Modern Poland is a place of sharply polarised politics in which a broad coalition of liberal opposition parties fear their country is in the grip of a government so deeply conservative that it is exerting a kind of reactionary grip on political life.
"People who support one side really don't speak to people who support the other," one old friend told me in Warsaw. "I don't even remember that in the communist days."
One thing that does more or less seem to unite Poland's fractious political class, though, is a profound belief in the value of the EU. [...]
In all the countries that joined the EU after emerging from the shadows of Soviet communism there is a deeper and more complex dimension to the argument about free movement of labour, which is perhaps difficult for British voters and politicians to grasp.
Anyone who's over 50 in Poland - and all of their children - will remember the petty humiliations of Soviet occupation and, in particular, the enormous difficulties of arranging foreign travel even with the communist bloc.
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