on June 23 and since then there has been much speculation on when the new prime minister, Theresa May, will trigger Article 50 and start the official two-year negotiation process for Britain to leave the EU. March 2017 is the current target date.