My name is Gary Stevenson - former trader and people's economist. This is Gary's Economics.

Now today we're going to do something a little bit different, since i started doing this channel

i've spoken a lot about how i made a lot of money in the city and i've also spoken about

how i came from a poor background, we've had a lot of messages from people who want to

know more about the background where i grew up, if i really am from that kind of background

so recently my parents told me that um they're selling the house and they're moving to south

coast somewhere so i figured i would bring you to the house i grew up in and show you

what my life was like growing up so here's the house i grew up in

- Hi Gary Hey how's it going, go in shall we

okay so this is my old bedroom, it's pretty different now, like growing up i used to

share this with my older brother so there was like a bunk bed in this corner

and i was in the bottom bunk here i could look outta this window um

yeah you can see it's not massive i used to keep all of my stuff in like

a couple of drawers that just went under the bed um there was a computer here

my brother used to learn to program which someone from church gave us for free

and hes a programmer now but yeah i grew up here just sleeping under there

um you can see there's a railway track just back here, there's a train going past

um i've spoken a couple of my videos about how my dad used to wake up

really early like 5-5.30am and he would go down to Seven Kings station and

he would get the train into work every morning and it would go past here

and my mom would wake us up, we'd look out and try and wave to my dad

see if we could see him on the train like super early in the morning

that's like one of my earliest memories growing up but yeah this is my bedroom

where i grew up i shared it with my brother and um let's go down to the front room

okay so this is um this is the front room this is the biggest room in the house

the nicest room you can see the sun coming in from the windows

um growing up it was me, both my parents and my brother and my sister

so it was often pretty crowded in here um but i had a little mega drive

i'd play sonic the hedgehog down here um now when i was 16 i was expelled

from school and i remember at that time i would wake up in the morning and um

there would be no one in the house my parents would be at work and

my brother and sister be at school so that was the time when i would spend

the most time basically in this room you know we didn't like have a desk

really in the house to study so we used to get a little plank of wood

and i'd put it on the floor here and i would lie down here and

i would do all my maths homework and my french homework for GCSEs

that's when i spent a lot of time in this room and obviously that time was like

having been expelled from school i was like very, it meant a lot to me

that i did well in the exams so i spent a lot of time lying down on this floor

studying and i did well what did i get - 8 A*'s & 3 A's

study hard for your exams guys um yeah that's the front room and i think

we'll just show the bathroom and the garden quickly yeah we do that

okay so this is the bathroom, i wanted to show the bathroom because i've got

a couple of memories of this bathroom growing up um one thing i remember is

my first ever day interning at Citibank when i was 20 years old, i had to get

into the office at 7am it was in December so that meant leaving here at 6am

and um i remember now we got one of these showers here you get this like little

stick on thing from Argos and you put it on the taps and then you like

you use this little shower head you hold it, you sit in the bath

i remember like waking up at like 5am and sitting in this like bath tub

which was very cold on a December morning and showering myself up before

getting the train into Canary Wharf for my first day at Citibank um

and i also remember um the day after i got expelled when i was 16

waking up and my brother and sister were at school, i think my brother was

already working then and my parents were at work and um yeah waking up

the only person in the house and coming down and sitting in this bathtub

with this handheld this handheld shower

and um showering and watching the water go down the drain and uh

just watching the water go down and thinking yeah that's going to

be your life if you don't do something about it so um yeah that's why i was

studying so much in that front room um that's the bathroom yeah so uh

my mom says you've gotta go to the garden yeah so we'll go through to the garden yeah

just watch your footing around here

so this is the garden we do have a little bit of a garden even though as i think you're about to see

there are trains going past right here this is the main line out from Essex into London

yeah my mum wants to show the hydrangeas she's been working on hard she's going to lose them

soon when she moves out but yeah we didn't spend much time here the sun is on the other side um

but yeah i could see out from the bedroom into here and um

yeah it wasn't too bad we've got some trees out here in this, that's basically it one other thing

what was i supposed to show you yeah my little clay painting i made when i was 12 little clay

portrait of the house so that's it yeah so it's not a big house but it meant a lot to me and um

yeah this is where i grew up um it was small it was crowded with five people but it was um

it was where i lived so yeah that's it we're gonna show you a little bit outside the front

so this is the outside of the house i just wanted to show a few things that have changed

basically since i was a kid so we used to have like a kind of abandoned factory here at the end

that we would climb over the gates and play in you can see now it's like a massive block of flats

that really like overlooks the street um yeah i've got nothing against that but i guess it's

a bit strange for me like just being here when it didn't used to be there big great block of flats

yeah i was talking to my mate the other day who used to live down there so he doesn't like coming

down anymore just because it sort of um makes him feel strange to see like

this massive block of flats where we used to be able to see the sky i suppose there's another one

over there can you see the one there that's new as well that used to be a swimming pool we used to go

for i think like one pound as kids go swimming in the swimming pool that's a block of flats too

so there's no swimming pool now i think these guys are getting loft conversion

there's another block of flats over there which i think is just out of shot and beyond that there's

i think a 40-story block of flats um which is massive there was nothing like that in

ilford when i was a kid growing up so yeah my dad was saying it's just filling the place up

um yeah i know people need houses i'm not complaining against it but just saying um

yeah this place has changed since i was a kid a lot more flat a lot more crowded but um still

it's a nice street in a way i enjoy going up here we're going to show a few things on the street

so this street like it don't connect to no street so there's not a lot of traffic and the kids used

to play out on the road my mum says they still do i used to know everyone, Aron one of my

best friends used to live here. Lee Jones lived over there he wasn't one of my best friends

Andrew and John Parker lived here they were good guys i used to go around their house to

play megadrive before i had the megadrive not just that they're my mates as well obviously

in case they're watching and uh Bradley used to live there and there was another Bradley with his

brother Justin and their little brother Ricardo who live up there yeah like all the kids will be out

in the street all the time playing and um it's a Wednesday today so there's nobody playing

but i guess on a sunny day like this they still do let's take it to the end of the street

it's funny like when i was a kid the street seemed like so long you know what i mean

this is where Anthony Silverstone used to live he was like my absolute idol growing up

very funny, very sporty guy and then this was Kelly his next-door neighbour

*I've got a question - where did Tyrone live?*

Tyrone was like in the middle we ain't talking about Tyrone man, Tyrone was trouble

still is probably, this was the Jattinder family don't know their surname they come out and we

used to play football down here so we're gonna show let's see this new sign i don't know if you

can see this no ball game sign i don't know when they added that but you see down here at the end

there's this telegraph pole on this lamp pole

and uh obviously it's made for playing football we used to play football here all the time these

houses weren't there it was like a kind of garden like warehouse or something yeah we used to

play football it always used to go over into this man's uh fence they put this this is new this

fence we used to keep the ball over all the time and we had to go all the way around to climb over

and i remember one kid came down from a couple streets down and he just jumped straight

over that wall like kicked off it and jumped over it when we was about 15 and we was like

blew our minds but yeah we used to play football down here all the time

there's a no ball game sign here now but i'm guessing people probably still do play football

we'll show you the bridge yeah okay so this is the bridge this goes over the railway and connects

my street to the rest of Ilford which is on the north side of this railway

so my primary school my grammar school my comprehensive school they're all on the other

side of this so i started crossing this every single day from when i was 4 or 5 years old

i remember crossing it with my brother as you can see it's a very long bridge

to be honest it was quite dangerous growing up my dad was saying

that even now he won't cross it in the night time, Anthony got beaten up one time on

this bridge and had to go hospital i remember one time two guys tried to mug me just here

i remember just listening to them all the names of the people that i knew hoping that we knew

someone because i lived literally just here eventually they decided not to mug me so

but yeah i crossed this and back every day and um it was dangerous and it was scary but um

if anything happened l just used to run away so that's how it is, I had a bright future i'm

not losing it to fight someone on this bridge but yeah this iron bridge so well known in Ilford

this is where i come from if you come from a place like this and you know it doesn't have to be in

London it could be in Manchester or Birmingham or Newcastle or you know Northern Ireland, Wales

it could be in another country right if you come for a place like this you're not going to hear

many voices like yours or like mine talking about economics what you are going to hear is voices

paid for by billionaires telling you you shouldn't tax billionaires now look i don't get paid to do

this youtube doesn't pay me to do this the reason i do this is because i worked in a

city and my job was to analyze the economy and the result of my analysis was if we don't do anything

people like me and the people here and from places like here are going to struggle and

their kids lives will be even harder than their lives and their lives will get worse over time

that's what will happen if we don't do anything about wealth inequality but the newspapers which

are very often owned by billionaires and the politicians who often are billionaires themselves

are not gonna to say that but i'm going to say that because i want to make things better

so look there's a voice here that is representing your interests in economics and um if you want to

make things better for ordinary people then it's important that voice gets heard so check

out my website check out my videos, share this voice and um let's let people know that the way

things go with the economy might be good for the billionaires and millionaires who talk on tv

but it's not good for ordinary people let's spread a different message about how we can make the

world better for ordinary people like the people that live here and the people who live where you live

and we're going to start that by talking about the tax system in our next video

about what's happened to changes in a tax system raising national insurance payments

which is ordinary tax on people like you while the billionaires don't have to pay anything so yeah

check out my next video on tax and share this video thank you

is that good? *yeah perfect*

-Hi i don't know if you can see the likeness, he's short like me

you can't, we can't put that in!

- i'll do that again no that'll probably work fine to be honest

yeah, i'm i'm i'm your mother I've been around a bit longer than he has that's kind of important

isn't it? i'm really proud of you Gary that's nice we'll put we'll put that bit instead

okay thanks. - No put the short bit in as well OK that's enough right it's enough okay good work