Neil Kinnock

Saving the Labour Party?

Kevin Hickson, Kevin Hickson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000588002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book reappraises Neil Kinnock's policies, impact, legacy and leadership of the Labour Party 30 years on from his defeat in the 1992 general election. It offers comprehensively fresh perspectives and some first-hand accounts – some friendly, others more critical – from leading academics, journalists, politicians and advisors on various aspects of ideas, policy, elections and party management, including an interview with the man himself as he looks back on his experiences. This timely book will resonate widely with the current challenges to Labour's leadership and the enduring uncertainties on the future of the party.This book will be of key interest to researchers and students in the fields of political studies and contemporary history as well as the interested general reader.

PART 1 Contexts

1 NEIL KINNOCK REFLECTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254393-3

Anthony Seldon

Neil Kinnock, unusually among party leaders, has not and will not write his memoirs: ‘I’ve reflected since on what usefulness they might have, and decided against because the political environment is now so radically different’. So I concluded that my most useful contribution to this book of reappraisal should be a conversation with him, so readers can assess how the world seemed through his own eyes. Accordingly, I met him for a two-hour extended drink it his favourite Tufnell Park Tavern in North London on a hot summer day in early July 2021. What follows as far as possible is Neil Kinnock in his own words. I eschewed offering my own comments and leave the evaluation of the evidence he gives entirely to readers.

Why did you want to be party leader in 1983?

I don’t think I ever wanted it. That’s not false modesty. Apart from a lack of driving ambition, I had understood, by 1983, what a hellish job it would be. I talked my reservations through with Glenys, naturally, as well as with my closest friends and comrades in my constituency. They were insistent; you must go through with it! In the end, what decided me, after a week or so of deliberation – this is long before the 1983 general election – was if we lost, as widely expected, then only somebody from the Left could begin the much-needed modernisation and reform programme. The only serious alternative to me was Tony Benn. I knew that we would be in utter bloody chaos if he became Leader.

(Michael Foot was his immediate predecessor as leader, from 1980–1983.)

In what ways did you think Foot similar to Jeremy Corbyn?

Michael was rounded. He used his intellect to solve practical problems. He was a poet, but a pragmatist too. He thought his ideas were best but not supreme. He was born into politics, thrived in politics, but never really became a politician – one of his many saving graces. Michael was completely honest and had no superficiality. He would please crowds, but never because he sought it.

Corbyn was entirely different, and his thinking was distorted by the illusions of Bennery. He worshipped him and never really grew out of it. Consequently, he was part of that segment of the movement that prizes power in the Labour Party, more than power for the Labour Party. They believe that the day will come when the false consciousness of the British working class will fade because of the capriciousness, dishonesty, and exploitation of Toryism, and when that day comes the insurrectionary spirit will be best articulated by an insurrectionary leadership of the Labour Party. It does demonstrate that Marx was half right; history does repeat itself as farce, and then bloody farce again!

So how bad was your inheritance from Foot: worse than Starmer’s after Corbyn?

Keir’s task is greater than mine because the illusions about the political environment are greater now than in 1983. Keir though has got some advantages. He has been able to hand pick his Shadow Cabinet, a mixed blessing, but at least he doesn’t have to start off with a Shadow Cabinet in which only four people had voted for him.

Secondly, he got an immediate majority on the National Executive Committee. It’s a crucial difference – partly because of Corbyn’s centralisation of the power of the Leader, which I was opposed to, but which produces a happier result for Keir.

Nobody has ever described Keir as prolix or stupid. His profile is a great and welcome advance on mine. But offsetting those advantages; the press have only gradually become antagonistic to Keir. They were more comfortable with Keir when he was selected than they were to me when elected, though the press is less influential in moulding public opinion than it was in 1983.

The union scene was different. There is no Arthur Scargill and no Miners’ Strike. That is a huge advantage over me. But, overall, I had an easier lot with union leaders. As individuals, I don’t think they are inferior today, I just think that the experience and perspectives are different from those of Jack Jones, Clive Jenkins and Moss Evans and the leaders of the print unions and so on, who in the end, all assisted me. There are no comparable leaders of the trade union movement now – though there might be in a few years because we are in the middle of a great turnover in trade union leadership.

So which union leaders helped you most and least?

Well, Scargill least! He committed a form of political hari-kiri and wasn’t significant after ’87. The one I was closest to, but as a friend, was Ron Todd (TGWU), my union, which never voted for any of the significant changes in policy and constitution. Ron, frankly, was always more a hindrance than a help, much as I liked him. John Edmonds (GMB) was very helpful, so were people like Jimmy Knapp of the railmen (NUM). Sam McCluskey of the Seaman’s Union, very small union but very big presence, was good. So were the SOGAT leaders, Brenda Dean and Bill Keys. Clive Jenkins (ASTMS) at the start, but he retired not too long afterwards. Jack Jones had retired really. But in terms of supportive statements, I could always rely on Jack who was a genuine comrade. We’d known each other a long time because during the 70s I was on the executive council of the union for a couple of years. Jack was the General Secretary when I was put on the union sponsored list. I used to think sometimes, what a shame he hadn’t extended his tenure by five years!

(Kinnock was leader for nine years, and suffered two general election defeats.)

Do you think you moved too slowly in your first years as leader?

Yes, I think I moved too slowly, but I moved as fast and as far as I thought was possible. We’d fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that committed us to a withdrawal from the European Community. to unilateral nuclear disarmament, to extensive nationalisation, and it was opposed to the sale of council houses unconditionally. That ’83 manifesto had a whole page on fox hunting and the word ‘computer’ wasn’t mentioned once. That’s where we were. The reason was that it was a composite of a massive assortment of resolutions that had been passed by conference in the last previous few years, which were, by definition, incoherent anyway.

Michael, tactically, refused to accept any amendments to the policy document that was published in ’82, simply because, as he pointed out to me in a note, ‘it we start amending, they will run riot’. ‘They’ being the Bennites, and they would have grabbed the opportunity to make the manifesto even more absurd. I went along with that. And we were stuck with this policy document that turned into the manifesto.

More than that. The party was broke, absolutely financially smashed to pieces. The organisation was a shambles, even down to the point where it had employment contracts with its own employees that allowed people to work a 36-hour week. Across the board, everything was a bloody mess. Worst of all, in the wake of the 1979 general election, as is not unusual in political parties of all kinds, but the Labour Party is particularly prone, they reach for what they think is their ideology. So, the dominant philosopher was Tony Benn and the consequence was the dog’s breakfast of a manifesto we ended up with.

More important still, the mentality that came with it. Changing mentalities in politics, as in religion, is an arduous and time-consuming business. People endow their political stances and affiliations with religious fervour. So unilateral nuclear disarmament wasn’t a strategic view of any kind. It was what Nye Bevan had previously called a ‘spasm of emotion’. As a long-term member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I had taken a rather different view; I didn’t think that any country was going to surrender nuclear weapons just because we’d given a noble example. My focus was our diverting untold amounts of resources into an unusable weapons system. I thought it should be spent, as the Falklands War indicated, on conventional preparation.

(Transforming a party from one concerned with internal power structures and ideology to a party determined to achieve power in the country is the contemporary mission of Keir Starmer.)

How I wondered did Kinnock set about his own task of transformation?

I took it head on. I began a programme of regional visits to constituency parties behind locked doors, sometimes with hundreds attending. I explained at the beginning that they could say anything, but I could say anything too. It is to their credit that not one of those dozens of meetings were even reported in the press. Sometimes there were hundreds of people.

But records were made?

‘No, I don’t think so. But they were absolutely vital’.

Tony Blair’s reliance on his close personal team is well known to all. Who was on your close personal team?

Oh, no doubt about that, 1983–’87 and afterwards, Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt, John Eatwell and Sue Nye (who was a secretary, but much more than that in terms of insights). John Reid from 1983 to 1985. Then Jan Royall was appointed in late ’85, Peter Mandelson, of course, from late ’85. I deliberately appointed them on two grounds. They were politically sympathetic to the project of change that they knew I had. Or they were all former high-ranking officers of either big student unions or the National Union of Students, because I figured out that the only place where people by their mid-twenties could get the experience of having to withstand the political pressures of a demanding rank and file, and run a business, was as leading figures in a student union. [This was] just as I’d had to do it, but on a smaller scale than the NUS.

Could you say more about how ‘the project’ formed in your mind?

A lot of origin goes back to my own experience in South Wales, to that of running a students’ union, to seeing how the Swedish party worked when I went there to their general election in ’73, to seeing the shambles of Soviet communism when I went there soon after, and my perception of the Wilson-Callaghan government from 1974 to ’79, with some insights that I got from knowing some of the Cabinet ministers like Michael Foot and Cledwyn Hughes.

What defined your project overall?

Restoring relevance to the Labour Party.

When did you first realise this?

I knew it had to be done at the 1981 deputy leadership election: but for 0.6 per cent of the vote, Benn would have won much more than the Deputy Leadership, and he’d have shattered the Labour Party. Michael kept the party together, even in the wake of the formation of the SDP. That was his great heroic act. I was by his side for much of that time. I opposed him running for the leadership. Then eventually when Jack and Moss and the rest of them persuaded him to run, I said ‘Well, since you are running, I’ll manage your campaign’, which is what I did.

The miners’ strike of 1984–1985 was one of your earliest major tests. How did you decide to handle it?

It cost two years progress. The first meeting I had with a trade union leader was in the late October 1983 with Arthur Scargill. At that meeting, we agreed with my proposition that given the threat to numerous coal mines, the NUM ‘work-to-rule’ was sensible, and the time they weren’t in work should be used, as far as possible, in getting out to the non-mining districts, the county towns and London, and leafleting, having discussions in the pubs and clubs, on streets, in workplaces wherever, to explain why they were working-to-rule. I thought it was essential to maximise understanding amongst the general public. Scargill agreed with that. I think at that time he had no intention of provoking, or assisting, or achieving a national strike.

But, when the closure of Cortonwood was announced – mistakenly, as it turned out – a reaction took place, mandates were claimed, the strikes started and then, like an avalanche, in three weeks it turned into a national strike.

What that meant was that in the lead up to the strike, the 12 months of the strike, and then during the six to eight to ten months after the strike, the Labour movement was absolutely preoccupied with the miners. It was a good cause. I totally understand the reasons. I was right in the middle of it – constituency, family, nationally, politically. But, it meant that all of the processes that I was trying to set in line, stalled.

Did it affect the outcome of the 1987 general election, I wonder? Could Labour ever have won?

No! The hill was too high. Thatcher was still a huge beneficiary of the first past the post system, and the divided opposition – which had been a factor in ’83 – was graphic in the election in 1987. What I dubbed ‘the feelgood factor’ was evident because the initial crash in manufacturing and extractive industries that came with the Conservative government’s policies, was being followed by a partial recovery, encouraged by a generous budget. So, I knew that we were sailing against the wind for a mixture of economic and political reasons. I thought in ’83, as I said to Charles and Dick [Clements] at the time, that we were going to have to win this match ag...