The Poor Man
at His Gate.
The poor man doesn’t stand at the gate anymore. He checks his phone.
There is an old verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful that most people don’t sing anymore.
“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate…”
It appeared in the original nineteenth-century hymn.
Read today, it feels uncomfortable.
Not simply because Britain was enormously unequal, but because the verse reflects something deeper about the age: the idea that hierarchy could be presented as part of the natural order.
Everyone had their place.
Britain has changed beyond recognition since then.
Children are no longer legally sent up chimneys. We have compulsory education, employment law, workplace safety legislation, the minimum wage, the welfare state and the NHS.
A worker in 2026 possesses rights that a Victorian labourer could scarcely have imagined.
So this is not an argument that Britain has literally returned to Victorian working conditions.
It hasn’t.
But history doesn’t have to repeat itself exactly for an old economic principle to reappear.
Because every age develops a vocabulary that makes its economic arrangements sound inevitable.
The poor man doesn’t
stand at the gate anymore.
He checks his phone.
That is obviously worlds away from nineteenth-century casual labour in terms of legal rights and living standards.
But economically, something familiar has happened.
The company wants access to labour when demand exists without necessarily guaranteeing the worker an income when demand does not.
And this isn’t some tiny curiosity of the British labour market.
Zero-hours contracts are simply one of the clearest modern expressions of a much larger question:
Who carries the uncertainty when there isn’t enough work?
Capitalism. Socialism.
And people shouting words.
One of the strangest things about British politics is how confidently people use economic labels they rarely define.
And then you start asking questions.
NHS? Keep it.
State pension? Keep it.
Police? Obviously.
Schools? Obviously.
Roads? Of course.
Government intervention when an entire financial system approaches catastrophe?
Suddenly things become more complicated.
Because Britain isn’t a pure capitalist economy and it isn’t a socialist economy.
It is a mixed economy.
Like virtually every advanced economy, it continually makes political decisions about which activities should operate predominantly through markets and which risks should be pooled collectively.
The minimum wage
tells us something.
From April 2026, Britain’s National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is:
For workers aged 18 to 20, the statutory minimum is £10.85 an hour.
At £12.71 an hour, somebody working 37.5 hours every week would gross roughly £24,785 a year.
But a zero-hours worker isn’t guaranteed 37.5 hours.
That’s the point.
And here’s where Britain’s political story becomes interesting.
Because after Brexit we were told something was going to change.
Britain was going to become something else.
Fine.
Where is it?
Not where are there any highly paid people?
Obviously Britain has them.
London remains one of the world’s major financial centres. Britain has outstanding businesses in pharmaceuticals, aerospace, technology, professional services, advanced manufacturing and numerous other industries.
The question is about the shape of the labour market.
Where is the transformation that was supposed to pull huge numbers of ordinary workers upwards through productivity?
There is a fundamental difference between increasing wages because businesses have become sufficiently productive to compete for scarce skilled labour and increasing the statutory wage floor because millions of jobs remain clustered towards the bottom of the wage distribution.
The minimum wage is important. But a high-wage economy should eventually be doing more of the lifting itself.
You cannot announce
a skilled economy.
This is where Britain’s industrial history matters.
Britain didn’t stop manufacturing.
We still manufacture pharmaceuticals, aircraft components, vehicles, machinery, defence equipment, chemicals, food and an enormous range of other products.
But Britain’s economy shifted heavily towards services, with financial and professional services becoming particularly important.
And when industrial ecosystems shrink, something else can shrink with them:
the machinery that produces skills.
Those skills aren’t created because a minister stands behind a lectern and announces a skills strategy.
They are created because somebody somewhere has an expensive technical problem that needs solving.
A factory needs maintaining.
A production line needs improving.
A machine needs designing.
A process needs automating.
An electrical system needs installing.
A young worker enters at the bottom.
They learn from somebody experienced.
They become experienced.
Eventually they train somebody else.
You can’t simply remove parts of that ecosystem and then complain twenty years later that nobody has the skills.
And you certainly can’t declare Britain a high-skill economy by press release.
Then we blame
the worker.
This is where the tribal politics becomes almost absurd.
People applaud.
People complain labour is too expensive.
People applaud.
The worker is suddenly greedy.
A politician promises British workers will replace imported labour.
People applaud.
Employers cannot find enough people.
Suddenly nobody wants to work anymore.
Which is it?
You cannot simultaneously demand a high-wage economy and become outraged by high wages.
You cannot demand skilled workers and refuse to pay a premium for skills.
You cannot restrict the supply of labour and then be astonished when labour becomes more expensive.
And you cannot spend decades constructing a flexible labour market and then complain that workers themselves have become flexible.
The NHS makes the contradiction impossible to ignore.
And then we arrive at Britain’s favourite collectively funded institution.
The NHS.
Healthcare risk is heavily socialised.
You don’t personally maintain a £50,000 reserve in case you develop cancer next Tuesday.
We pool the risk.
Taxpayers fund the system.
Treatment is generally available according to clinical need rather than your ability to produce a credit card at the hospital entrance.
That is a profoundly collective arrangement.
And yet the NHS operates inside a much larger market economy.
Private companies manufacture equipment. Pharmaceutical companies sell medicines. Technology companies provide systems. Construction companies build facilities. Agencies supply labour. Independent providers can deliver NHS-funded care.
None of that automatically means private provision is bad.
Private businesses can provide valuable expertise, innovation and capacity.
But look at the architecture.
Social provision and private enterprise are already intertwined.
The argument is about where we draw the boundaries.
And then there’s
the agency.
The NHS gives us another example.
It trains staff.
The taxpayer contributes towards the healthcare system.
Permanent employees keep hospitals functioning.
But when permanent capacity becomes insufficient, the system has historically bought temporary labour.
Sometimes at a premium.
The exact agency charge is not simply the worker’s wage. It can include employer costs and agency margins.
But structurally the contradiction is fascinating.
Don’t maintain enough permanent capacity.
Save money.
Develop a shortage.
Purchase temporary capacity.
Pay more.
Then impose controls because temporary capacity has become too expensive.
Turkeys and Christmas.
This is where politics becomes cultural rather than economic.
People begin defending economic arrangements as part of an identity.
The labels arrive before the analysis.
Someone earning £13 an hour can become passionately concerned that a millionaire might be taxed too heavily.
Someone dependent upon the NHS can describe collective provision as socialism as though socialism were inherently alien to British life.
Someone with little employment security can defend the employer’s absolute need for flexibility without asking what flexibility they themselves receive in return.
That doesn’t make them stupid.
It demonstrates how powerful political identity can become.
People don’t always vote according to a spreadsheet calculation of their immediate economic interests.
They vote according to values, aspiration, culture, identity, immigration, nation, family, status and what they believe society ought to look like.
That’s democracy.
But it also means people can defend economic arrangements without ever asking the most basic question:
ACTUALLY BENEFIT ME?
That is the turkeys voting for Christmas problem.
Not because somebody voted Conservative.
Not because somebody voted Brexit.
But because economic policy becomes a team sport.
And once it becomes a team sport, questioning the arrangement feels like betraying the team.
The castle
and the gate.
Which brings us back to that uncomfortable Victorian verse.
“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate…”
We don’t generally explain inequality like that anymore.
We don’t tell somebody their economic position was assigned by God.
We have better language now.
Some of those concepts are completely legitimate.
Markets matter.
Flexibility can be useful.
Businesses need to compete.
People do have personal responsibility.
But every economic age develops a language that can make its arrangements sound natural.
And sometimes the language prevents us asking who benefits from the arrangement underneath.
THE GATE.
THE PHONE.
The Victorian casual labourer stood somewhere hoping somebody needed him.
The modern worker checks an app.
The Victorian household worried whether there would be work tomorrow.
The modern household worries whether there will be enough hours next week.
The conditions are radically different.
The rights are radically different.
The country is radically wealthier.
But the economic question underneath remains surprisingly recognisable.
Who carries the uncertainty when there isn’t enough work?
Because zero-hours contracts didn’t abolish that uncertainty.
They allocated it.
The high-wage economy
has to be built.
This is ultimately why the argument about zero hours cannot end with zero hours.
Government can regulate them.
It can require greater predictability.
It can strengthen notice requirements.
It can provide greater protection where shifts are cancelled at short notice.
Businesses are entitled to point out that greater guarantees create costs.
Costs are real.
But so is the cost currently being carried by somebody else.
The cost does not disappear simply because it isn’t sitting on the employer’s balance sheet.
And legislation alone still won’t create the high-wage economy Britain was promised.
It requires industries capable of paying workers substantially more than the statutory minimum because those workers generate substantially more value.
CALLING WORKERS SKILLED.
It is created by building an economy with expensive problems worth paying skilled people to solve.
Until then, Britain can regulate zero hours.
It probably should regulate exploitative forms of them.
But we should understand what we’re looking at.
Zero hours aren’t simply a bad contract.
They’re a signal.
A signal from an economy that spent decades pursuing flexibility.
A signal from businesses trying to remove idle capacity.
A signal from households carrying volatility businesses no longer want.
A signal from a country that promised to replace cheap labour with productivity but has struggled to complete the transformation.
And perhaps, underneath all the modern terminology, something much older.
And if we really want a high-wage, high-skill Britain, the question isn’t whether we can force that person away from the gate.
It’s whether we’ve built anything better for them to walk into.