Giles Coren article prompts Polish complaints

The Press Complaints Commission is considering whether Times columnist Giles Coren has breached its editors' code of practice after receiving complaints about a piece he wrote about Poles. In a Saturday column on July 26 entitled, "Two waves of immigration, Poles apart", Coren said he had little sympathy with Polish workers leaving the UK because construction work is drying up. He said: "We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it." Coren's own great-grandfather, Harry, was Jewish and left Poland for the UK as a teenager. The Times columnist added: "The option to return [to Poland] was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore. "My sympathy for the... [read full story]