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A message from our President, General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank
'I am delighted to be associated with the work of the Polish Heritage Society and very honoured to serve as its President. The Society's work highlights the enormous contribution which generations of Poles have made to their adopted country. Preserving and celebrating that heritage will only further strengthen the ties between Poland and the United Kingdom.
I worked closely with the Society on the project to build a memorial to the Polish Forces at the National Memorial Arboretum and saw at first hand the energy and dedication of those involved.
I encourage you to explore this website and learn about the many other projects the Society has sponsored. Do please contact us if you would like to be involved in any way'.
General The Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank GCB LVO OBE
A Debt of Dishonour is a unique documentary film dedicated Major General Sosabowski and all ranks who served in the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade Group and to their Comrades-in-Arms of the 1st British Airborne Division that fought in the ill-fated “Operation Market Garden” at Arnhem and Driel during September 1944.
Sto Lat-Albert Hall
The Polish Heritage Society
Charlemagne: A task for Tusk (Economist - 31 October 2015)
Poland’s former prime minister desperately seeks to ensure that Europe’s centre can hold
MOVING to Brussels, says Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, was like reaching “paradise”. True, that had more to do with the abundance of Flemish masterpieces in local museums than the delights of coaxing compromise from the European Union’s 28 disputatious leaders. Mr Tusk has the unenviable task of managing the European response to an endless series of crises without any real power of his own. Yet almost a year into the job he has found ways to manage, and sometimes to surpass, its limitations. As he speaks in his Brussels office, you get the sense that he might even be enjoying himself.
Few Eurocrats’ eyebrows remained unraised when Mr Tusk won his appointment. Poland, the country he had run for seven years, had barely a decade’s experience of EU membership and remained outside the euro, the union’s signature project. Mr Tusk’s abrasive style, honed in the rough-and-tumble of Poland’s young democratic politics, seemed an ill fit with the consensual methods preferred in Brussels. He worked to improve his English but, some sniff, still cannot speak French.
Mr Tusk has not swayed all his critics, though their numbers are dwindling. Europe’s crisis-manager-in-chief has weightier problems on his mind. He returns repeatedly to a single theme: the need to shore up Europe’s liberal values against the threat from populism. This is hardly an original thought in a continent afflicted by Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban, but Mr Tusk has his own take on it. The liberal centre must be “tough and determined”, he said recently in the Netherlands, “not to become more like the right-wing populists, but to protect Europe against them.”
Thus, for example, his mantra that the EU must regain control of the borders through which hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants have flowed this year. He has called for an end to the policy of “open doors and windows”, a remark some saw as a jab at Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. If voters cannot be assured that Europe’s frontiers are secure, fears Mr Tusk, then they will turn to nastier leaders. (He mentions Poland, where nationalists have just ejected Civic Platform, the centre-right party Mr Tusk founded and led to two election victories.) That will make it hard, if not impossible, to pursue the more liberal policies, such as sharing out asylum-seekers across Europe, that Mr Tusk says he backs. He notes the paradox: to preserve its openness, Europe must countenance a degree of closure.
© 2015 - The Economist