[inglor_cz]

Anecdotally, I meet some Polish returnees from the UK when I am in Poland.

You can often tell by something like a small Union Jack hanging by the checkout bar etc. (they seem to cherish the memories), and I like to ask them about their experience.

The consensus seems to be that it does not make sense to bear British costs of living for British wages anymore, and that the living standards have reached approximately the same level here at home.

Something very similar was said to me in 2023 by a youngish barista in Riga, Latvia.

[gadders]

At a large company I know, offshored Polish developers now cost more than ones in the North of the UK. So I think Poland has come up as much as parts of the UK have gone down.

[inglor_cz]

Oh yeah, Poland has grown tremendously. I still remember Poland at the end of the 1980s when the Jaruzelski junta relinquished power: poor, shabby, nothing in the shops, badly dressed people looking for oblivion in wodka wyborowa.

Nowadays it is an optimistic and rich country. A few weeks ago, I walked around Chalupki, a relatively unknown small Silesian town on the border. I noticed that most of the family houses just shone with new facades and generally had the "we are fairly wealthy" look; they could have stood in Switzerland. And you could find all sorts of high-brow food in the local Zabka store, like seven types of Kombucha.