Zack Polanski is Right About Wiping Bottoms – and That’s the Problem
Zack Polanski got to the bottom of the issue when he said now infamously on Question Time: “I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum.” It was the logical conclusion of a society that has systematically devalued care for four generations since the inception of the NHS. Those who pretend to be surprised at Polanski’s callous nature ought not to be. From bum-wiping at birth to bum-wiping before assisted suicide, it has been official government doctrine, happily adopted by the public since 1948, that it is the role of the state, rather than family, to care for you and your loved ones. Zack Polanski’s solution – to flood the UK with bum-wiping immigrants – may be unhelpful, but his honest articulation of disinterest in wiping bums ought to be applauded. He is at least acknowledging one of the great modern-day flaws in our society: our seeming disinclination to care for ourselves and each other without state support.
Whether Jeremy Hunt’s enthusiastic expansion of state-sponsored child care from nine months, to Lord Falconer’s furious insistence that the state enables suicide, great swathes of personal and family care have been outsourced to the state or corporations. Are you aware for instance that secondary schools and colleges give away free period products to girls – embedding early the idea that it is not our personal or family’s responsibility to care for even the most elementary of hygiene? With Mounjaro, we no longer need to care about eating properly, with the venture capital involvement in elderly care homes we no longer need to fret about Granny, and once Musk’s Optimus has come on stream we can forget about human care altogether.
Who better in this climate to win the FT’s educator of the year, than Miss Rachel in the FT’s 2025 Influencer list? ‘Toddler educator’ Miss Rachel is best known for emitting primary-coloured videos of herself talking in child-like language to millions of global toddlers who are given iPads to watch while their parents get ready for work. If even baby-care is deemed worthy of outsourcing away from mothers, then what hope end-of-life bum-wiping?
As a society we have allowed ourselves to become deeply deskilled in matters of acute human connection. Teenagers consider ‘talking to someone’ via Snap as meaningful as spending an afternoon together flirting. Within two generations domestic skills have rapidly diminished wholesale. Compared with my grandmother, who had all three children at home, knitted and sewed their clothes, home-cooked every meal and managed to repair all cuts and scraps with a nursing grade medical cabinet, I am unable to sew or knit any clothes and rely on the pharmacy or the local minor injuries unit to mop up injuries. What I, and millions of women like me, gained in academic qualifications we lost in practical caring skills. Can any connections possibly be made between this shift and the 20% of children with mental health conditions, the 15% of the adult population taking anti-depressants and the 38% of marriages ending in divorce?
David Goodhart in The Care Dilemma, sought to grapple with the changing role of women in society and what this means for the care of the young, old and sick but his book has so far untroubled policymakers. With the exception of post-feminist writers Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, talk around care has long since shifted decisively away from the family and individuals to the state. What clamour there is around ‘care’ remains weighted in the balance of state-supplied care. There must be more ‘welfare’, more ‘mental health appointments’, more special school placements, more homes built, more care visas issued.
And yet the state, in many instances, delivers care dreadfully. The breakfast clubs and wrap-around care the Labour Government is celebrating are often attended by children out of necessity, rarely choice on the part of the child. Those I’ve visited are generally staffed by ladies in tabards issuing toasted bagels with jam – sufficient, but, you know, not as cosy as porridge in bed with Mum and a snuggly read of a book. Or a brisk fitness session and eggs with Dad.
At the more malign end, ‘gender affirming care’ and the notorious ‘care homes’ bound up in the rape gang atrocities ought to demonstrate the flaws in state ‘care’ – alas neither being rare anomalies. The inability of the state to properly care for people reached its apogee during lockdown. While spouting ‘care’, what this meant in practice was its opposite: the elderly and ill dying alone and children isolated from school and friends.
What if we are looking at society’s problems through the wrong end of the telescope? What if it’s not immigration, lack of housing, welfare or mental health, that are at fault, but our own ability to wipe bums, as Zack Polanski would have it? The last mainstream study that I can find into the outcome of parents rather than nurseries bringing up their own children found children were happier and more successful when raised at home for their early years. Surveys repeatedly show that, if finances allowed, mothers would prefer to stay at home and raise their offspring. What if children, parents and grandparents, were made happier with grandparents living in the home? What if multi-generational living, as was the norm until the 1950s, returns to combat the housing and loneliness crisis? What if we properly and lovingly cared for our elderly – they can’t all have complex needs? What if we all wiped our own bottoms and those of the people we love?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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But it IS Third World Invasion that is the problem, taking all the jobs teenagers want to do, and leaving young Indigenous Britons with no career options except care for the elderly, made worse by the fact that “the elderly” are often Third World Invaders dumped on the NHS by their families. Even young British men lament the fact that all the IT jobs they hoped for have been given to Ethnic Indians, often leaving the young British men with no choice but nursing or care home work.
As one mother of teenagers wrote,
“I didn’t work hard to give my daughter a good education at the best schools, just to have her end up WIPING THE BACKSIDE of some old Pakistani Muslim man dumped on the NHS by his family.”
This is the true meaning of the Globalists saying that Britain will become “A Service Economy”… Indigenous Brits as SERVANTS of the Third World.
I have moved back in with my parents to care for them. I’m a bloke and I wipe bums. It is not a big deal. I would not dream of putting my parents into a care home.
It’s a big deal if you’re a young British person just starting out in life, full of dreams, then forced to wipe the backside of some old Pakistani Muslim man or woman, dumped on the NHS by their family.
Well done mate, agree with you, good luck, been there myself
Try offering Brits a decent rate of pay to do jobs few apply for and several problems will be solved at once.
It has been official government doctrine, happily adopted by the public since 1948, that it is the role of the state, rather than family, to care for you and your loved ones. Zack Polanski’s solution – to flood the UK with bum-wiping immigrants – may be unhelpful, but his honest articulation …
The issue goes beyond the family’s duty of care. It never fails to amaze me how that this almost universal belief that immigrants should be called upon to do the work that we natives consider beneath us is RACISM writ large. Unless we are willing to pay native men and women whatever it costs (as a matter of market capitalism) to employ them as nurses, cleaners, carehome staff and the like, we are hypocritical racists and just too blind to admit it.
I agree, it is unbelievably racist, and that is why Polanski deserves the opprobrium he is receiving.
But it is NOT an almost universal belief! It is Globalist Propaganda that has been rammed down our throats to make us submit to this FALSE JUSTIFICATION for the Third World Invasion and Destruction of the West.
The same issue of unwillingness to perform certain roles necessary for the functioning of society applies to other aspects of life too, e.g. manufacturing, food production.
Manual labour is considered infra dig., or too much like hard work for us molly-coddled natives, and consequently it is expensive. Where feasible, the solution is to get foreigners to do the manufacturing – in (formerly) Third World countries where labour costs are much lower – and import the goods we need. We have turned ourselves into a ‘service economy’.
Likewise, we don’t like paying the high cost of domestic food production, so we import 40% of the food we eat. We don’t care that UK farming is becoming increasingly uneconomic, or that importing food has a much larger carbon footprint.
“We” the ordinary people are not doing any of those things.
A leftist Anglican vicar once told parishioners that it was all our fault for “wanting cheap clothes made in Bangladesh”.
One retorted that no Indigenous Brits wanted that— they want their clothes to be made by Indigenous Brits in British factories, but all these things have been OUTSOURCED by the Globalists to increase THEIR OWN PROFITS. We the ordinary people CANNOT STOP THEM.
Even the British Empire brought NOTHING BENEFICIAL to the ordinary working men and women in Britain. Only to the Globalists.
A fair bit of domestic food production relies on ‘Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAWs)’ from the East, e.g. Romania.
But that’s only because the Indigenous Britons who did those jobs for centuries have been lured into idleness by a myriad of welfare benefits.
Definitely don’t rely on migrants, especially men and especially in a home care setting, where the elderly are much more vulnerable. And unless the recipient has given specific consent, I don’t think men should be allowed to go ahead and give personal care to elderly women, such as help with toileting and showering. It’s about maintaining dignity and respect for the patient, after all. This is only a few in Sweden so god knows what the reality is, including in other countries. Aren’t we often hearing about the ridiculous amount of sexual assaults taking place in NHS hospitals? ”A 47-year-old Kosovo Albanian man who worked in home care in the Swedish town of Ronneby has been charged with raping a female care recipient, according to the indictment filed this week. Despite the seriousness of the charge, the man remains free more than two years later. Prosecutor Malin Rydell Almroth confirmed to the Samnytt news outlet that the man has not been detained, even though Swedish law generally presumes pre-trial detention for rape and other serious crimes carrying a minimum sentence of one and a half years in prison. The accused, an Albanian man from Prizren who later became a Swedish citizen, requires… Read more »
In the aftermath of the Cologne mass (i.e. organised and co-ordinated) sexual assaults of 2015, I watched a video of a young Syrian participant in the attacks who said that it was difficult for him to regard white women as being fully human. I wonder if that attitude has anything to do with the attacks you mention here.
“Can any connections possibly be made between this shift and the 20% of children with mental health conditions, the 15% of the adult population taking anti-depressants and the 38% of marriages ending in divorce?”
In a word – Yes.