I'll bet you didn't have to work and save for 12 years to save a deposit for your first house....which is where they are going with it now. You had access to free HE, my youngest daughter is having to find just under £9k PA to cover her tuition fees to uni...which means she has to take on a massive debt or end up with stacking shelves for the rest of her life whilst people 2 years older than her lucky enough to get a free degree can leapfrog onto a fastrack promotion ladder.
I've resigned myself to working until the day I die because I wanted to be an engineer and not a pen pusher working in the public sector.
This being cafe, I shan't give my take on the macro situation any further. WRT my own leap on to the housing ladder, I didn't have to save 12 years it's true, however I did buy a tiny dilapidated terrace house in an area of Ipswich previously written-off by estate agents before the latest boom.
The b/soc withheld the full loan until I'd got the house liveable and I spent long evenings and weekends so doing. It needed a new roof, new windows, new doors, complete rewire, plumbing and some new floors plus a damp-proof course and loads of re-plastering. I couldn't run to central heating but used a 2nd hand gas fire for a couple of years. Indeed I was lucky because I qualified for a local authority grant for quite a bit of the work which helped.
The neighbours weren't great. The first couple were schizophrenic drug users and there was quite a bit of dodgy stuff going on including police visits. They'd threatened many locals with knives allegedly but luckily I seemed to have escaped that kind of attention. Eventually they moved out to Worthing and neither survived long after. But hey, I was on the ladder and moved on after 3 years.
Quite frankly Linford I reckon there are/will be quite a few people who would be grateful of the opportunity to 'work til they die' because they won't get the chance and they won't get much pension either. In the 70's I had a 6 year stint with British Rail before moving to private employers on Felixstowe Dock and seeing the Chinese stuff arriving. By the mid 90's the writing on the wall was there to be seen and we saved like scrooges. No posh motors or foreign holidays for us

Whether our savings will be any use once the banking problem is resolved is impossible to say, maybe we should have joined the party because after all, we are still getting the hangover.
Public sector? You think they are part of problem? Your choice, I'm not going to tell you what to think like some journalist.
It is often forgotten that a "full career final salary pension", while the norm in much of the Public Sector because of wide ranges of jobs and organisations being within the same schemes and the transferability between schemes (from which both my wife and i benefited), was a rarity in the private sector as most people moved companies during their career leaving behind frozen pensions (or pensions which, while increased in line with inflation, are based on salary at time of leaving not final career salary).
Final salary schemes were not at all rare in the private sector up to just a few years ago. It is only in recent times, say the last decade that they have started to be replaced by defined contribution. In larger organisations it wasn't uncommon for people to spend their entire career with the same company and to be rewarded for loyalty (amazing as it now seems!).