Peering fearfully through the curtains as the police raided a drug den in their maisonette block, the young couple knew it was time to escape back to their own country.

Envisaging a secure and prosperous future for their two daughters, Slawek Frankowski and his wife Sylwia had settled in the seemingly tranquil Hampshire town of Fareham.

But it had changed beyond recognition and they longed for the wholesome life they had left behind when they emigrated from rural Poland.

It was just before Christmas 2022 and a spate of subsequent stabbings (plus the loss of Sylwia’s warehouse job with Estee Lauder, which is moving distribution to Belgium) hardened their determination to leave.

‘It got to the stage where we would look outside almost every week and see police, firemen and ambulances,’ says Slawek, 35, who worked as a welder in Portsmouth. ‘It wasn’t the same Britain we came to for a better life 15 years ago.’

On November 27, having sold the renovated maisonette for £200,000 (turning a very small profit) this disillusioned family packed their belongings into their Skoda Octavia and made the 22-hour road trip back to the village where Slawek’s family live, near the Baltic port city of Gdansk.

When I met them there, on Wednesday, their relief was plain to see. Slawek was working on their new four-bed house, built on land gifted by his father, and expects to easily find a well-paid job.

Sylwia is relieved to have supportive grandparents and in-laws close by, and delighted with the way her older daughter Alicja, six, has settled into a new school which, she says, places a greater emphasis on homework, parental involvement and discipline than the one she left in Fareham.

Theirs is the sort of story I have heard numerous times in Poland this week. For as our economy stagnates and standards nosedive in towns and cities blighted by crime, failing services and spiralling living costs – all fuelling unrest over unchecked immigration – the exodus of Britain’s industrious and highly-skilled Polish migrant workers is gathering pace.

Soon after 2004, when accession to the European Union granted them freedom of movement, more than one million poured into Britain, plugging gaps in service industries and the building trade. Cheap, reliable and ever-ready to tackle an emergency, the ubiquitous Polish plumber became the embodiment of mutually beneficial migration.

Yet today he and his tool-handy ilk – brickies, electricians, painters and decorators, welders such as Slawek – are so scarce that sardonic laments to their departure are viral on TikTok.

New statistics reveal that while 7,000 Poles arrived in the year ending last June, 25,000 returned home: a net outflow of 18,000. The UK’s total Polish population has shrunk to 750,000 and is predicted to keep falling.

From a British viewpoint, the reasons for this mass repatriation are depressing and shameful. Another indictment, many will say, of a broken country.

For Poland, however, the story is hugely uplifting, because the diaspora is also being lured back to the land they abandoned by its astonishing economic resurgence. Among the cities being transformed by this great revival is Gdansk, the once-dilapidated seaport where Solidarity leader Lech Walesa led the shipyard strikes that brought down a moribund communist regime, paving the way for democracy and prosperity.

At 82, the wolfishly moustached Walesa’s fire still burns, and on Wednesday I found him raging against Donald Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of Ukraine, in a talk to students at Gdansk University.

Afterwards I reminded him (through my interpreter) of a prediction he made 45 years ago: that Poland would one day become ‘a second Japan’, then enjoying enormous prosperity.

His words led some to question his sanity, for Poland was an economic basket-case, even by Eastern Bloc standards. Luxury meant coffee and bananas; people queued for hours for bread and pork. Indeed, as he smilingly reminisced this week, Walesa hadn’t given serious thought to his vision. He had simply blurted it out to divert questions from hostile reporters who said his strikes would starve the nation.

‘My real aim was to direct the world’s attention towards our struggle and show how communism was declining,’ he chuckled. ‘But I couldn’t say [we would match] America or Britain – that wouldn’t have been politically correct in those days, so I just chose Japan.’

Maybe so, yet Walesa’s then-preposterous prophecy – which he reprised in the 1990s, when Poland’s free market experiment seemed doomed and inflation reached 585 per cent – will soon become reality.

New forecasts show that in 2026 the nation’s Gross Domestic Product – the standard gauge of a nation’s wealth and the spending power of its people – will indeed outstrip Japan’s.

And by the 2030s, if the trajectory continues, the average Polish family will be better off than the Britons they once envied.

Moreover, though wages in most sectors are below ours, for now, Poland’s lower taxes, property and shopping prices and household bills mean many families here are already more affluent.

The sense of excitement strikes you the moment you decant into Gdansk’s sleek, luxury-laden airport, renamed after Walesa in 2004. Barely a generation ago this was a forgotten outpost, hollowed out by Soviet bombardments as they seized it back from Hitler and isolated from the rest of Poland by antiquated roads and trains. Misery and decay were etched in its grim socialist housing blocks.

Now it stands as a glorious amalgam of all that is best about modern and historic Poland.

In elegant new steel-and-glass towers such as the 34-storey Olivia Centre, the tallest building in northern Poland, one finds multinationals such as Fuji and Amazon (who make their Alexas here). In nearby buildings Boeing and Lufthansa make cutting-edge aviation maps.

The new motorway network and high-speed rail line have reconnected the city, turning dying nearby villages into an affluent commuter belt. No HS2-style U-turns here.

There is a new bridge across the River Motlawa – now lined with chic bars, restaurants and hotels – and a tunnel beneath it. All this without detracting from the medieval charm of its Old Town.

With similarly bold developments breathing fresh oxygen into other Polish cities, such as Krakow, where the new Silicon Valley contrasts with the historic castles, and Lodz, Europe’s latest film and fashion hotspot, some experts even suggest Poland is on the brink of another ‘Golden Age’ matching the wealth and power wielded by the 16th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

So how have the Poles pulled off this astonishing resurgence while Britain stagnates?

Economists credit astute post-communist planning that saw its bankrupt industries delivered to well-run foreign investors rather than the corrupt oligarchs who creamed off assets in the former Soviet Union and its other satellites.

Polish firms have since profited to the point where they are the ones eating up European competitors. The British chocolatier Elizabeth Shaw, for example, makers of Mint Crisps and Famous Names, is now owned by a Polish company started in the 90s as a spice importer.

Undoubtedly the huge handouts Poland received after joining the EU have helped. Yet other new members, treated equally generously, have used their payments less prudently.

Piotr Grzelak, Gdansk’s deputy mayor, who cleaned hotel bedrooms in Blackpool when the first wave of Poles emigrated, believes the most important shift has been in the psyche of Poland’s Gen Z.

‘Before, everybody was always complaining but my son’s generation are open and unafraid,’ the 44-year-old centre-Right politician told me. ‘They go out in the world now and no longer feel inferior.’

Another key factor is Poland’s willingness to learn and adapt, he says. Two decades ago, when the new ring road was being designed, Gdansk turned to British construction companies for advice.

Now, offshore wind turbines are being built in the shipyards and on Facebook this week, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk gloatingly congratulated a workman called Bartek who has returned to help build these Green energy generators after doing similar work in Britain’s for 12 years. ‘At the beginning Poles were not so well received [in offshore energy],’ he wrote.

‘It’s interesting how things have changed. They want us now, we even earn better money than the British and now the British are crying when we leave.’

Tusk’s jibe was all too true. Many Poles will doubtless return in the coming months to start building a nuclear power station beside the Baltic, too. Then there is migration. Tactfully, or perhaps because he has not been following the British news lately, Gdansk’s deputy mayor compliments Britain for smoothly integrating its incomers.

However, although Ukrainians and Belarusians comprise one-fifth of Gdansk’s 480,000 population, he says their arrival has not pushed up unemployment, which remains under three per cent, two points lower than the UK.

Since Poland’s birth rate has fallen dramatically in recent years, leaving a shortage of labour to service the boom, quotas of migrants from India, Vietnam and other parts of Asia are also being admitted.

Yet Grzelak adds pointedly: ‘They aren’t on social (welfare). But then our social benefits are not so big as in the UK. You can’t live on them for long.’

For the first three months out of work, Poles receive £313.80 per month according to recent figures. This then falls to £246.35 and is stopped altogether after a few years.

To encourage people to have bigger families, however, Polish child benefit is relatively high, at £180 per child per month. Enlightening insight into Gdansk’s turnaround also comes from former DJ Jake Jephcott, 48, who was in at the rebirth.

Invited to spin the decks at a local club one weekend in 2002, this son of Stratford-upon-Avon met a cousin of Polish internet whizz Maciej Grabski. After enlisting Jephcott as his English teacher, the internet mogul made him the business director of his new venture, the £600million Olivia Centre (in the Klondike Poland, such unlikely opportunities tend to arise). He has since filled the tower, and its seven satellites, with companies employing some 20,000 people.

He greets me in the 34th floor Michelin-starred restaurant, run by Paco Perez, who also has a tapas eatery in Manchester, in partnership with City manager Pep Guardiola. Gesturing to the swish surroundings, he says: ‘They said all this couldn’t be done – that there wasn’t enough disposable income in Gdansk, but we proved them wrong.’

While UK salaries have barely risen in real terms since 2004, in the same period Poland’s have quadrupled.

The packages for some hotshots working in the Olivia are now on a par with London, Jephcott says. HR firms tell him ‘a steady 20 or 30 per cent’ of them are Poles who have returned from the UK and Ireland.

Describing Gdansk as a microcosm of the Polish miracle, he says they are attracted back by the low cost of living, affordable accommodation, the safety of the streets and standard of schools.

‘Visa anxiety’ – the fear that they won’t be able to work in Britain and visit Poland easily – is another often stated reason. ‘The Poles are also more geared to family than we are,’ says Jephcott, who is married to one.

‘So, when Polish girls meet British men, they’ll often say, “If you really love me, you must love Poland, too. It’s time to go back, so we can be close to babcia (granny)”.’

Seeking to compare Gdansk with a British city, before flying in I visited Sunderland, which shares some of its maritime and industrial traditions.

The disparities were sobering and may explain recent polls suggesting that this former bastion of Labour’s Red Wall is turning towards Reform UK.

Though Gdansk has residual pockets of deprivation, and some young people complain the bubble has brought with it unaffordable rents, its social problems appear to pale alongside Sunderland’s.

A quarter of that city’s children live in poverty and 40 per cent of residents are in the bottom fifth of England’s most disadvantaged people. Teen pregnancy, at 26.4 per cent, is double the national average.

Though Sunderland feels safe and welcoming, violent crime is running at 127 per cent of the national rate, whereas Gdansk has a ‘very high’ safety ranking.

Forget the statistics though – you can see the city is struggling, for all the talk of ‘levelling up’.

The central mall is busy and Christmassy but many shops and pubs are shuttered.

Even for older residents, the days when the shipyards produced a quarter of the world’s tonnage are a distant memory.

In Sloanes sports centre, at three in the afternoon, I found a group of 16 and 17-year-old boys shooting pool.

‘There are jobs about, in the supermarkets and that, but I don’t fancy it,’ said one. Asked how he saw his future, he shrugged and chalked his cue.

I thought of these boys a couple of days later, when talking to 29-year-old Natalia Waszynska in Poland. Driven by a love of British culture (and the naive hope that she might meet her favourite band, One Direction) she studied media at the University of Sunderland, working in a restaurant and the local theatre to support herself.

Though she loved the city, with its beautiful beach and earthy folks, she has returned home to open an English language school. 

It now has 138 pupils – an enterprise made possible with a £6,000 grant from the Polish government, which funds start-ups for young entrepreneurs. Would she have had the same opportunity if had she remained in Sunderland? 

The Labour-run council, encamped in one of the few new buildings to match those in Gdansk (a £42million civic palace on the banks of the River Wear) told the Daily Mail: ‘We have developed a number of strategies to unlock the potential of the city, including intervention to address issues like child poverty, support for community hubs and the voluntary sector, a health strategy and a focus on adult skills.’

Though he has done well for himself since arriving in Britain as the borders opened, Grzegorz Lewandowski, one of 1,057 Poles living in Sunderland according to the 2021 census, is angry and frustrated by the increasing difficulties of operating here. The archetypical open-all-hours plumber, he has saved frugally and bought a string of buy-to-lets.

However, he says punitive taxes and tenants’ rights, which began with the Cameron government and have become intolerable under Starmer (‘the worst thing that’s happened to Britain since World War II’) have turned the rental business into a barely profitable nightmare.

Ambitions to expand his business – Greg The Gas Engineer – have been thwarted by political correctness and pettifogging rules, he says.

‘By 2013 I had two lorries and wanted to employ two drivers but the job centre said I must first explain my ‘anti-discrimination’ policies. What a joke!

‘I’ve had a few apprentices, too, but they were lazy and spent all the time looking at their phones, so now I don’t bother.

‘Before I can fit a boiler, I have to fill in three lots of official paperwork. The government put their noses into everything. Why does Downing Street want to know where a home boiler is installed? Britain has become a bureaucratic tax regime.’

He carries on: ‘Whoever makes money now is a bad person: businessmen, farmers, contractors. Where is the entrepreneurial spirit that I came here for? They should send this government to some socialist paradise like Cuba or Venezuela.’

As he is still ‘doing ok’, and has three children here by his ex-wife, he says he will probably stay. Without a radical change of direction, however, he can see the Polish drain becoming a torrent.

Unlike some of the newer arrivals to our shores, who have made lurid headlines in recent days, we will miss them sorely when they’re gone.

Additional reporting: Kevin Donald and Szymon GontarskI