Lunch brought Stas and Jacek out of their squabbling and into conflict with the youngest labourer in the team, a grumpy, heavyset joiner whom both inexplicably called Miner. He was a newcomer, in England only since 2009. Miner knew some English. Just about enough to read. 

Miner had been permanently alienated from his life in a crammed flat above a halal butcher in Wood Green when a plumber was called in an emergency three years ago. The man had left the Sun next to the radio and switched off the Polish pop music the boys played at every hour and in every house. Miner opened the paper. "That rag claimed Poles are jobs thieves and drunks! You English only pretend to like us to our face!"   

He was, like almost all builders, an obsessive saver. But unlike the rest, he was neurotic about it. He was always on his mobile phone calculating the precise value of his savings. This was because like many of the young ones he thought he was only here temporarily. He was saving to build a house, a dream mansion. 

Miner needed £30,000 but the exchange rate and the influx of Romanian workers were working against him. He rolled a cigarette. "Those Romanians are a bunch of uninsured cowboy builders! They are driving down our wages. They're working for £4 an hour. Britain is mad to let them in." 

Miner spent his days drilling and sawing, mentally sketching the mansion he would one day build. He decided it would look like a redbrick Edwardian vicarage. He would get a friendly metallurgist to erect a London postbox as a souvenir outside. 

If Conservative MPs ever deigned to talk to Polish builders they might discover people near-identical to the Norman Tebbit fantasy of the working class. Industrious savers. Family people. Willing to work for nothing. Fans of Thatcher, the Soviet-fighter. Disgusted by trade unionists and completely depoliticised. 

Polish churches are full every Sunday. London was long a city of empty Victorian churches. These Gothic chapels now echo to Polish mass and Nigerian choirs. Polish churches are full of toddlers and pushchairs. Teary tattooed plumbers cross themselves. Hard-up meat packers shove £20 into the collection boxes for the nuns needing furniture in eastern Poland. 

I went drinking with Miner. We began in the newsagent by filling a blue plastic bag with a dozen cans of Lechs. It tore. Traipsing home, Miner shared his confusion about the English. "Why do they give the benefits? Why £60 a week and a free flat for a lazy pig that don't work?"