One of the great moments of my student life was opening the door and seeing visitors step back, shocked. I’d shaved my hair off to an eighth of an inch. It felt like velvet but looked spiky and hard. It was all down to Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder with Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction, who’d just hanged herself in Stammheim prison, in Germany.
My friends liked my haircut as we conflated Ulrike the martyr with images of a mullet-haired Jane Fonda raising her fist against the US army on behalf of the tortured Viet Cong. I was reminded of that haircut — and my shocked visitors — by the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham this week, when he said that the country needs ‘to confront a tragic truth’ that there are people born and raised here ‘who don’t really identify with Britain’.
Many of us white British middle-class students in the 1970s didn’t identify with Britain either.
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