Unskilled rural labour has absolutely been hammered by immigration. ('they do the jobs British people won’t do! (Actually we don’t want anybody doing that work for that pay.)

A member of my family is in a building trade. When he started, he was a labourer, bottom of the heap. He observed that most of the Brits on the crew with long Brit ancestry were work-shy and bolshy. The only people he respected were the Poles and Romanians. They showed up every day, did the job and didn’t constantly moan. Now almost all of them have returned to their home countries, or at least have stopped working in England.

Working-class white “true Brits” learned a bad habit during the Empire: assuming there was always someone else to do the dirty work: an Irishman, someone from somewhere in the Empire, or (more recently) an Eastern European. It’s entitlement, pure and simple, and a passivity when it comes to improving one’s lot in life.

My family member has moved up rapidly in his trade and is now in education to move up the food chain even further. His British friends who started with him as apprentices have now moved on to faking disability, dealing drugs, stealing things, or remain at the bottom of the heap.

Exploitation is a problem. But so is the learned helplessness and the entitled sense of being too good to put any effort into working or learning.