“There must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” Senator James Henry Hammond made this argument to the U.S. Senate in 1858 in defence of slavery. When Zack Polanski defended migrant labour in the care sector on the grounds that Brits like him have better things to do than “wipe someone’s bum” he was not consciously echoing Hammond. But the logic was identical: society requires menial labour the ruling class refuses to perform; therefore a dedicated underclass must be imported to perform it.
Polanski was widely condemned for his remarks. But his error was candour, not sentiment
Care workers earn £11 per hour — barely above the legal minimum. At that price, recruitment is difficult. But the shortage is a policy outcome. The Migration Advisory Committee repeatedly urged the government to fund higher wages rather than import workers, but was overruled. Boris Johnson later admitted his government had maintained high migration specifically to prevent “upward pressure on wages” — just as it had done for decades, compounding into an equilibrium in which certain work remains permanently beneath the native population. Hammond’s premise, achieved by other means.
Polanski was widely condemned for his remarks. But his error was candour, not sentiment. The argument is better received when given a gloss of solidarity: our NHS would collapse without migration. Who could be so heartless as to disagree? Here we encounter the peculiar synthesis that defines our age: social liberals and progressives supply the moral cover for a morally bankrupt economy. The humanitarian rhetoric of compassion, diversity, and opportunity validates a system of exploitation while hollowing out working-class communities on both ends of the migration chain. The caring language is of the left; the brutal economics needs no party and no justification. They are not opponents but collaborators: one provides the vocabulary of compassion, the other collects the profit. Adam Smith called it the vile maxim of the masters of mankind — all for ourselves and nothing for other people.
Consider what this arrangement describes. Nigeria, for example, has one doctor for every 10,000 patients; the WHO recommends one per 600. Yet over 12,000 Nigerian doctors are registered with the UK’s General Medical Council, and surveys suggest that 80 percent of those who remain in Africa express intentions to leave. A 2011 British Medical Journal study calculated Nigeria’s loss from doctor emigration at $654 million — part of $2.17 billion lost across sub-Saharan Africa. Britain, meanwhile, gained $2.7 billion in avoided training costs. It is undoubtedly a profitable trade to be in. One in eleven NHS doctors now come from the WHO’s red list of countries with critical health worker shortages, with over 32,000 such staff recruited in 2021 alone.
And who can blame those doctors for coming? For a Nigerian physician, emigrating to Britain is a rational, intelligent, and ambitious decision. It offers higher wages, professional development, and a future for their children that their home country cannot provide. The individual migrant is only responding naturally to incentives; the tragedy is that Britain’s economy is predicated on providing them. To acknowledge migrant agency is not to validate the system that constrains it. Choice within a structure of coercion is not consent to that structure.
The historical parallel demands precision. The legal mechanisms are obviously different: chattel slavery rested on explicit force; labour migration operates through economic pressure. No one is kidnapped. Visas are applied for, flights are booked, contracts are signed. But Hammond’s defence of slavery did not rely on coercion — it was that society requires a class to do the menial duties, and that it was fortunate that a suitable population existed. The contemporary version differs in means but not in logic: we do not compel migrants to come, but we have arranged an economy that requires them to. Choice within constraint is not consent to the structure that constrains. In the 1980s and 1990s, structural adjustment imposed by the IMF and World Bank led to cuts to health spending, freezes on public-sector hiring, and removal of training subsidies. Medical schools were graduating doctors into economies that could no longer employ them. When those doctors migrate to the NHS today, they are making choices — but between options that were shaped, at every stage, by the same economies now grateful for their arrival.
Those defending this system go further: because migrants enjoy better conditions, their arrangement is declared not merely tolerable but virtuous. This sophistry has a long pedigree. In 1805, a parliamentary defender of West Indian slavery declared that “the slaves are, in fact, very happy — much happier than the labouring poor in England.” (The parliamentary record noted drily that the speaker “omitted to state in what their happiness consisted.”) By 1830, Charles Edward Long had refined this into a theory of civilisational uplift: “their very bondage has raised them in the scale of creation.” The same rhetoric recurs in today’s migration debate: compare conditions to somewhere worse, declare the arrangement beneficial, and reframe extraction as charity. The wage differential is presented as generosity, but is the foundation on which exploitation is built.
If individual gain is the first defence, remittances are the second: money sent home, it is argued, compensates the countries left behind. But while remittances help individual families, they do not offset what is lost. An IMF study of Caribbean economies found no evidence that remittances offset the negative growth effects of emigration. Instead, they create dependency on exporting workers. And skilled workers — whose loss is most damaging — send less home than unskilled workers and are more likely to reunify their families abroad, compounding the brain drain. The Philippines, often celebrated as a remittance success story, has been exporting nurses for half a century; it has not become a wealthy country. It has become a country structured around producing nurses for export. What Britain receives in return is an economy structured around its own incapacity.
Services require bodies — in care homes, in warehouses, in hotel kitchens — and they require them cheaply and flexibly. Between 1994 and 2019, 77 percent of UK labour force growth came from migrant workers, mostly in low-wage service sectors. This growth has been overwhelmingly concentrated in London, where non-UK nationals now hold 42 percent of all jobs and 63 percent of those in hospitality. Meanwhile in the regions and former industrial heartlands, the picture inverts: older industrial towns have low migrant populations precisely because their economies are too weak to attract workers at all. The pattern is not of migrants displacing natives but of capital concentrating in London’s service economy while the regions decline.
The alternative is a country that trains, builds, and needs no servant class
This was not inevitable. Between the early 1970s and late 1980s, 2.5 million British manufacturing jobs disappeared — one-third of the entire sector, vanishing faster than in any comparable Western European country. What replaced them was an economy that makes little, trains few, and requires a permanent supply of workers from elsewhere to function. In explaining how Britain came to see such an economy as its future, the historian Martin Wiener identified a cultural pathology at the heart of the English elite. In English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, he documented a pervasive upper- and middle-class hostility to industrialism — leaders entranced by rural nostalgia and gentility, educated in public schools where the sons of businessmen were looked down upon and science barely taught. Keith Joseph found the book so compelling he gave a copy to every member of Thatcher’s Cabinet. But Thatcher read it as a case for financialisation. The factory gave way to the City, and the contempt for manual labour outlasted both.
That contempt now sustains Britain’s migration dependency. The elite that learned to disdain the factory learned equally to disdain the care home, the warehouse, and the abattoir — any work involving bodies rather than abstractions. Hence the shortage occupation list, the wage arbitrage, the permanent need for a workforce willing to accept conditions British workers refuse when it pays a minimum wage. The class prejudice that killed British industry now requires a globalised servant class to paper over its consequences. We have become a nation that has outsourced not just its manufacturing but its conscience — and that has learned to call the arrangement compassion. The alternative is a country that trains, builds, and needs no servant class. That this sounds utopian to people who would never countenance working in a care home is precisely the problem.
