Goodbye Polish nannies, we’ll miss you

It is not because of Brown's encouragement of xenophobia, deplorable though that is.

Commentators are pursing their lips and wagging their fingers because they — we, to be frank — come from a different country from the striking oil refinery workers in Lincolnshire.

Our Britain is not very British. It is filled with Polish plumbers, Filipina au pairs, Hungarian nannies and Lithuanian cab drivers.

London professional life in the bubble depended on contracting out the chores of family life to a vast army of servants from the former Soviet bloc and all points east and south. To afford the ever-rising prices of London houses — whatever happened to them, by the way? — both man and woman had to work in demanding jobs. The only way they could cope was by bringing in hired help to care for the children and keep the home.

I stopped being surprised when friends said their nanny would not travel on the Tube because she was frightened transport police would pick her up as an illegal immigrant. I kept my composure when a Romanian told me she was nostalgic for the days of the Ceausescu dictatorship because "at least then, young people showed respect", and learned more about Slovakian provincial towns than I ever thought I needed to know.

We will have to see how the recession pans out, but it could be that historians will look back to Slavophile London as a distinct period in our history. When a professional loses his or her job, the au pair is fired and the kitchen renovation is cancelled as matter of course.

As the middle class cuts back, unemployment is rising, and Westminster council is already helping jobless Poles buy a ticket home. In any case, if the pound stays low, London will not be anywhere near as attractive a destination to migrant workers.

It could be that the great immigration is over, and years from now when you hear a Polish accent in a film or television drama, you will guess at once that the action is set before Lehman Brothers went down.

I will miss them, but then I can afford to be sentimental. If I were a builder hoping for work on the Olympic stadium or an electrician wondering how I could keep my family going, I would be relieved.