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In an extraordinary intervention Anna Marie Siarkowska said many eastern member states, including her home country, are heading for economic catastrophe due to mass emigration of talent. Millions of Eastern Europeans, predominantly the young and educated, have left their homelands to seek new opportunities in the West of the continent since the accession of the eastern bloc in 2004.

GETTY EU free movement rules have caused a brain drain in Eastern Europe

There are estimated to be 831,000 Poles in the UK alone, and 300,000 Romanians and Bulgarians, out of a total of 3.2 million EU citizens in the country over all. But whilst countries like Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have profited from cheaper labour, politicians in the East are now warning this mass emigration is starting to have disastrous consequences back home.

YouTube Polish MP Anna Marie Siarkowska has warned her country is facing a pension crisis

Mrs Siarkowska, an independent MP in the Polish parliament, said her country’s public pension scheme was close to collapse because so few working age Poles are now paying taxes to support the elderly. Speaking at a conference organised by the European Alliance for Freedom at the parliament in Warsaw, she warned Poland was starting to face a serious problem of “demographic decline”. She told delegates: “Demographic decline is already being felt in Poland: There will be a pensions crisis due to the number of young people leaving Poland rather than staying in to work and pay in to pension funds. “We have no generational substitution, which means effectively the state will go bankrupt due to the two billion Zloty (£416m) of pension contributions with no one to pay for it.”

Effectively the state will go bankrupt Polish MP Anna Marie Siarkowska

The independent MP’s remarks reflect a growing concern about the impact of the “brain drain” caused by the EU’s doctrinal dedication to unfettered freedom of movement. Last month a landmark report in the journal Science Advances found that the free movement zone had stripped Eastern Europe of its best academics whilst failing to increase cooperation on research projects. Poland has already launched publicity drives in an attempt to lure some of its nationals back home from Britain, whilst Warsaw’s health minister has complained about the NHS poaching doctors and nurses. Latvia, which has lost an astonishing fifth of its population since joining the EU, has been equally alarmed and is running a similar initiative to stop people leaving and bring skilled workers home.

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