Fiona Hill

I was born in 1965, and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already.

And basically, my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times.

Every coal mine he worked in was closing down.

He was looking constantly for other work and he had no qualifications because at age 14, he'd gone down the mines.

His father had gone down the mines at 13.

His great-grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age.

I mean, you had a lot of people, you know, at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, you know, 14.

They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, hey, you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family.

And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to basically find another job beyond something in manual labor.

So he worked in a steelworks, that didn't work out, a brickworks, that closed down.

And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as a porter, an orderly.

So basically somebody's just pushing people around.

There was no opportunity to retrain.

So the big issue in my family was education.

You've got to have one.

You know, you've got to have some qualifications.

The world is changing.

It's changing really quickly.

And for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to...

get educated and find a way out of this.