13 Comments

“As someone whose first political memories are of the miners’ strike..”

Even older readers think: which one?

Expand full comment

I was 9 years old at the time and the childhood excitement of scheduled power cuts during the 3 day week remains a vivid memory from 1974!

Expand full comment

The moon landings.

Expand full comment
May 10Liked by Tom Hamilton

If you feel old in our office, think how old I feel! Brown got the market price for the gold. As Thatcher said, you can't buck the market. If the price rise had been predictable, hedge funds etc would have bought it and the price would already have risen. Politically it was silly - because there was a 50:50 chance the price would rise, so selling gives your opponent a 50:50 chance of an easy hit.

Expand full comment
May 10Liked by Tom Hamilton

You can never trust early childhood memories (are you just remembering something you later thought you remembered) but with that caveat my earliest news/political memory was the Israeli attacks on Beirut when I would have been about 4 or 5, I just have this vivid memory of the BBC News coverage of it on the nightly news, just one night but still

My earliest political memory I remember really being fascinated by was Tiananmen Square, which is weird as my parents tell me I campaigned among my friends parents for Labour at the 87 election because I knew my dad had said that if Thatcher won we were applying for emigration to Australia

Expand full comment
May 10Liked by Tom Hamilton

You don't look a day over the fall of the Berlin wall being your first political memory!

Expand full comment

That van is parked on double yellow lines on Princes St. Absolute chaos.

I’m older than you and I remember all the chuntering about ‘sold the gold’. It was one of those very specific attack lines that became almost memetic, like the addition of ‘Zanu’ to ‘NuLiebour’ which I cannot remember at all why it happened.

Expand full comment

They did something, that I can't remember in detail, that wasn't maximally hostile to Robert Mugabe.

Expand full comment

My immediate thought was WHICH miners' strike?

Expand full comment

I also wonder how many of the people who go on about it now think it was closer to the recession than it actually was.

Expand full comment

As a newly minted 28 year old I'm never sure what to count as my first political memory.

I can recall what must in hindsight have been the 2000 fuel crisis and the 2001 general election, but that doesn't feel right. And then 9/11 and the Iraq war and, in what feels like the first story I remember /following/ as a political story the fall of IDS.

The first memory I have where Gordon Brown is mentioned involves Dad telling me we weren't going to be joining the euro, as Young Me thought was obviously the right choice.

Expand full comment

And if you’re going down the fact checking route, the song is called “Jilted John”, not “Gordon Is A Moron”.

Expand full comment

I remember the death of Churchill, just about. I was very small but was aware something historic was happening.

Expand full comment