ONE OF the better English-language bloggers on Poland, the Beatroot, carries a startling allegation this week. He asserts that a reporter from the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, contacted him to ask him to break British traffic rules for money. To be more precise, he says that the reporter wanted to pay him to drive a Polish-registered car to Britain and spend a few days breaking parking laws and speed limits with a photographer in tow, to demonstrate that Poles and other eastern European immigrants flout British rules with impunity.

Another blog, EU Referendum, picks up the story and reproduces what it says is an email from the Daily Mail reporter in question, Sue Reid, setting out the offer. In the end, Beatroot says the negotiations fell through when someone else from Poland agreed to the exercise first.



One story by Ms Reid that has been published is this one, headlined: "£1m of child benefit paid out a month—to mothers in Poland," which describes how a Polish mother receives British child benefit worth £33 a week (€48) for her two children, though she and they live in Poland. To quote the article, this makes her:


It is paragraph 13 before Ms Reid mentions the detail that the family in question are entitled to British child benefit because the children's father works legally in London as a builder and pays British taxes there. In other words, the children could legally live in Britain, and receive their British child benefit there. Would that satisfy the Daily Mail? It is hard to tell: British tabloids are fond of complaining about the costs of schooling the children of legal migrants from eastern Europe in British state schools.