I left school when I was 17 (got 'asked to leave', is the more accurate term I guess). This was 1997. My unqualified, entry-level salary was more than the average salary now. My Dad - hopping mad - had sent me to three months of secretarial college and I came out into an £18k job in the local Glaxo factory as an admin assistant. To give a sense of how long ago this was - my boss would hand-write messages onto sheets of paper and I would touch-type them into this new-fangled 'email' thing she couldn't fathom. Nearly 30 years later, the equivalent - in purchasing power at least - would be £36k. A year later, I parlayed that up to a £21k job in the R&D side - still as a PA, 18 years old. I saved up and went to Taiwan to teach English for a bit. When I got back, I went to London and got a job earning £24k designing presentations and documents in a marketing agency. I was 20yo. The equivalent in 2026 would be £46k. With zero qualifications beyond the ability to touch-type and a certificate saying I could use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, I was on 1.35x the average salary now. I made a lot of mistakes as a kid. Most of my mates did. But the economy I lived in allowed the messiness of life to roll out. We could learn, take risks and still be able to live and breathe. We are failing future generations. And we have a generation that's already been failed. Our politicians are addicted to cheap slogans. They want power, not service. The failure of their reality-denying ideologies continues to spiral outwards. Yes, immigration plays a role. Yes, housing, technology and deindustrialisation play a role. But the state has morphed into a deeply incompetent, self-indulgent boondoggle machine, that spends more time bribing voters than it does serving - or investing in - the country.