Anyone in need of a break from the frivolity of so much Western politics should spend time in Poland. The conditions there, I was pleased to find on my first ever visit last month, are highly favourable to thoughtful debate about important matters. The country does not go through the tedious ritual of pretending, for instance, that importing endless numbers of foreigners with no ancestral attachment to Poland is an enriching exercise. This may have something to do with the fact that the Polish elite, whatever their other faults, never subjected their country to such a treacherous demographic experiment in the first place, so there is no need to dream up an ex post facto rationalisation. Nor is Polish conservatism plagued by the predominance, so regrettable in Britain, of free market fundamentalists who obsess over GDP while failing to grasp that all economic activity takes place within a pre-existing culture whose health is paramount.
