Nearly 75,000 under-18 jobs gone in two years, and Labour expects people to call that “progress”. It is not progress if the price of a politically convenient wage rise is that teenagers are priced out of the first rung on the ladder.

Saturday jobs are not a nostalgia project. They are how millions learned punctuality, customer service, money management, and what work actually means before they ever had a “career”.

If you make entry-level labour too expensive, employers do what employers always do: cut hours, freeze hiring, or stop taking chances on younger workers.

Labour’s line is always the same: pay more, regulate more, lecture more. The result is the same too: fewer opportunities for the people they claim to champion.