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(continued from part 4)

In the next part of my speech to Jiji Top Seminar, I took Napoleon Bonaparte’s view that “to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty” and looked at the state of the UK in the 1980s, to understand the influences this might have on Keir Starmer now.

After a year at Hiroshima University in 1984-5, I began my degree at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. This photo was taken on our matriculation day – if you look at the orange circles you can see me, aged 19, but also Keir Starmer, who had just turned 23.

I don’t think we ever met properly, as he was doing a postgraduate law degree and I was a first year, studying Modern History and Economics – I do remember one time drinking with some post graduate lawyers at the Middle Common Room bar, but that was a rare event. But, having read Tom Baldwin’s excellent biography of Starmer, I feel we are very much of the same generation and mindset in terms of what influenced us around the age of 20.

The poster on the right was on quite a few student bedroom walls – our generation grew up during the Cold War and was genuinely fearful of a nuclear apocalypse. There had been a real war too, the Falklands war of 1982, which Britain won, and that gained huge popularity for Mrs Thatcher. But for young people on the left, the defining event of that time was the miners’ strike of 1984-5- a gruelling, year long strike where there was bitter conflict and even a couple of deaths. Thatcher was determined to win that too and had stockpiled coal in preparation.

It was all part of the deindustrialization of Britain, perhaps inevitable, but the way the miners were treated, with no thought as to what would happen to them next, seemed unforgivable. In fact the year before the strike had already marked a turning point, when the contribution of the services sector to UK GDP outstripped the contribution of the manufacturing sector.

(to be continued)

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2024-12-12.