https://archive.is/ndjbi
"Surrounded by ancestral portraits, the Countess of Carnarvon sits in her
morning room, contemplating the challenge of running Highclere Castle. A cloud
settles over her sunny features as she ponders life without the Polish help.
Home to the Earl of Carnarvon and Fiona, his wife, the countess, the
17th-century Hampshire mansion is better known to millions around the world as
the setting for the
Downton Abbey TV series and films. It attracts a
multitude of visitors but still struggles to make ends meet, despite an
award-winning Highclere gin, on sale in the gift shop for £39.50. “We’ve lost
our seated afternoon tea business,” the countess explains with a rueful smile.
“I’ve got no staff to wash up.” I ask about weddings. “That’s all gone too, and
the conferences,” her ladyship says.
It’s nothing to do with the “curse of the mummy”, supposed to have cut short
the life of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon after opening Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
The countess instead blames Brexit — “a complete own goal”. Young Europeans who
used to serve the tea at the stately home have stopped applying for jobs in the
UK. “Everyone forgot how wonderfully easy it was to float to and fro,” she
says. “Nowadays if they want to come here they have to fill in a 30-page form.
Who’s going to do that? It just doesn’t work. If you need ten people, you might
get two or three. One can’t plan a business on such uncertainty, so we’ve
simply pulled the whole thing.”
Many of those she used to employ were Polish — until recently our largest
non-UK-born immigrant community. Freedom of movement within the EU made it hard
to count the precise numbers, but Britain’s Office for National Statistics
estimated that there were 911,000 Poles living in Britain in 2016. By 2020 that
number had fallen to 691,000."
Via Joerg Fliege and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
