There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

Fiona Hill was born in 1965 in Bishop Auckland, affectionately dubbed Bish by local residents, a mining town in northeast England that experienced significant economic shocks after the mines closed due to the shift away from industrialism towards a more postindustrial society in the 1980s. As jobs left the area, Hill watched as her hometown transitioned from a flourishing community to a shell devastated by unemployment. The lack of opportunities combined with Bish’s remoteness also made educational access a challenge; with soaring youth unemployment rates, prospects for the future seemed dim.

Hill stresses that her story is not a testament to hard work; rather, she attributes much of her success to luck and timing to underscore the importance of social mobility. Between the forgotten places that were once centers of industry and the general economic decline, discontent has grown in the US as in the UK. In the US, many voters saw Trump as someone who might shake up this status quo. Hill warns that if populism takes hold, the US could slide along a similar trajectory as Russia when Putin offered a new style of leadership that people believed would help them regain economic standing. However, Hill believes it’s possible for the United States to correct course before it’s too late. The book will make her point by telling her story: She’ll examine the role of deindustrialization, education, poverty, inequality, racism, and sexism to deconstruct how the US got to where it is and how to stop it from continuing on a destructive path.

Hill grew up in Bishop Auckland, one of many former mining towns in the northeast of England. These towns sprang up when villages were built around mines. While the mines were producing, economies in these towns boomed, giving those who lived there a sense of security. Even though mining was a dangerous profession, workers like Hill’s grandfather much preferred it to the alternatives of the time. However, under the economic influence of leaders like Margaret Thatcher, England moved away from industrialization, the mines closed, and jobs dried up. When opportunities vanished, people who could afford to leave did. This left industrial towns poor and in disrepair. All domains of life suffered, from transportation to education. The sense of community vanished, and petty crime moved in. As these small towns languished, other areas of England prospered, leaving mining towns an unfortunate, yet soon forgotten, consequence of these new economic policies.

The specter of Hill’s hometown haunted her. Whenever she ventured beyond Bish, she was asked three recurring questions that she soon discovered revealed a great deal about her class, and therefore perceived worth, in English society: “Where are you from? […] What does your father do?” and “What school do you go to?” (17). When people learned that she was from a working class family from an undesirable area of England, they assumed she wasn’t worth their time. Often, her accent gave her away even before those questions confirmed her social standing.

The UK’s economic shift away from industrialization had lasting impacts, though there were some policy measures in place to mitigate these. One of the biggest positive social welfare developments for England was the creation after World War II of the National Health Service (NHS), which provided everyone with access to healthcare. This didn’t solve all problems, however. Hill’s father, Alf, worked for the NHS, but couldn’t qualify for a mortgage without gaming the system through her mother’s job as a Queen’s nurse. Hill’s parents saw home ownership as security for Hill and her sister’s future, but because of this investment, the family was strained financially in many other ways. Hill wore clothes made from curtains and worked to support her family. Hill jokes that when the family’s electricity was turned off during the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978 to 1979, when workers went on strike, her family was too poor to tell whether this was a “power cut” due to the strike or a “pay cut” because they hadn’t paid the bill (39). Hill knew her only chance to escape this knife’s edge of poverty was education.

Hill had a long road to achieving her goal of breaking free from her social status. However, she was lucky to have positive role models in distant family members who had managed to forge the path she wished to embark on herself. She praises UK governmental policies that made education more affordable and accessible, arguing this is a vital part of rectifying the social mobility issue. When Hill’s grandparents and parents were growing up, a child’s educational track was established early on and didn’t accommodate late bloomers. After the Labour Party set out to make the system more equitable, the British government set nationwide standards to improve the quality of education.

Not all schools could meet these standards, so, for most UK kids during Hill’s childhood, location remained an important factor in educational access. Hill scored the highest in her class on the eleven-plus exam, which allowed her to attend a private girls’ high school with tuition fees waived. However, Hill didn’t take advantage of this opportunity: Her family couldn’t afford books, uniforms, and other supplies, so she ended up at the school nearest her house, Bishop Barrington.

After high school, adopting a why-not attitude, Hill applied to Oxford, but failed the exam, which focused on obscure material only extremely privileged students would have had exposure to. However, the university saw promise in her response and invited her to an interview, where they told her she had potential but wasn’t Oxford material. She was advised to attend St. Andrews and study Russian and History, which she did. A lecturer in the Russian Department, Mr. Sullivan, became one of her key mentors after she had the good luck to meet him during her first visit to the campus.

When Hill attended St. Andrews University, her Northeast identity faded, but she remained acutely aware of the privilege and homogeneity she was witnessing. Even though she had escaped her geographic bubble, she didn’t have the financial means to fully integrate into that world. However, with funding from the British government, Hill studied abroad in 1987-1988 at Moscow’s Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Language. These years proved pivotal in Hill’s life.

While living abroad, Hill noted many similarities between her upbringing in Bish and life in Moscow. Both were rocked by the move away from industrialization. As the USSR was on the verge of collapse, poverty was visible. To cope with life’s hardships, many people turned to alcohol and self-deprecating humor, such as joking about how amazing the USSR was when gasoline came out of the tap instead of water. Just as in England, music also provided an outlet for political frustrations and acted as a revolutionary cultural force in Moscow. During a stint as an interpreter for NBC News, Hill covered Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s walk around the Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa—a moment Hill thought would be the highlight of her career.

Later, while making coffee for Maria Shriver, Hill struck up a conversation with Columbia University political scientist Robert Legvold, who advised Hill to apply to master’s programs in the US by talking to cultural attaches at the US and UK Embassies. Deputy British attaché Mike Bird, who had once won a scholarship to study Russian at Harvard, guided Hill on her journey. During her interview with Harvard for the Kennedy Scholarship, Hill embarrassed herself by mistakenly trying to leave through the broom closet door. Before her next interview, for the Knox Fellowship, she relayed this story to Mrs. Watson, the program secretary. Little did Hill know then that she’d passed the “Mrs. Watson test”—she was one of the only students who had talked to the secretary. This, along with Hill’s acing of the interview questions, and her analysis of the similarities between the UK and in Moscow, earned her the Fellowship.