A few years ago I predicted that slavery would become legal in the UK. My thinking was that the government (any government, any party) would legislate to allow people in debt and unable to extricate themselves to undertake unpaid work for their creditor(s) until the debt was paid off.
I was right about the return of slavery, but wrong about the reason for its return.

We have just learned that there are about one million workers in this country on zero-hours contracts. This means that those workers are bound to a company but guaranteed no earnings. It means that their main income is provided by the taxpayer in the form of benefits. It means that their employer has no responsibility toward them, but has total control of their allotted work time whether they work or not.
The government has being pretending that there are 250,000 zero-hour slaves nationally, which would be enough of a disgrace for anyone with a social conscience. The fact that they were lying about the numbers tells us that even those soulless rats know that this is an abominable state of affairs.
The zero-hours slavery puts the "welfare to work" form of slavery in the shade, but let's not forget those hundreds of thousands of slaves also working for dole money.
In addition to the Sklavarbeiter there's something like 2.5 million on the dole and yet to be enslaved. Is anybody working in this country, whose economy, according to our criminally insane Chancellor of the Exchequer, is recovering nicely, thank you, from the great bank rip-off? Well, there are who are keeping a lot of slaves from starvation while the slavers pay little or no taxes on the vast profits they are removing from this sceptred isle.
In the immortal words of the loathsome Hughie Green, "Wake up, Britain!"

I still haven't written off the slavery as debt repayment idea. It could come. Another money-saving scheme I'm predicting is euthanasia for the no longer productive aged. Thanasia really, as there's nothing 'eu-' about killing people off.