Zack Polanski’s ill-chosen words on last week’s Question Time about migrants may or not prove his undoing. At the very least, they provided much entertainment when the offending clip went viral. It’s difficult not to conclude that the Green Party leader’s halo has slipped, that his aura of moral righteousness has evaporated.
Polanski was asked on the BBC’s flagship politics show about the importance of having foreign staff working in Britain’s care system. It was vital that this country should have such people, he answered, before explaining further: ‘One in five care workers are foreign nationals. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum, and I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.’
How so few words said so much – and offended so many. So much for Zack the man who piously preaches no borders and berates the parasitic super-rich. Here was a man speaking as the super-rich might do of their servants. They might as well have been the words of Zsa Zsa Gabor or the unguarded sentiments of some oligarch’s spoiled daughter. So much for Zack the lover of humanity and friend of immigrants. This was the Green Party leader, putting on his proverbial top hat and monocle, intoning about the need to import cheap labour to do jobs that no normal, decent human being in this country should ever have to demean himself to do.
It wasn’t just migrants he dismissed, either. By insinuating that the very essence of caring for the elderly entails removing excrement from their backsides, he achieved the feat of managing to insult everybody who works in the care sector, irrespective of background or ethnicity. For many thousands of people in this country, caring for old people means treating them as human beings with needs and emotions, not just as economically unviable deadweights at the end of the road. Thousands more are unpaid carers for family members. To reduce them to the status of shit-cleaning coolies is perhaps not the look Zack was going for.
But we shouldn’t be surprised by Polanski’s gaffe, and for two reasons. The first is that he owes much of his current popularity to Gen Z – and he appeals to its worst instincts. This is a generation whose members, at the extreme end, don’t believe they should work, because they are ‘mentally ill’. They also believe that everything should be free. In fact, no one need do anything if we just milk the evil top one or two per cent through a magical ‘wealth tax’. This is the economically illiterate anti-politics that Zack Polanski personifies.
The problem with demanding a life of idleness, however, is that ultimately someone will have to do the work that makes society run. That has historically been solved by creating a slave class, or designating a class of untouchables, so that a refined elite need not have to degrade themselves with hard, dirty work. It’s perhaps no surprise that today’s champion of the indolent seems to have stumbled upon precisely that solution.
Secondly, the global, supposedly humanity-loving left has been saying much the same ignoble, avaricious thing as Polanski for the past 10 years, just not in such an obviously unseemly fashion. Ever since the vote to leave the European Union was put to the public nearly 10 years ago, we were told, resoundingly and remorselessly, that we need labour from more economically disadvantaged countries to work in poorly paid sectors in order for our nation to function.
The GDP fetishists in the Treasury and money-worshippers in the City have never needed to excuse their support for mass migration. The liberal-left affluent middle classes, however, have had to dress up their love of the cheap, largely Eastern European labour that came with EU membership in the language of moral virtue. They needed to pretend there was something altruistic in their use of foreign nannies, au pairs and plumbers. That there was something positive about the economy’s reliance on cheap factory and farm labour. So they did a clever thing: they made their opponents out to be the selfish ones. Leaving the EU and closing our borders was closing ourselves to the world, they said. It was thoughtless and uncompassionate. That way leads to xenophobia, hatred and racism, they insisted.
The left in all its forms has been at it for the past 10 years, reminding us, ad nauseam, that the NHS relies on recruiting blessed souls from faraway lands. Never mind that ‘Our NHS’ has been dependent on poaching young talent from poor countries to save us the cost of training our own people to run our own health service. The liberal-left has continued to carry on speaking as if it were somehow virtuous, or even noble, to pilfer labour from poor countries – and to depress the wages and living standards of the native working class.
There are some who actively seek to lower wages through increased immigration. There are some, and I suspect that Polanski may well be among their number, who are so politically naïve that they don’t understand how economically and socially destructive it can be to have no control over migration.
If Zack Polanski wants to improve the lot of working people in this country, including care workers of any ethnicity, he might advocate a policy to tighten control of the borders. But that wouldn’t look very ‘compassionate’, would it?
