My mum and dad admired Margaret Thatcher when they were at university, sharing the excitement at the prospect of a free market economy, while protesting the totalitarian communist government they grew up under. The UK’s capitalist structures captured the imagination of young people in the Eastern Bloc, and continue to hold a significant grip on political discourse in many former communist countries.

What my parents only realised years later was that in the transition to a free market economy their education as engineers became worthless. The same economics which they chanted for at protests in the early 1990s led to a botched privatisation and decimation of Bulgarian industry. Thirty years of lost professional progression.

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