Zoe Williams argues UK prices rise while average wages stagnate

Attainability index measures hours needed for holidays, cars and nights out

In an opinion column published October 26, 2026, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams uses a claw-machine game to examine the UK cost-of-living crisis. Her formulation of the problem is blunt: “No matter how you crunch the UK data, prices are rising while average wages stagnate.” She presents the game as a metaphor for incurring costs without control over the result.

Williams recalled taking her children, then under 10, to arcades about a decade earlier and paying a pound for a turn at a claw game. The claw never retrieved the toy, even after she reached pound seven, and the frustration of her six-year-old intensified. She said she had expected the machine eventually to yield a toy and used the mismatch between payment and result as an analogy for the economy.

Williams placed the change around the period between 2015 and Brexit. She described an older expectation that studying hard would lead to work, working hard would make a home affordable and starting a family would make it possible to feed it. In her account, political attention turned away from day-to-day liveability. The resulting public language of a “cost of living crisis” cast people as “a bunch of luckless dopes to whom bad things keep happening,” rather than as economic participants whose wages were not keeping pace with prices.

Her argument draws on several indicators from 2014. The TUC found that only one in 40 new jobs was full time. Geographer Danny Dorling said a fifth of people needed a cash benefit to make rent and that average house prices were nearly nine times average salaries in England and Wales. The NHS noted that the number of children with vitamin D deficiency and rickets had tripled since 2009.

The New Economics Foundation and Best for Britain introduced an “attainability index” using wage data from the previous 20 years. It calculates how many hours a person must work to afford a holiday, a night out, an outfit or a car. Williams said the results reflected the position of low-paid workers, whose wages were mostly consumed by essentials. Social participation was sporadic, she wrote, and holidays were out of reach.

Even a secondary school teacher could appear to be doing well on the measure, Williams said, because the teacher would need to work 23 hours to afford a festival ticket. She noted that the calculation assumed the teacher would make no other discretionary purchases. She described gym memberships, budget clothes and meal deals as just about the only items to have fallen in price in real terms over the 20-year period.

Williams said the central point was not the numbers alone but that people were experiencing the same degradation. She compared the housing prospects of pilots in 2026 with those of pilots in 2006 and said chefs and accountants faced a similar decline from their earlier counterparts. Her conclusion was that people’s expectations had been thwarted across occupations for two decades. She noted that many had privately thought, “This whole thing is rigged,” before the cost-of-living crisis became a more public discussion.

Williams then turned to political rhetoric, arguing that rival camps such as “the woke” and “the anti-woke,” or “the liberal elite” and “the left-behind,” can obscure a common experience of thwarted expectations. She predicted that wider recognition could shift public discourse from “get mad” to “get even.” Those broader claims remain Williams’s opinion; the column supports her argument with figures and attributed commentary from the TUC, Danny Dorling, the NHS, the New Economics Foundation and Best for Britain.