Neil Kinnock

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

For the first time, it was to consider the transfer of control over the party manifesto from the leader of the party to the NEC. Although the resolution passed by 800,000 votes, the NEC debated the issue and decided, by one vote, that it would defer the final decision to 1980. By all accounts, the key vote was cast by the Tribunite Neil Kinnock. Jon Lansman: Possibly only one of the crucial votes, but certainly one of those in favour of withdrawing, was that of Neil Kinnock. In many ways, Neil Kinnock can be held responsible for the fact that the NEC does not have ultimate control for drafting the manifesto: that is a significant crime. This wouldn’t be the last time the two would be in conflict. It further exacerbated the split between the Tribunite left and the New Left.

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To their left was the Tribune group led in the 1960s by Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Ian Mikardo, later joined by Neil Kinnock in the 1970s. Named after the Tribune newspaper, this group was closely aligned with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and believed in redistributive economics driven by taxation and public spending. It operated as a rebellious group within the mainstream of Labour politics in parliament. In the 1960s Foot had refused a ministerial job under Harold Wilson, preferring to be the leader of the left from the backbenches. Neil Kinnock also refused a ministerial job under James Callaghan in the 1970s over Welsh devolution and public expenditure cuts.

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For Spencer Livermore, it was a necessary correction to the past: It was about reconnecting the Labour party both to its traditional values and to the people it was founded to represent. Prior to Neil Kinnock, the Labour party had gone on a sort of ideological holiday, where it indulged itself in all of that sort of dogma. This amused the middle-class intellectual socialists but had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with real people. Except some traditionalists like Neil Kinnock himself saw it as a rebrand without a real soul: It was a title for victory, not for rule . . . They made an ideology of the absence of ideology. Peter Mandelson, unsurprisingly, had an opposite view: It was a modernising, radical, social democratic project, based upon a progressive alliance of people on the centre and the left of British politics.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

Patricia Hewitt, the former general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties, who had become Neil Kinnock’s press secretary in 1983, was lobbied by a group of recently enlisted party members, including Sharon Atkin, a Lambeth councillor, and Diane Abbott. They persuaded her that the way to get around the reluctance of people of black and Asian descent to participate in meetings dominated by whites was for them to form separate black sections, which would be recognized as affiliated organizations entitled to be represented at every level of the party. Hewitt came close to persuading Neil Kinnock of the case, but the whole idea came up against a wall of opposition, not least from established leaders of the Asian communities who had already developed their own ways of operating, almost invisibly, within the party.

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It was illegal to name the victim in rape trials or pre-hearings, but the law did not extend this protection in a case where the rapists were still at large. Within a week, different newspapers had told their readers that this victim was a vicar’s daughter, that she was twenty-one years old, that the attack had happened at a vicarage in Ealing, close to the home of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, and that the vicar, whose name was Michael Saward, had described the victim as ‘a jewel in my crown’.28 The Sun also published her photograph, partly blacked out. The Labour MP Robin Corbett demanded that the Sun be prosecuted, but the attorney general’s reply was that, since no one had been charged with rape, no law had been broken – though the law was changed in 1987 as a result of the case.

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She made a series of allegations, which she backed up in a sworn affidavit, including that MI5 was not only watching the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, and listening in to his telephone conversations, but had been doing the same to Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, who until 1982 were leading officers of the National Council of Civil Liberties. Harman was by then a Labour MP, and Hewitt was press secretary to the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Massiter also revealed that Harry Newton had been an MI5 informer for so long that he was almost an agent provocateur. She had come out of the cold just as MI5 was struggling to recover from the Michael Bettaney affair, which suggested that they were so busy investigating innocent people that they missed what was happening under their noses.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

Once again, we were in a world where miners’ flying pickets were ‘storm troopers’ and ‘hit squads’ and their leaders’ tactics a ‘blitzkrieg’ (all terms used in the commentary on a Channel Four television documentary about the strike, When Britain Went to War, broadcast in 2004); where Arthur Scargill, not Margaret Thatcher, was to blame for the shutdown of the coal industry and the hardships of the miners (who bafflingly still elected and re-elected him); where the miners’ cause was ‘futile’ – but would nevertheless have surely been won if only the NUM leadership had called a national ballot or strikers had not fought running battles with strikebreakers and the police. It was the same story at the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary. From Thatcher’s close ally Norman Tebbit, who recalled the strike as a ‘war on democracy’, to the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who was still denouncing the miners’ leaders’ ‘madness’, to the BBC broadcaster Andrew Marr, who blamed Scargill’s ‘incompetence’ for coal’s early demise, an Alice-in-Wonderland consensus stretched across the media mainstream. The strike had caused the breakneck rundown of mining, they all agreed against the evidence, not the government that ordered it.

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The Scargill Affair depended on a coincidence of purpose between an exotic array of interests, foremost among which were the Thatcher administration and the Labour leadership. The government was determined to privatize the coal industry and continued to regard Scargill – acknowledged in the City of London to be a significant turn-off for potential buyers – as a malign influence from the past. Neil Kinnock, who later described how he had felt impotent and humiliated during the 1984–5 strike, saw the miners’ leader and all he represented as a deeply unwelcome presence in the new-model Labour Party he was trying to create. Robert Maxwell, the slippery-fingered media baron, was, as ever, happy to do favours for both of them.46 The hares set off by Maxwell’s Daily Mirror and the Cook Report in 1990 were subsequently chased with great relish by the rest of the media, Tory and Labour MPs, Scargill’s opponents inside the NUM, the Fraud Squad, the courts, the government-appointed Certification Officer and Commissioner for Trade Union Rights, the UDM and the maverick right-wing electricians’ union, Cabinet ministers, the TUC, an eccentric alliance of Soviet trade-union bureaucrats and dissident union breakaway outfits, the Inland Revenue, even Colonel Gaddafi, as well as a vast array of accountants and lawyers – who, needless to say, made a fortune out of the affair.

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The article quoted the Soviet miners’ leader Mikhail Srebny as saying that 2.3 million roubles – equivalent to £2 million – had been collected for the NUM, including £1 million of hard currency in ‘golden roubles’. Soviet miners had given up two days’ pay for their British comrades, so it was said. ‘The figures’, the Sunday Mirror explained triumphantly, ‘show a discrepancy of around £1 million. No one is saying what happened to the missing money.’ The story was written by Alastair Campbell – then Neil Kinnock’s closest friend and ally in Fleet Street, later Tony Blair’s press secretary – while the main source for the British end of the tale was transparently Margaret Thatcher’s devoted spin-doctor, Bernard Ingham. But, like John the Baptist, this was only a harbinger of greater things to come. The next day, the Sunday paper promised its readers, Maxwell’s daily would treat them to the ‘authentic inside story’ of how Scargill also took Libyan money – and ‘how he used some of it for personal transactions’.4 ‘THE FACTS’ On Monday, 5 March, the campaign began in earnest.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

The fact that the electorate failed to extend that logic into the general election the following year by voting in sufficiently large numbers for the Labour Party – which was promising to put up taxes in order to raise money for precisely these causes – was a source of considerable discomfort in some quarters. There were those who attributed the gap between professed belief and practical expression to hypocrisy, others who saw the problem as being a lack of credibility on the part of the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. But surprisingly few were prepared to give much credit to John Major, the successor to Thatcher, who had softened the harsher edges of her policies and, in the process, ushered in a new era for the country. When, in 1990, Major set out his stall in a bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party, he promised to ‘make changes that will produce across the whole of this country a genuinely classless society, in which people can rise to whatever level their own abilities and their own good fortune may take them from wherever they started’.

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He made far less play of that dubious merit than did Blair, giving the appearance of someone who had been middle-aged for some considerable time. There was too, when he became prime minister in November 1990, a higher cultural premium placed on experience than was to become the norm, and it was more important for him to emphasise his record in government, in contrast to that of the two opposition leaders – Neil Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown – though both were older than he was. That record, however, was so compressed that it resembled a crash course in statesmanship. Major had never been in opposition, having entered Parliament in the 1979 general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. He had served as foreign secretary and then as chancellor of the exchequer, but these had been only brief appointments.

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On air at the time of the change in leadership, the programme’s first attempt to depict Major showed him with a radio antenna on his head, so that Thatcher could operate him by remote control, but when the show returned for its next series in 1991, it had devised a more enduring incarnation: a puppet sprayed all over with grey paint who had an unhealthy obsession with peas and starred in a new feature, ‘The Life of John Major – the most boring story ever told’. The greyness became the defining public image of the man so that when, in 1992, someone drew a Hitler moustache on a portrait of Thatcher in the House of Commons, Neil Kinnock could joke on Have I Got News for You: ‘Next week they’re going to colour in John Major.’ He was by common consensus dull, boring and lacking in glamour; in 1996 readers of the BBC’s Clothes Show Magazine voted him ‘the person they would least like to see in his underpants’. Major’s voice, too, with its slightly strangled, expressionless tone and its tendency to pronounce the word ‘want’ as ‘wunt’, came in for mockery.

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

So just ten days after his wisdom tooth operation, John Major stood outside Number 10 as prime minister declaring, somewhat toothily, ‘there is a smile on the face of the party’ and boasting he would win the next election. Less than eighteen months later he did, securing a surprise victory over Neil Kinnock’s Labour with 14,093,007 votes, the most ever cast for any party in a UK general election. Five years of economic and political turmoil later, he would lead the Conservatives to a crushing defeat against Tony Blair’s New Labour. In addition to the convenience of a dental appointment, one of the lasting consequences of this period is the idea that Heseltine lost because he had moved against Thatcher first – despite there being plenty of colleagues who agreed with him at the time.

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‘All he had been through’ included the revelation in February 1992 that five years earlier Ashdown had a five-month affair with his secretary Tricia Howard, captured in the Sun headline ‘Paddy Pantsdown’, which Ashdown himself described as ‘Dreadful – but brilliant.’ It did not do him much harm, his personal ratings rose after the scandal broke, and the Lib Dems held all but two of their seats in the 1992 election. No disaster, then, but far from the breakthrough Ashdown craved. In the wake of the result Neil Kinnock had resigned, triggering a Labour leadership contest between Bryan Gould and John Smith. While that battle was being played out, Ashdown decided to insert himself into the debate. One hopes it is not indelicate to point out that it has been a while since governing alone has been a realistic prospect for the Liberals.

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The chancellor signs a warrant of appointment, with a witness looking on, and then a letter is sent to the quitter without the letters ‘MP’ after their name. Ouch. The two titles alternate, so there is always a vacancy for an outgoing MP to take. It means that Sadiq Khan, Chris Huhne, David Davis, Tony Blair, Betty Boothroyd, Neil Kinnock, Roy Jenkins, John Stonehouse and John Profumo were all stewards of the Chiltern Hundreds (good pub quiz trivia for you) while the subaquatic Manor of Northstead was briefly the responsibility of Cameron, Mandelson, Adams, Eden and Kilroy-Silk, along with John Bercow, David Miliband, Martin McGuinness, Matthew Parris and Enoch Powell.

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron
by John Preston
Published 9 Feb 2021

Among the other guests that night were Neil Kinnock and his wife, Glenys. ‘I did go on that occasion, but frankly most of the time I found good reason not to go,’ Kinnock recalls. As always, whenever he had any dealings with Maxwell, he found himself in a tricky position. ‘I was in this constant dilemma of not wanting to defer to him, and not wanting to lose his support either. How do you deal with this extremely capricious man with an overwhelming sense of his own power? It was very difficult.’ After the fireworks were over, the Kinnocks took to the dance floor. When Neil Kinnock decided he’d done enough dancing, another guest stepped up to partner his wife: Peter Mandelson.

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The Max Factor, BBC1, 1991 32. A Long Way Down Interviews Alastair Campbell Dominic Carman Joe Haines Carolyn Hinsey Neil Kinnock John Pole 33. Lost Interviews Ian Maxwell Rabbi Feivish Vogel 34. Found Interviews John Jackson Ken Lennox 35. The First Autopsy Books Chester Stern, Dr Iain West’s Casebook, Little, Brown, 1996 Interviews John Jackson Ken Lennox 36. A Hero of Our Time Interviews Conrad Black Joe Haines Max Hastings Neil Kinnock 37. The Second Autopsy Books Chester Stern, Dr Iain West’s Casebook, Little, Brown, 1996 Interviews Ken Lennox 38.

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The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, offered a – somewhat solipsistic – contribution of her own: ‘Robert Maxwell has never made any secret of the fact that officially he is politically opposed to me. But to tell the truth, I think he rather liked my approach to politics and government – a sense of direction and decision. These are the very qualities that have taken him far.’ As far as the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, was concerned, ‘If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him.’ Kinnock went on to pay tribute to Maxwell’s ‘basic convictions of liberty and fairness’. On the night of the first party, the guests passed down a receiving line where they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty and all seven of their children.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

But it was the Liberal/SDP alliance which decisively fractured Labour’s base, put it on the defensive, ensured that Labour’s 1983 vote was the lowest it had gained since 1918, and prevented any recovery until Blair had finally effected the coup de grâce. The ‘modernisation’ project initiated under Neil Kinnock almost as soon as he was elected leader in 1983, continued by John Smith and consummated by Tony Blair, may have been forced on Labour by other means and in other circumstances. The transformation of social democracy into what has been called ‘social liberalism’ – a hybrid of traditional social democratic organisation with neoliberal politics – is not peculiar to Britain.

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This project was supported by a union leadership which had swerved sharply to the right, enjoining a ‘new realism’ according to which unions should seek harmonious relations with all governments, and take a more conciliatory line with employers. This doctrine, unavailing when it was initially unveiled in 1983, proved ideal for a union leadership desperate to avoid conflict after the mauling visited on the miners. And it sufficed for Neil Kinnock, as he and his allies executed an often shambolic, unconvincing retreat from anything which could be considered a left-wing policy, from full employment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. In a sense, it is difficult to see what else Kinnock could have done. ‘Everyone agreed’ that these were the steps necessary to make Labour electable, the only worthwhile objective from his point of view.

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Labour seemingly had only to remain firm in opposition to the tax in order to preserve the advantage. The problem they faced, however, was that the areas where opposition to the tax was most concentrated were working-class boroughs run by Labour councils. There, the leadership demanded that councils take an unyielding line against non-payment. Just as Neil Kinnock had advocated a ‘dented shield’ strategy for Labour councils struggling to fund local services in the face of rate-capping, urging that local authorities set strictly legal budgets within the parameters set by the government, so Labour now sought to burnish its constitutionalist credentials by prosecuting non-payers.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

It was waging class war. Asked to picture a 'class warrior', perhaps most people would see a chubby union leader in a flat cap, becoming progressively redder in the face as he denounces 'management' in a thick regional accent-not well-bred men with sleek suits and clipped accents. When Iasked former Labour leader Neil Kinnock if the Conservatives were the class warriors of British politics, he shook his head gravely. 'No, because they've never had to engage in a class war,' he said. 'Largely because we signed the peace treaty without realizing that they hadn't.' The demonization of the working class cannot be understood without looking back at the Thatcherite experiment of the 1980s that forged the society we live in today.

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The Tories had made a big deal out of the fact that unemployment had reached a million under Labour in 1979, employing ad firm Saatchi & Saatchi to design their famous 'Labour Isn't Working' poster. But under Thatcher, some estimates put the number out of work as peaking at four million. The terror oflosing your job suppresses any temptation to fight back. 'The major catalyst for Thatcher's alterations in labour law was unemployment,' says former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. 'Stupid bourgeois people, like the ones who write the newspapers, say that four million unemployed means an angry, assertive workforce. It doesn't. Itmeans at least four million other very frightened people. And people threatened with unemployment don't jeopardize their jobs by undertaking various acts oflabour militancy-they just don't do it.'

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I think the only legacy it's had really has been to say to other great forces of organized labour, you take on the government at your peril.' Even today, a quarter of a century later, trade union leaders still feel haunted by the Strike. Trade union leader Mark Serwotka says that its 'legacy was years of despondency and defeatism' . . Many miners and their supporters vilified Neil Kinnock for refusing to support the Strike. Today, he sticks to his 'plague on both your houses' attitude towards Scargill and Thatcher, but reserves most of his vitriol for the miners' leadership. But even he is under no illusions as to the consequences, describing it as a 'salutary' defeat for the labour movement.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

The thirteen designs, such as Arcons, Spooners and Phoenixes, had subtly different features – some had larger windows, some had porches, some had curved roofs, some looked almost rustic – but they were all weatherproof, warm and well lit. People did complain about rabbit hutches or tin boxes but for many they were hugely welcome. The future Labour leader Neil Kinnock lived in one, an Arcon V, from 1947 until 1961, and remembered the fitted fridge and bathroom causing much jealousy: ‘Friends and family came to view the wonders. It seemed like living in a spaceship.’ As they spread around the country, in almost all the big cities and many smaller ones too, they came to be regarded as better than bog-standard council housing.

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In practice there was therefore a sharp, public, sheep-and-goats division of the country’s children which took place at eleven years old through the ‘eleven-plus’ examination. It in turn was based on an IQ test supposed to scientifically measure intelligence. Among those who made it to the grammar schools, many hated being separated from their old friends – George Best and Neil Kinnock being among the innumerable examples of eleven-plus successes who then bunked off or frittered their school days in a mood of rebellion. Many of the majority who were rejected and sent to the secondary moderns never got over the sense of rejection and failure. John Prescott never forgot that his brother passed, and was given a bicycle while he failed and wasn’t.

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The pro-European devaluers would have liked to replace Wilson with Roy Jenkins. The ironies are multiple: as the arguments raged, some on the left toyed with leaving Labour and setting up a new left-wing party based on the trade unions to be called the Social Democratic Party. One of them was the young Neil Kinnock, who would later as leader unleash a ferocious war on another ‘party within the party’. The title SDP would later be taken not by the left but by Jenkins and many of the pro-Europeans who followed him. Meanwhile the devaluation crisis turned into an ungainly and undignified dance as George, Harold and Jim, with Roy and the rest joined hands, lurched away from each other, formed new sets and jigged towards humiliation.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

By the time he stepped off he was a legend. NEIL KINNOCK Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations? Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno 15 May 1987 Neil Kinnock was the saviour of the Labour Party, at least temporarily. To anyone who grew up caring at all about Labour in its dark days in the 1980s Kinnock was a hero. Migrating from left to right in the party, he took it from the brink of the abyss to the threshold of power. He was not able to take it further, but the governments that followed, led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, would have been inconceivable without the preparatory work done by Neil Kinnock. Kinnock was born in 1942 in Tredegar, Wales, to a coal miner and a district nurse.

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Kennedy: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, Washington DC, 20 January 1961 Barack Obama: I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America, Grant Park, Chicago, 7 November 2012 Pericles: Funeral Oration, Athens, Winter, c. 431 BC David Lloyd George: The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice, Queen’s Hall, London, 19 September 1914 Woodrow Wilson: Making the World Safe for Democracy, Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 2 April 1917 Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987 Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588 Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787 Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947 Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964 Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991 William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908 Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936 Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963 Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?, Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno, 15 May 1987 Maximilien Robespierre: The Political Philosophy of Terror, The National Convention, Paris, 5 February 1794 Adolf Hitler: My Patience Is Now at an End, Berlin Sportpalast, 26 September 1938 Fidel Castro: History Will Absolve Me, Santiago, Cuba, 16 October 1953 Václav Havel: A Contaminated Moral Environment, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1 January 1990 Elie Wiesel: The Perils of Indifference, The White House, Washington DC, 12 April 1999 PROLOGUE THE PERILS OF INDIFFERENCE The Birth of Rhetoric The beautiful ideas of rhetoric and democracy were born in the same moment, in the winter of 431 BC in Athens, when the statesman Pericles stood to deliver his Funeral Oration.

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The Dream of Progress The material condition of the people is a standard subject for the political speech. Many speeches have been made on the topic, but only the rare ones survive in the canon. The best recent example was made by the man who made Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party possible, Neil Kinnock. In Llandudno in 1987, Kinnock described the dream of equal life chances in poetic style. As a speaker, Kinnock is the apotheosis of the reformist Left, in that he reserved his most magnificent scorn for the battle against the revolutionaries in his own party. Kinnock might, though only might, have been gentler on Dolores Ibárruri, the Spanish revolutionary who went under the rhetorical guise of La Pasionaria.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

It so happened that I was at Ascot the day before the general election with the economist Roger Bootle, and we were so sure that Labour would win that we did not take up the bookmakers’ offer of 6 to 1 against the Conservatives – that is, six pounds for every one pound staked! We have been kicking ourselves ever since. David McKie, then at The Guardian, was on night editorial duty that week and maintained that it was clear that things were going against Labour even before the Sheffield rally, at which Labour leader Neil Kinnock was considered to have been fatally triumphalist. It was an amazing feat for Major to win a general election while the economy was still bogged down in the second biggest recession since the 1939–45 war. The Tories seemed to be good at this. Had they not won the 1983 election after the biggest recession since the war, with unemployment high and still rising?

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Major was helped in 1992 by the dubious but effective campaign run by the Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten, with its emphasis on ‘Labour’s tax bombshell’ – a sensational but effective way of castigating Labour for having the cheek to suggest that taxes had to go up to finance public spending. The sad thing for Labour was that they were trying to show fiscal responsibility by explaining how their manifesto pledges would be financed. Ironically, Patten, who had so successfully undermined Neil Kinnock’s electoral hopes, became good friends with Kinnock when, later, they served as British commissioners in Brussels. Both were strongly pro-European. The other twist was that Patten himself, having masterminded the nationwide Tory victory, lost his own seat in Bath – hence his sojourn in Hong Kong as the last Governor, from 1992 to 1997.

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On one such occasion, one of us, perhaps tactlessly, made a passing reference to Kaufman’s ‘suicide note’ remark. Quick as a flash, Michael quipped, ‘He got elected on it though.’ In fact, the former leader had long since repudiated his 1983 stance and become a passionate European, along with his successors Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (although it has to be admitted that Gordon went out of his way as Chancellor, when fighting his corner in Brussels, to disguise his pro-Europeanism). Yet, once again, when Cameron called the referendum that did not bring peace and quiet to the Tory ranks, a strain of Euroscepticism resurfaced in the Labour Party.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Clinton spoke for the many and not for the few – as the UK Labour Party was to put it, equally triumphantly, in the 1997 election. After the Conservatives won the UK election in the spring of 1992, with their fourth successive victory, there was a widespread assumption that Labour would never form a government again. Its leader, Neil Kinnock, had changed his party with heroic determination over nine turbulent years. By 1992 Labour had different positions on Europe, public spending, taxes, nationalization and unilateral nuclear disarmament from those it held when Kinnock became leader in 1983. Kinnock had worked tirelessly on internal reforms and on the way the party was projected to the media.

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They also remained Eurosceptic enough not to challenge their party on Europe until it was far too late. And yet it was the Conservative Party’s militant, obsessive Euroscepticism that had brought down a succession of party leaders. These self-proclaimed modernizers did not want to address that issue. As such, they were far more timid internal reformers than Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader in the 1980s who dared to challenge his party on all the thorny issues of that era, from ending support for unilateral nuclear disarmament to scrapping Labour’s opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU. It was the failure of Cameron and Osborne to discover a new approach to public spending and tax, the size and role of the state that undermined their modernization project most of all.

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Here was supposedly the most powerful leader in the world admitting that his sense of office sometimes prevented him from moving the ‘ball down the field’ in the areas that he cared about most deeply. After eight years Obama was reflecting on the powerlessness of power. He had lost his principled beliefs amidst the glamour of office. The office constrained him. He could not be himself. On a much smaller part of the political stage, the then leader of the UK Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, was asked the following question in a BBC interview in 1988: ‘As leader of the Labour Party you are reviewing the party’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, but what is your personal position?’ Kinnock had been a passionate supporter of unilateralism, but without hesitation he replied, ‘Being leader of the Labour party and having personal views is a contradiction in terms.’12 He was no longer allowed to have personal views.

The politics of London: governing an ungovernable city
by Tony Travers
Published 15 Dec 2004

Within the capital, only Westminster, Wandsworth and Kensington and Chelsea remained impregnable. New Labour and the legacy of the 1980s London had been different from the rest of the country, at least until 1994. There had been a visible ‘Labour Effect’ in London, which had depressed the Party’s vote in London councils in 1986 and 1990. Neil Kinnock’s leadership of Labour had been badly blighted by the impact of some of its urban councils. The Conservatives had been able to use the threat of London Labour leaders such as Ken Livingstone (GLC), Ted Knight (Lambeth) and Linda Bellos (Lambeth) to frighten the electorate. There is no doubt that the quality of services in a number of Labour-controlled boroughs collapsed because of the failure of political leadership.

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The fact that many ministers, MPs and civil servants lived in a number of the more problematic London boroughs did not help matters (Jones and Travers, 1996). It profoundly affected New Labour’s approach to local government after 1997. The Blair view of local government went well beyond the distaste felt by senior Labour politicians such as Neil Kinnock and John Cunningham as they had battled with the left during the 1980s (Butler et al., 1994, pp. 256–7). By 1997 virtually the whole of local government – including former hot-spots of militancy such as Liverpool and Lambeth – was under the control of mainstream party politicians, whether Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, or otherwise.

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The Party’s commitment in 1987 and 1992 was to introduce an elected council for Greater London, along the lines of traditional local government elsewhere in the country: there would be members elected for wards. These elected members (presumably from a majority political group) would then choose a leader for the council. Under both Neil Kinnock and John Smith, the policy was consistent. The death of John Smith in May 1994 brought Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party. Blair, a far more presidential figure as Labour leader than his predecessors, had an instinctive affinity with the concept 46 The Politics of London of a directly-elected mayor, to provide strong executive leadership as part of a transformation of traditional local government.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

It was a hot day in August 2014. The president wore a lightweight tan suit during a press conference about increasing the US military response against the Islamic State in Syria. That was it. Almost anything to do with Meghan Markle (SEE: ROYAL COVERAGE). The wife of the sixth in line to the British throne. Oceans of ink. Neil Kinnock stumbling on a beach. The then Labour leader slipped while walking along the seashore at Brighton in October 1983. Reputable historians have speculated at length on how his career might have been different had he not lost his footing. And so on. All these answer to the description ‘chaff’, not ‘wheat’.

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But it is worth reading two little-noticed pieces of testimony about the way he operates, given to the Leveson inquiry by two of his most successful former editors, Andrew Neil (Sunday Times (1983–94) and Kelvin MacKenzie (Sun, 1981–94). Both were instructive on the way Murdoch exercises the immense power he knows he wields. For Neil, the Murdoch newspapers’ brutal treatment of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the 1992 election was ‘the seminal development in relations between British politicians and the media . . . seared into the minds of a future generation . . . [it showed] what could happen if they ended up on the wrong side of the Murdoch press. They vowed to themselves not to let it happen again.’

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They vowed to themselves not to let it happen again.’ Kinnock, a centre-left politician who had helped purge the Labour Party of the Militant faction of left-wing infiltrators, was subjected – in Andrew Neil’s words – to brutal, personal, uncouth and vicious coverage by his ‘most virulent tormentors’ (the News International tabloids). ‘Neil Kinnock learned the hard way what it was like to be on the wrong end of a press out to get you, day in, day out.’ In Andrew Neil’s mind (though he concedes it is unprovable), the Murdoch press played a significant part in Kinnock’s defeat. More important was what a subsequent generation of British politicians believed: that in order to get elected in the UK, you had to make nice with a multi-billionaire who wasn’t even British and who spent most of his time in New York, California or Australia.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

What is notable about Trump’s brand of conservatism is that it shows little devotion to Reagan or recent conservative history, seeking instead to imagine away much of postwar US history in favour of a hologram of a nation where men manufacture the world’s goods and women iron their shirts. A large part of the reason Corbyn causes Blairites so much distress – whether or not they dislike his policies or style of leadership – is that he threatens to destroy their narrative about the 1980s and 1990s. In that version of history, the hard left was heroically defeated by Neil Kinnock, setting the stage for the most successful Labour Government ever. What if Corbyn were to win a general election? How would that recast the significance of those battles? The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism.

…

Thanks to copious demographic and geographical analysis, we are already in a position to make sense of the 2016 referendum result itself. But it remains difficult to grasp how the Tories could effectively have taken what was to everyone else a fringe issue and used it to attack the interests they had until very recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall. To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy? From a Tory perspective, things must have reached a sorry pass when the sole voice speaking up for the Union belongs to Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

The fight was closer than is often imagined – had the dockers struck, as they nearly did, and the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), as they nearly did, the outcome could very easily have been different. It would undoubtedly have been messy – for it would have been a victory against the might of the state, and against the unsympathetic Labour Party parliamentary leadership, not least its leader, Neil Kinnock. The miners agreed to return to work unconditionally in March 1985, as the drift back became an issue of survival for the union. The great miners’ strike of 1984–5, like the lockout of 1926, was not an offensive, but a last redoubt, the tail end of a period of some trade union influence. It was understood by all that a defeat for the miners was the defeat of the organized working class as a whole, for the left too.

…

It was not true; it is not true; it never has been; and all our history shows that – from the great industrial development and nationalization acts of the Attlee government, which gave this country a post-war industrial basis, through to the Wilson government’s investment schemes and initiatives that brought new life to where I come from, to South Wales, to Scotland, to the Northeast, to Merseyside, to the new towns of the Southeast, right through to the actions of the last Labour government, which ensured that at least we retained a British computer industry, a British motor industry, a machine tool industry, a shipbuilding industry. We … need give no apology for being the party of production. Neil Kinnock, speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference The great British–American alliance led the way – morally as well as militarily – in both world wars. Margaret Thatcher, speech to the English-Speaking Union in New York, 1999 You are Neville Chamberlain, I am Winston Churchill and Saddam is Hitler.

…

As the party of the nation, it found life in a post-national economy and society difficult to adjust to or respond to. After the electoral defeat of 1983 the leadership of the Labour Party passed from Michael Foot to a so-called dream ticket combining the soft left and the right. The new leader and deputy leader were figures of much less substance than those they replaced. Neil Kinnock was neither an intellectual nor a worker, and for all the claims made for him as orator and parliamentarian, he was merely more prolix than Michael Foot. Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader with strong support in the parliamentary Labour Party, was a littérateur (like Michael Foot) rather than a robust specialist in international relations, as was his predecessor, Denis Healey.12 Kinnock and Hattersley were both formed by residues from the Labour Party of the 1950s: Hattersley by Croslandite reformism, Kinnock by Bevanism.13 The potential leaders of the left formed by the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, could not stand because neither were at that moment members of parliament.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

Because of how and by whom they are run, much of the media today serves as a highly partisan defender of the interests of those with wealth and power. It was the tightest election campaign in Britain for a generation. In April 1992, after thirteen years in the electoral wilderness – years of mass unemployment, union-bashing and the selling off of public assets – Labour and its leader Neil Kinnock were on the cusp of regaining power from the Conservative Party, led by Thatcher’s successor John Major. On 2 April – a week before voters were due to march to schools and village halls to cast their ballots – one poll projected that Labour was on course for a 6-point win. But the creeping jubilation of the party’s grassroots was matched only by the horror of Britain’s media elite at the prospect of a Labour victory.

…

It was an instructive lesson in the new balance of power between government and finance. It was not just the Tories who had courted the City: the entire political elite would come to pay homage to Britain’s financial kingpins. It is certainly true that, traditionally, Labour had an ambivalence towards the financiers. When Neil Kinnock became a Labour MP in the 1970s, Harold Lever, an ally of the then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, told Kinnock: ‘You can easily rise to the top of the Labour Party, young man, if you are knowledgeable about the City or about cows. Because if there’s two areas in the Labour Party about which people know fuck all, it’s the City and agriculture.’

…

‘This action will be seen as intervention by a Western country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation, however unattractive its regime,’ she messaged the US President, adding that she was ‘deeply disturbed’ by Reagan’s communications on the issue.5 Despite these hiccups, the 1980s witnessed the development of a new ideological bond between the British Establishment and US elite. It was a new relationship that was not yet embraced by the entire political elite. Under the leaderships of Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party in the 1980s was committed to a defence strategy that included nuclear disarmament. This was seen as unacceptable in Washington. When I asked Kinnock whether the US response involved interventions in British internal affairs, he was unequivocal. ‘Yes, no doubt at all about that,’ he recalls.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

‘Without him, we’d have a very good chance of winning this election. With him, it’s a question of damage limitation, though we are doing better the further north you go.’ Another former cabinet minister said: ‘My fear has long been that all the work we did rebuilding the party, stretching back to Neil Kinnock, will be wasted if Gordon leads us to a generational defeat. I always knew we couldn’t win with Gordon. Can a big defeat be averted?’ While we were in the north-east, I travelled in one of the dark-windowed cars in the Prime Minister’s motorcade but also on the media bus. There was little excitement among the journalists on the bus.

…

UKIP is attracting support in the party’s old working-class northern English heartlands and winning converts in key Home Counties swing seats that Labour would once have hoped to win. In Scotland the SNP has become the natural party of government. In a recent interview, Alex Salmond was scathing about Miliband, describing him as ‘more unelectable’ than Michael Foot. He had none of ‘Foot’s wonderful qualities or intelligence. He’s more unelectable than Neil Kinnock was; and Kinnock had considerable powers of oratory, and didn’t lack political courage.’ One would expect Salmond to be dismissive of a Labour leader but it is worrying for the party that even allies now speak similarly of him and his failings. Miliband is losing the support of the left (to the SNP, to the Greens) without having formed a broader coalition of a kind that defined the early Blair-Brown years.

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky
by Oleg Gordievsky
Published 13 Apr 2015

I looked at Pozdnyakov with close interest, thinking what an extraordinary difference a couple of glasses of wine can make. Because Jack Jones produced so little I met him only five or six times in all, and mostly we exchanged harmless talk about the unions and the Labour Party. But we also discussed Neil Kinnock a good deal, because he was leader of the opposition. Curiously enough, Dmitri Svetanko had shown a flash of intuition in Moscow back in 1981, when I was in the process of joining the British desk. A report from the London Residency had named Kinnock as the Labour politician to watch, and Svetanko had endorsed the suggestion, cabling back that he was regarded as the man of the future, and should be carefully observed.

…

Moscow told me I should get hold of him as it was hoped that he might become an asset to the KGB, but although I once had a long talk with him, nothing came of it, and it was clear that the Centre had been wrong. Moscow was also eager that I should make contact with Dick Clements, the author and journalist who had been editor of Tribune from 1961 to 1982, and then became a senior adviser to Neil Kinnock. After years of attempts at cultivation by others, he was taken over by Kobaladze but the KGB decided to abandon him. Yet another public figure in whom Moscow showed interest was the author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. One day in London we received a long letter about him from the Centre, saying that the KGB had monitored him while he was visiting East European countries: they had not yet tried to contact him but, after studying his record, they had come to the conclusion that he was good material for cultivation, as he was progressive (that is, in Moscow’s eyes, friendly to the Soviets), and also influential in the British media.

…

I was impressed by his warmth and cordiality, but as I was speaking I noticed that a look of bafflement occasionally came into his eyes, and I wondered if he understood what I was saying, or whether he had any real interest in matters of detail which lay beneath the most general facts. In any case, I got twenty-two minutes of his time (the Labour politicians Neil Kinnock and Denis Healey got eighteen), and the all-important moment came at the end, when he put his arm round my shoulder and said, ‘We know you. We appreciate what you’ve done for the West. Thank you. We remember your family, and we’ll fight for them.’ As he said goodbye, he repeated something similar, and the British head of station was delighted.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

On the right they were often loathed; on the left they were the objects of deep and often unconditional love and respect. ‘You don’t get me I’m part of the union,’ sang the folk-rock band the Strawbs in a single that reached number two in February 1973, its lyrics often taken as a celebration of working-class trade unionism, although they were almost certainly meant sarcastically. Neil Kinnock even had it blaring out of the windows of his car as he toured his South Wales constituency a year later. What the song captured was the fact that, as the Marxist critic Raphael Samuel put it, trade unionism was ‘not only a cause’, it was ‘something approaching a workers’ faith’. Behind the mind-numbing discussions of basic rates and differentials and working-to-rule, he thought, there was ‘a quasi-religious impulse at work’, with the strike as a religious revival, the mass picket ‘a ceremonial demonstration of strength’, the hated scab who defied the picket ‘a category of folk devil’.

…

Four days later, when the guillotine motion was actually debated, the atmosphere was even worse, with speeches on both sides frequently interrupted by jeers and abuse while Lloyd and his deputy, Sir Robert Grant-Ferris, struggled vainly to keep order. At the centre of the disturbances was a young Welsh MP called Neil Kinnock, who savagely denounced the government’s ‘class-directed legislation’, and at ten o’clock led an extraordinary demonstration in which thirty Labour MPs gathered shouting in front of the Speaker’s table, refusing all entreaties to sit down, some calling Lloyd a ‘bloody hypocrite’ and ‘bloody twister’.

…

The EEC was therefore the perfect target – not least because it was so close to the despised Heath’s heart. It was a ‘rich nations’ club’, Michael Foot told the voters of Ebbw Vale, opposed to ‘the interests of British democracy [and] the health of our economy’. It would destroy ‘the real power of the people to control their destiny’, agreed Neil Kinnock – this, of course, some years before he became a European Commissioner himself. ‘Beating capitalism in one country is enough of a task. Beating it in several countries – without even having a solid domestic base – goes too far even for me.’29 It was in the unmistakably English surroundings of Blackpool, at the Labour conference in October 1970, that Wilson first realized he had a serious problem on his hands.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991
by Robert Service
Published 7 Oct 2015

Foot was courteous, Healey so boisterous that he chipped in while Brezhnev was in midsentence.32 There had been discussion among Soviet officials about how to address Foot, whether as ‘Mr’ or as ‘comrade’. Foot resolved the problem for them by shaking Brezhnev’s hand warmly and, while holding on to it, addressing him as ‘comrade’. Neither Foot nor Healey mentioned Afghanistan.33 The MP Stuart Holland went to Moscow three years later on behalf of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, who wanted to know the official Soviet standpoint on nuclear disarmament before his own planned visit. The Kremlin had a strong interest in encouraging Kinnock. This was a man who might become Prime Minister and declare the United Kingdom a ‘nuclear-free zone’.34 By the time of Kinnock’s visit the Politburo had come to a definite policy: Soviet leaders would offer to reduce their arsenal of warheads by the same number as the British agreed to remove; they would also cease to point any of the remainder at the United Kingdom.

…

When Scargill also grumbled that the United Kingdom remained able to buy coal from abroad, Counsellor Parshin and First Secretary Mazur pointed out that the USSR had ceased to supply coal or any other fuel. Scargill denounced a large section of the British labour movement. In his eyes, Labour Party leaders Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley were purveyors of Tory propaganda, and Scargill declared a preference for the Communist Party of Great Britain and certain left-wing Labour militants.36 The Kremlin leaders pursued this policy without thought for the damage it caused to Anglo-Soviet relations. They felt that they had nothing to lose at that time.

…

And secondly, I think we both believe that they are the more likely to succeed if we can build up confidence in one another and trust in one another about each other’s approach, and therefore, we believe in cooperating on trade matters, on cultural matters, on quite a lot of contacts between politicians from the two sides of the divide. But Gorbachëv showed a rougher side to Labour Party leaders. At lunch with Neil Kinnock, the two sides called each other ‘comrades’; but when Kinnock read out a list of Soviet human rights cases, Gorbachëv turned red in the face and let forth a spate of expletives.78 He warned that the British would get it ‘right in the teeth’ if they insisted on denouncing the USSR’s record on human rights.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

Our takeaway is that a tight election means a coalition looks inevitable. But will the Tories come out as the party with the most seats and the chance to form a government? Or will Gordon Brown pull off a come-from-behind victory? TUESDAY, 27 APRIL Time to decide which party to back in the election. In 1992, when the FT gave a mealy-mouthed endorsement to Neil Kinnock’s Labour party, I was on sabbatical at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My professor-mentor was Nelson Polsby, a heavyweight (in every sense) with a passion for British politics. Nelson asked me who the FT would back. John Major’s Conservatives, I shot back.

…

We are sitting on a balcony in something akin to a safe house, a remote lodge in the four-star 500-plus-room Kruger Park Lodge near Hazyview, a rundown town near the border of South Africa and Mozambique. A sign on the lawn warns: ‘Beware hippos’. I owe this remote encounter to Andrew England, our Johannesburg bureau chief. Initially, the message from the Malema camp was less friendly: JuJu does not speak to white capitalists. Then Andrew pointed out that the FT had endorsed Neil Kinnock in 1992. That apparently clinched the interview. I ask Malema whether things have improved after 20 years of ANC rule in South Africa. ‘No! We are worse off than we were under apartheid,’ says Malema, eyes flashing. ‘Before we did not have electricity or running water. Democracy has given us [blacks] the vote but there is still no clean water or electricity.

The Defence of the Realm
by Christopher Andrew
Published 2 Aug 2010

The former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins noted that ‘the publication of Peter Wright’s tawdry book . . . nonetheless chimed in with a chorus of other allegations.’98 Callaghan reached a similar conclusion. So did the official biographers of both Wilson and Callaghan. The DG, Sir Antony Duff, recorded after a meeting on 31 March 1987 with Callaghan and the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock: ‘Callaghan fixed me with a fairly penetrating, not to say hostile glance, and said that even if only a tenth of what Wright had said about destabilising the Wilson government was true, it was still a “bloody disgrace” that it had happened. I said that it was all in any case untrue.’ Though not all Callaghan’s suspicions seem to have been laid to rest, he acknowledged ‘Wilson’s “paranoia” and said that Marcia and others had been responsible for a lot of it’.99 The stringent internal inquiry ordered by Duff, which examined all relevant files and interviewed all relevant Security Service officers, both serving and retired, concluded unequivocally that no member of the Service had been involved in the surveillance of Wilson, still less in any attempt to destabilize his government.

…

Rees revealed that he favoured a scheme to redraw constituency boundaries in order to get rid of the city-centre constituencies which, he believed, were those most easily exploited by subversives.41 By 1977 Militant Tendency was believed to have gained a foothold in some eighty-eight CLPs and to pose a threat to twelve sitting MPs.42 Secretly recorded by the Security Service, Peter Taaffe told the annual conference that Militant cadres, despite disappointing recruitment figures, were the ‘spinal column of the future mass revolutionary organisation’, which would be ‘an indispensable weapon of the Revolution in Britain’.43 Militant members of CLP delegations to the annual Labour Party conference increased from thirty-five in 1976 to fifty-five in 1978.44 Though MT membership was still below 1,500 in 1978,45 Taaffe made the wildly exaggerated claim that year that MT played a decisive influence in 100 CLPs and a significant role in 225.46 Despite the concern felt by Rees and Callaghan about Militant entryism, there were powerful voices on the NEC opposed to any serious action to prevent it, among them those of Callaghan’s two immediate successors as Labour leader, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. In November 1975 the Labour Party national agent, Reg Underhill, presented a report to the NEC on extreme left-wing infiltration of the Labour Party which concluded that Militant was an independent political organization and therefore clearly contravened the prohibition in Labour’s constitution on Party members joining organizations with their ‘own programmes, principles, and policy for distinctive and separate propaganda’.47 The MT leadership gave much of the credit for sidelining the Underhill report to one of its members, Nick Bradley, the LPYS representative on the NEC, who, it believed, succeeded in persuading the Organization sub-committee that the report should ‘lie on the table’.48 When the report eventually reached the NEC, the Committee voted by sixteen to twelve to take no action.49 As late as 1981 Neil Kinnock believed that, within the Labour Party organization, ‘there was neither the will nor, more important, the organisational capacity to undertake a systematic attack on Militant.’50 The divided views within the Labour leadership about the threat of Militant entryism produced frustration among the F Branch officers concerned with the investigation of subversion in the Labour Party.

…

In November 1975 the Labour Party national agent, Reg Underhill, presented a report to the NEC on extreme left-wing infiltration of the Labour Party which concluded that Militant was an independent political organization and therefore clearly contravened the prohibition in Labour’s constitution on Party members joining organizations with their ‘own programmes, principles, and policy for distinctive and separate propaganda’.47 The MT leadership gave much of the credit for sidelining the Underhill report to one of its members, Nick Bradley, the LPYS representative on the NEC, who, it believed, succeeded in persuading the Organization sub-committee that the report should ‘lie on the table’.48 When the report eventually reached the NEC, the Committee voted by sixteen to twelve to take no action.49 As late as 1981 Neil Kinnock believed that, within the Labour Party organization, ‘there was neither the will nor, more important, the organisational capacity to undertake a systematic attack on Militant.’50 The divided views within the Labour leadership about the threat of Militant entryism produced frustration among the F Branch officers concerned with the investigation of subversion in the Labour Party.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning
by Tariq Ali
Published 22 Jan 2015

Blair’s subsequent electoral triumphs were used to cement the New Labour project. But the political geography, when decoded, told a different story. The figures revealed a decline in voting, marking a growing alienation from politics. New Labour’s popular vote in 2001 was down by 3 million and less than the 11.5 million won by Neil Kinnock when Labour suffered its defeat in 1992. The 71 per cent turnout that had been considered low even in 1997, now dropped to 59 per cent. Only 24 per cent of the total electorate voted for another Blair government. Unsurprisingly, there were 2.8 million Labour abstentions in Britain’s former industrial heartlands – the metropolitan vastnesses of Tyne and Wear, Manchester, Merseyside, the West Midlands, Clydeside and South Wales.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

‘Fifty years from now,’ he said, ‘Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”.’49 But he delivered this speech in the face of a rising tide of Conservative Euroscepticism that, in spite of his best efforts, would drift his party away from a European future and back into England’s past. At the same time, the Labour Party was heading in the opposite direction. Under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, it had been warming to Europe for precisely the same reason that many Conservatives were becoming hostile: the prospect of uniting with a social democratic Continent to temper the impact of free-market economics. This was when the centre-left began to outline the shape of a country with blurred national identities, more personal autonomy from the top-down structures of the state, as well as a greener and more feminist politics.50 Much emphasis was placed on constitutional reform with the Charter 88 movement – less a distant echo of Magna Carta than a globalised version based on the demands of east European dissidents – demanding electoral reform, a Bill of Rights, an elected House of Lords and devolution of power across the United Kingdom.51 A self-consciously modern, progressive version of a country was beginning to crack through what seemed like the eggshell-thin crust of conservatism.

…

Goodhart himself is an Eton-educated north Londoner who has spent his entire adult life within what he calls the ‘liberal tribe’ of media and politics which he thinks are the cause of so much harm. Like any skilled polemicist, however, he treats tens of millions of exceptions as proof of a rule that might be a bit snobbish itself. Neil Kinnock, who came from a long line of miners, steelworkers and factory workers before leading the Labour Party through much of the 1980s and early 1990s, is perhaps better placed to judge this latest iteration of class politics. He suggests: ‘I’ve noticed a lot of people these days inverted their privileges, often for kindly or sentimental reasons, so that they now believe being working class is the same thing as being blessed with infinite wisdom.’

The European Union
by John Pinder and Simon Usherwood
Published 1 Jan 2001

But there have been serious defects when it has been required to administer expenditure programmes without the staff who can do this properly, resulting in defects either in its own work or in that of consultants hired to do it, with sometimes bad and in a few cases fraudulent consequences. This stimulated not only the 1999 resignation, but also the ongoing reforms to the administration set out by Neil Kinnock in the early 2000s, aimed at improving recruitment, training, promotion, and audit practices. Some have argued that the Commission is a European government. How far could this be an accurate description? Within the fields of Union competence, its right of legislative initiative resembles that of a government, and even exceeds it in so far as the Commission’s is almost a sole right.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

That was to be achieved by vote share.’ Labour moderates, like former advisers Tom Baldwin and David Mills, were sufficiently concerned that this would be seen as an acceptable benchmark for Corbyn’s survival that they publicly demanded that he gain more seats, more votes and narrow the gap to the Tories, as Neil Kinnock did in 1987, before he was allowed to stay as leader. Corbyn’s staff saw this criticism of the seats he was visiting as flawed, since many of the ninety rallies he staged during the campaign were not necessarily in target seats themselves but in convenient city-centre locations, which would attract voters from neighbouring marginals.

…

To the younger generation of organisers radicalised by the Iraq War and the age of austerity that followed the 2008 economic crash, who included James Schneider, Momentum was a British incarnation of the Syriza protest movement in Greece, and Podemos in Spain. This difference of approach created some tensions. Activists like Schneider resented press claims that Momentum was being used as a Trojan horse by Trotskyite entryists, kicked out of the party in Neil Kinnock’s expulsion of the Militant Tendency in the eighties. In February 2016 Momentum set up a formal membership structure under which members had to ‘support the values and aims of the Labour Party’, a move designed to prevent the Socialist Party – the successor to Militant – and the Socialist Workers Party from returning to Labour.

…

After forty years of oppositional politics, he spent the autumn of 2017 receiving training from Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, about how to operate in government. Win or lose, he had already done enough to be seen as a key leader in Labour’s history, unpicking the work of Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair to marginalise the hard left in the twenty-four years between 1983 and 2007 in just twenty-four months. ‘A lot of the project has been successful,’ a union official said. ‘The Labour Party is now an anti-austerity party and there is a clear difference between Labour policy and the Tories in a way that people didn’t feel that there was before.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

In 2002, spending growth was speeded up again, to a projected 3.3 per cent between 2004 and 2006, well above the Treasury’s estimates of the growth rate of the economy.63 Journalist Philip Stephens described it as the moment the party finally chose social democracy.64 Gordon Brown’s prudence was partially a response to memories of the chaos and irresponsibility of the 1970s. Equally traumatising were memories of Labour’s surprise general election defeat in 1992. A good part of the reason for the defeat, the party’s insiders felt, was that the voters had revolted against Neil Kinnock’s ‘tax bombshell’. A Tale of Two Nations 29 If Labour was ever to regain power, both Blair and Brown believed, it had to keep control of spending and promise never to raise taxes again. It should have been obvious that pledges to spend more on the public services, not raise taxes and maintain prudent finances formed an impossible triangle.

London Review of Books
by London Review of Books
Published 14 Dec 2017

One night, she had her baby son with her when she spotted the prime minister at the other end of a long corridor. ‘I couldn’t bear her eyes to fall on my perfect baby,’ she writes. ‘I pulled his blanket over his face to shield him from her gaze’ and dived into a side room. In the 1987 election 41 women were elected, 21 of them Labour. For most of the decade from 1983 until 1992, when Neil Kinnock was party leader, the only female member of the shadow cabinet was Jo Richardson – as minister for women, inevitably. In 1990 the rules were changed: MPs now had to vote for at least three women in shadow cabinet elections. Harman says male MPs called this the Assisted Places Scheme and tried to sabotage it by spreading their votes so no woman would get a respectable number, or by deliberately voting for someone supposedly so hopeless that the scheme would be discredited.

The Payoff
by Jeff Connaughton

And though I was anxious to find out what was behind the news report we’d heard over the radio on the way there, I never imagined that within two weeks the Biden for President campaign would be over. It happened with dizzying speed. Biden’s peroration at campaign debates included a long quotation from a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labor Party and the son of a Welsh coal miner. It asked the question why he was the first member of his family in a thousand generations to attend university. Had his ancestors—who worked twelve-hour shifts in the mines but read poetry at night—been too stupid? No, it was because he had a platform on which to stand.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

As inequalities increase, people already at the top become ever more motivated solely by greed. The source of inequality is a failure to control the greedy. Often they feel that they need more money despite all their wealth. They are made to feel that way because status and respect are increasingly measured in purely financial terms. Just over thirty years ago, Neil Kinnock, then Labour Party leader, remarked: ‘If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.’ What he did not add, which would have been most prescient, was: ‘I warn you not to reach adulthood alongside Thatcher’s grandchildren.

Day One Trader: A Liffe Story
by John Sussex
Published 16 Aug 2009

This choice was a no-brainer for Danny. He just could not resist the chance of being able to show off in such a flash car. He regularly took Green up on the offer until one fateful day in the summer of 1992. It was the eve of the General Election. The British public were about to once again reject a Labour party led by Neil Kinnock in favour of the grey man of politics, John Major, who would succeed in persuading people to re-elect his Conservative Party. But Danny was not spending the evening agonising over which way to cast his vote at the ballot box. He was showing off on the streets of London taking Green’s car for a spin.

Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley
Published 20 Apr 2016

By the 16th of the month, according to the Mirror, the ‘rebel pithead winders’ had ‘caved in’, giving ‘miners’ leader Arthur Scargill a boost by agreeing to back the NUM’s overtime ban’. (The paper’s tendency throughout the strike was to characterize the NUM’s leadership, but not its members, as militant.) The following week, Neil Kinnock, who’d become leader of the Labour Party and leader of the opposition the previous October, authored a series of Mirror articles with the headline ‘WHY I AM ANGRY’, sharing page one on the first day of the series with ‘The many faces of Boy George’. ‘I am angry,’ begins Kinnock’s first piece, on 23 January.

Alan Partridge: Nomad: Nomad
by Alan Partridge
Published 19 Oct 2016

is a whole bevy of signed photos from previous guests, snapped next to Hettie/Mrs Lancashire. Charlie Dimmock giving a thumbs up, Kelvin MacKenzie (who’s written ‘Lovely B&B and that’s The Truth!’), Everest Windows’ Craig Doyle and lovely wife Doon, Gloria Hunniford with a glass of wine, Duncan Goodhew (‘Keep swimming!’), Glenys (and Neil) Kinnock, Clare Grogan, Paul Gambaccini (‘Thanks for everything and sorry’),65 a Krankie, Jarvis Cocker . . . and in the middle of them all, a soft-focus publicity shot, all twinkly eyes and bouffant hair, stirring a feeling in me that was simultaneously like a punch in the gut and a kick in the cock. There, smiling at me, was Edmonds. 14.

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe
by Andrew Adonis
Published 20 Jun 2018

To understand New Labour, Blair and Brown, you have to understand the eighteen years that came before Blair won the 1997 election. The emergence from the divisions of the 1980 Wembley Conference, the splintering of Labour into a new SDP, the disaster of the 1983 election, and the slow march back to credibility under Neil Kinnock. The loss of the 1992 election – in my view the most important and searing experience in the origins of New Labour – reinforced Blair and Brown’s determination to do what it would take to restore Labour’s credibility. The yardsticks for Labour credibility were shaped by the difficult years of the 1980s, and the ways in which Britain changed under Thatcher.

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper
by Andrew Martin
Published 9 Feb 2017

Even so, the measure shines a spotlight on the most heavily loss-making services – such as the sleepers – begging the question: ‘Are they worth paying the charges?’ But we British can’t blame the EU for the directive, because it represents the implementation of the British railway privatisation model, and it was the former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who, as Transport Commissioner, was behind the policy. Stepping aboard the Thello train, I was greeted by a friendly sleeping car conductor, who was either French or Italian, but spoke excellent English, and seemed to have a lot of time on his hands to talk to me. He agreed that business was slack; there had been many cancellations.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

Mitchell, previously an academic and TV interviewer, became the most prominent voice of fishermen in Westminster, and helped Billy Hardie’s mother, Dolly, in her successful campaign to get compensation for fishermen who lost their livelihoods after the Cod War. He was first elected as European restrictions on Britain’s fish catching began to bite, and talked up withdrawal from Europe long before Ukip appeared on the scene. In the early 1980s, in Michael Foot’s Labour Party, quitting the EEC was policy. When Neil Kinnock took over, Labour embraced Europe, but Mitchell didn’t. His banishment to the back benches as the epitome of old Labour – a socialist, an internationalist and localist rather than globalist, a believer in higher taxation and higher public spending, a champion of the working class, a sceptic on Europe, a conservative on gender – came about after he infuriated Kinnock with what would now be seen as a rather New Labour move.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
by Tracey Thorn
Published 7 Feb 2013

When I was interviewed by Smash Hits in 1985 and asked what was the last book I read, my answer was The British in Northern Ireland: The Case for Withdrawal. In Smash Hits! Red Wedge was officially launched in November 1985, and was an attempt to fuse all of this somewhat disparate political activity into the one supposedly common cause of ousting the Thatcher government and getting Labour elected. Neil Kinnock was trying to modernise the Labour Party, following the landslide defeat of the 1983 election, and realised that one strand of this process would be to try to reconnect with the youth vote, and to marshall some of that highly motivated activism which was clearly prevalent among young rock fans.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

They didn’t use the same language, but they might have agreed with moderates that 1983 Labour candidate Michael Foot’s center-left election manifesto was “the longest suicide note in history.” While Benn and the Labour Left fought campaigns to win the leadership and democratize the party, and while Arthur Scargill led a last great miners’ strike in 1984–1985, the intellectual cover was provided for Foot’s replacement, Neil Kinnock, and an emerging New Labour current to challenge these movements. Kinnock gave way to Tony Blair, who doubled down on centrist politics and constructed a public relations machine to rebrand Labour as fresh-faced modernizers. This approach won a massive victory in 1997—a rare one for a party that’s been called the least successful major party in the world.

The Fear Index
by Robert Harris
Published 14 Aug 2011

They have four children and live in a village near Hungerford in West Berkshire. Also by Robert Harris FICTION Fatherland Enigma Archangel Pompeii Imperium The Ghost Lustrum NON-FICTION A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman) Gotcha! The Making of Neil Kinnock Selling Hitler Good and Faithful Servant To my family Gill, Holly, Charlie, Matilda, Sam Acknowledgements I WISH TO thank all those whose expertise, generously given, has made this book possible: first and foremost Neville Quie of Citi, who made many helpful suggestions and introductions and who, along with Cameron Small, patiently helped me through the labyrinth of shorts and out-of-the-money puts; Charles Scott, formerly of Morgan Stanley, who discussed the concept, read the manuscript and introduced me to Andre Stern of Oxford Asset Management, Eli Lederman, former CEO of Turquoise, and David Keetly and John Mansell of Polar Capital Alva Fund, all of whom provided useful insights; Leda Braga, Mike Platt, Pawel Lewicki and the algorithmic team at BlueCrest for their hospitality and for letting me spend a day watching them in action; Christian Holzer for his advice on the VIX; Lucie Chaumeton for fact-checking; Philippe Jabre of Jabre Capital Partners SA for sharing his knowledge of the financial markets; Dr Ian Bird, head of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid Project, for two conducted tours and insights into CERN in the 1990s; Ariane Koek, James Gillies, Christine Sutton and Barbara Warmbein of the CERN Press Office; Dr Bryan Lynn, an academic physicist who worked at both Merrill Lynch and CERN and who kindly described his experiences of moving between these different worlds; Jean-Philippe Brandt of the Geneva Police Department for giving me a tour of the city and answering my queries about police procedure; Dr Stephen Golding, Consultant Radiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, for advising me on brain scans and putting me in touch with Professor Christoph Becker and Dr Minerva Becker who in turn helpfully arranged a tour of the Radiological Department of the University Hospital in Geneva.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

The estate has (or had) a holiday village feel and, to modern eyes, the prefabs are quaint and homely, made more so through the decorative touches applied by some of the residents. They were however – with their fitted kitchens, running hot water, built-in storage and electric lighting and sockets – state-of-the-art dwellings in their time. To Neil Kinnock, future Labour leader, brought up in a prefab, his childhood home ‘was a remarkable dwelling and a piece of wonderful engineering … a place of wonder’.3 Elsewhere, Eddie O’Mahoney, recently demobilised with a wife and two young children, had wanted a proper brick-built house but was reluctantly persuaded by a council housing officer to take a look at the new prefabs on Excalibur: We opened the door and my wife said, ‘What a lovely big hall!

Sex Power Money
by Sara Pascoe
Published 26 Aug 2019

In October 2016 a video was leaked of the future president of the United States having a braggy conversation/admitting to the assault of women a decade or so before. We all know this recording off by heart. Trump says, ‘I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.’ I’m embarrassed to admit I believed his presidential hopes were over. In the 1980s Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s political ambitions went down on Brighton beach when he did. If you’re too young to remember this, you can watch it on YouTube. Kinnock was walking hand in hand with his wife when the sea surprised him and he tripped up trying to keep his shoes dry. ‘That’s it,’ said the nation. ‘You can’t be leader, you can’t even stay upright on pebbles.’

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

Of course he was anti-Brexit, and when he set his very considerable intellect to making the case for Europe, as he did in his Brexit campaign book, his arguments were strong. But so many of the anti-Brexit campaigners from the New Labour era were now men and women of the free bus pass generation and were no longer listened to. Other old-timers, Michael Heseltine and Neil Kinnock, for instance, made valiant efforts to speak up for the UK staying in the Europe but they came tagged as denizens of the House of Lords, the least democratic chamber of any parliament in the world, where a cheque buys the right to be a legislator. Above all, Prime Minister Cameron turned the entire referendum into a personal vote of confidence.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

And monetary policy was easier for national governments to give up because most countries already had independent central banks, the politicians were not losing control of anything. It became a technocratic matter between central bankers and people at the Commission.’ Andrew Cahn, the British chef de cabinet to Neil Kinnock 1997–2000, agrees with Lamy. ‘It was the classic tactics of advance. You establish the ERM, that runs into trouble, so you have to go forward to a single currency. And when the half-way house single currency without fiscal convergence runs into trouble you have to go forward to the full-blooded single currency.’

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945
by Pat Thane
Published 18 Apr 2010

On the other hand, in 1986, several Labour-controlled inner-London boroughs and the Inner London Education Authority began promoting more positive images of gay men and lesbians as part of sex education in schools, most controversially in Haringey. These were highly publicized and often caricatured in the media, prompting the formation of the Parents Rights Group in protest. A leaked letter from Patricia Hewitt, then-press secretary to Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party, revealed concern that ‘the gay and lesbians issue is costing us dear among the pensioners’.156 When proposals began to come forward to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities, the party did not have a coherent position.157 The 1987 Conservative election manifesto made clear the party’s intention to clamp down on ‘sexual propaganda’ in schools, and it was a significant issue during the election, explicitly supported by Thatcher.158 The outcome was the passage of Section 28 of the 1987 Local Government Bill, introduced as a backbench amendment, which made it illegal for local authorities to ‘intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or to ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

The English
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 29 Jan 2013

They have produced only one memorable Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, but at least he stands head-and-shoulders above many of the rest of the holders of that office this century. Figures like Aneurin Bevan have kept the radical Welsh tradition alive, but their advancement has been barred not only because so many of the English are, with rare exceptions in their history, inherently conservative, but because they just find it so difficult to trust the Welsh. When Neil Kinnock failed to lead the Labour party to victory in the 1992 election, the party sensed it was partly because of English distrust of the Welsh, and immediately replaced him with a Scot, John Smith. Smith possessed the subfusc Scottish virtues that the English appreciate. They are the qualities of Lowland Scots, listed by the historian Richard Faber as ‘industry, economy, toughness, caution, pedantry, argumentativeness, lack of humour’.14 The last is certainly unfair to Smith, who, had he not been struck down by a heart attack, would no doubt have become the first Scottish Labour Prime Minister since Ramsay MacDonald in the 1930s.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

After the election in 2015, the Chancellor met Rupert Murdoch twice ‘off the record’ just before cutting the BBC’s funding by forcing it to bear the cost of free TV licences for over-75s; Treasury officials met senior executives from Murdoch’s company four times.39 Through 21st Century Fox, Murdoch has a controlling stake in Sky UK, the satellite broadcaster, which would benefit from a weakened BBC. Murdoch, an Australian-born naturalised American, has never hidden his intention to influence British politics. When Labour leader Neil Kinnock lost the general election in April 1992, the now notorious headline in The Sun was ‘It’s The Sun wot won it’; the newspaper had run relentless attacks on Kinnock and the Labour Party, culminating in an equally famous headline on election day itself: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’

Pompeii
by Robert Harris
Published 31 Oct 2003

BY THE SAME AUTHOR Fiction Fatherland Enigma Archangel Non-fiction A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman) Gotcha! The Making of Neil Kinnock Selling Hitler Good and Faithful Servant ROBERT HARRIS POMPEII HUTCHINSON LONDON First published by Hutchinson in 2003 Copyright © Robert Harris 2003 Robert Harris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Map of Aqua Augusta by Reginald Piggott Hutchinson The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa The Random House Group Limited Reg.

The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways
by Michael Williams
Published 6 May 2015

Even Heath Robinson might have struggled to invent it … OUT OF SHREWSBURY station and over a rusty bridge, ducking and diving through some back alleys down onto the bank of the Severn, where I’m sidestepping the puddles and already out of breath. ‘Could you imagine carrying your luggage all this way just to change trains?’ My guide, Mansel Williams, a town councillor with a curious resemblance to the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, is leading the way from Shrewsbury’s main station to the site of the almost mythical and long-closed Abbey Foregate Street, terminus of the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Railway, perhaps the most hopeless line ever built in Britain. If there was a prize for the lost causes of British railway history, then this obscure branch line would surely deserve to be the winner.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

Instead, he got a demand for an immediate £500,000. Most ordinary investors would baulk at anything remotely on that scale, but Stockwell was no ordinary investor. The trouble was that, six weeks later, there was a similar letter. By February 1992, in the run-up to the election stand-off between John Major and Neil Kinnock, the demands were pouring in at the rate of £100,000 a week. ‘It coincided with the collapse in property values and astronomical interest rates after Black Wednesday, and I was facing total wipeout,’ he says. ‘I had no income coming in. All my businesses were in receivership. I was spending 30 or 40 per cent of the time with the receivers, just picking up the pieces out of the chaos.’

Checkpoint Charlie
by Iain MacGregor
Published 5 Nov 2019

Finally was a dinner, where the Corbetts would find themselves flanked by guests speaking fluent French or German, and needing to focus extra hard on the speeches being delivered in these languages. This diplomatic life did have its high points, too, such as hosting very charismatic VIPs, like Princess Anne, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, various VIPs, and of course, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Outside of official duties as the commandant’s wife, unlike her husband, Susie did enjoy a great deal of freedom to travel around the city and into East Berlin. “I was assigned my own driver—a Greek-Cypriot called Herr Georgio who insured I was safely driven wherever I wanted to go.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

The British had long made a fetish of property, compared with the more cautious Germans or relaxed French, but it was as though the obsession with buying and selling houses was turning into a national mania, or illness. In June 1987, when Margaret Thatcher won her second landslide election victory preaching the virtues of a property-owning democracy, the average house price in the UK had been £45,809; in April 1992 when John Major beat Neil Kinnock it stood at £64,509 and in May 1997, at the time of Blair’s victory, it was only a touch higher at £68,085. Then under Brown’s stewardship as Chancellor it soared as the economy raced ahead. By August 2007, and the first public stirrings of the credit crisis, the average house price in the UK was £199,612.

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
by Iain Gately
Published 27 Oct 2001

Meanwhile in Great Britain the traditional art of pipe smoking continued to attract new adherents. While in gentle decline overall, the habit did not attract the vilification accorded to cigarettes, and indeed was considered sufficiently respectable for politicians to dare to appear in public smoking a pipe. Neil Kinnock, leader of Great Britain’s Labour opposition, and Tony Benn, a member of his shadow cabinet, were both committed pipe-men. Pipe smoking was patronized by a broad cross-section of society. Winners of the British ‘Pipesmoker of the Year’ awards included the disc jockey Dave Lee Travis in 1982, the astronomer Patrick Moore in 1983, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion Henry Cooper in 1984 and the cricketer Ian Botham in 1988.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

* For more than one hundred years Labour’s troubled relationship with the public schools has presented it with political and individual challenges. It is, after all, a movement that was brought into being by the Fabian Society, a socialist group dominated by the Victorian elite. While many of Labour’s politicians have roots among the working classes, from Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald to Harold Wilson and Neil Kinnock, plenty do not. After the war a clutch of public school-educated men, including Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell and Hugh Dalton, held high office in Labour governments. Aristocrats like Anthony Wedgwood Benn (who renounced his title, 2nd Viscount Stansgate, to become an MP known simpy as Tony Benn) and Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, also became pioneering social reformers in the Labour Party.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

In the three decades following the war, this momentum carried public ownership further than it had ever been intended to go, as telecoms, airlines, banking, car manufacturing, railways and even travel agents became state-owned. The momentum, once established, was unstoppable. The Labour Party during this time developed a phobia about free markets because it smelled of the very thing they were trying to eradicate: privilege. It was ironic, therefore, that it was a Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who finally brought this statist movement to an end in his conference speech at Bournemouth in 1985, attacking the left wing of his party and calling for them to end their dogmatic opposition in order to win elections: I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

In the general election of 1983, the hitherto profoundly unpopular Thatcher government, surfing the wave of national jingoism born of victory over Argentina in the Falklands War the previous year, inflicted a catastrophic landslide defeat on a divided Labour Party, which the party’s right and its media allies blamed squarely on the Labour left. From this point on, the party’s direction of travel was encapsulated in its new, post-election leader, Neil Kinnock: originally from the left, he abandoned the party’s more radical policies, and tacked right. In 1985, the most seismic industrial struggle in post-war British history – the miners’ strike – ended in devastating defeat for the miners. Thatcherism had aspired to create a new political consensus of privatization, deregulation, toothless trade unions, and low taxes for big business and the wealthy.

The America That Reagan Built
by J. David Woodard
Published 15 Mar 2006

Hart’s departure left the Democratic race without a frontrunner, and the remaining candidates were disparagingly labeled the ‘‘seven dwarfs’’ by the nowvigilant press. Shortly afterward, Joseph Biden’s campaign was under scrutiny when he was found to have plagiarized a speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. The investigation revealed that Biden had earlier been guilty of a similar type of plagiarism when in law school. These misrepresentations resulted in his withdrawal. Biden’s exit was engineered by John Sasso, the campaign manager for Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Sasso provided the media with videotaped copies of Biden’s plagiarism, and then lied about doing so.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

‘There was a fridge, which was something I’d never had before, an electric cooker, electric kettle.’8 ‘Mother went to the housing office every Wednesday,’ remembered Mary Sprakes, ‘and my father went every Saturday to see where they were on the list. Such was the demand that the housing officer had a nervous breakdown. In the end my mother found a councillor that she vaguely knew, contacted him and they got a prefab.’9 Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock grew up in one too. ‘It seemed like living in a spaceship,’ he said of the modern amenities like fridges and plumbed-in baths that few at the time had.10 One of the residents of Excalibur, Eddie O’Mahoney, had lived there from the time it was built and was still there when this book was being written.

Lustrum
by Robert Harris
Published 6 Sep 2010

His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He is married to Gill Hornby and they live with their four children in a village near Hungerford. Also by Robert Harris FICTION Fatherland Enigma Archangel Pompeii Imperium The Ghost NON-FICTION A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman) Gotcha! The Making of Neil Kinnock Selling Hitler Good and Faithful Servant AUTHOR'S NOTE A few years before the birth of Christ, a biography of the Roman orator and statesman Cicero was produced by his former secretary, Tiro. That there was such a man as Tiro, and that he wrote such a work, is well-attested. 'Your services to me are beyond count,' Cicero once wrote to him, 'in my home and out of it, in Rome and abroad, in my studies and literary work …' He was three years younger than his master, born a slave, but long outlived him, surviving – according to Saint Jerome – until he reached his hundredth year.

I You We Them
by Dan Gretton

The strikers and the unions who represented them (then NUPE and COHSE) were soon asking us to support their fight by taking ‘Addenbrooke’s Blues’ around the country to raise awareness. For the next few months our studies were left behind as the intoxication of political theatre and campaigning took over – the show became even punchier, media coverage and fundraising for the strikers increased, as we toured from the House of Commons (meeting Neil Kinnock and Michael Meacherfn1 in the process), to the TUC education centre and numerous public meetings and events at hospitals affected by similar issues of creeping privatisation. Every performance would end with a rousing rendition of a song we’d adapted from the brilliant American singer and activist Phil Ochs: Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of, Mrs Thatcher find yourself another country to be part of!

…

The piece (together with the real objects and photographs) can now only be seen at the Imperial War Museum. 2 Taken from the transcript of Meili’s testimony to the US Senate, ‘Hearing on Shredding of Holocaust Era Documents’, 6 May 1997. 3 The Bergier Commission (Book One, Chapter Six – ‘Saurer: A Coda’). 4 I examine in detail IG Farben’s collusion with Nazism and the operation of their Buna-Monowitz complex at Auschwitz in the next volume of I You We Them. 4 Journeys with J. 1 Neil Kinnock at this time was leader of the opposition Labour Party and Michael Meacher was the shadow health secretary. 2 See chapter notes for details. 5 The Town of Organised Forgetting 1 The version of this document that Lanzmann includes in Shoah is considerably summarised, so I reproduce the full text here. 2 Kulmhof was the German name for the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland. 3 See chapter notes for more information. 4 Information on Just from Fateful Months by Christopher Browning, chapter 3: ‘The Development and Production of the Nazi Gas Van’, note 33. 5 The ‘T4’ programme will be explored in greater detail in Book One, Chapter Thirteen, ‘The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake’. 8 ‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues’ 1 Cited in Amnesty’s 2017 report A Criminal Enterprise?

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

‘I’d like to be a plasterer like my dad,’ reported one twelve-year-old boy interviewed on a London housing estate in 1983. ‘Dad says if you’ve got a trade you’ve always got something to fall back on.’36 But that was no longer true in a decade when skilled work was declining, and skilled workers were likely to suffer unemployment. Meanwhile, where was Labour? After a brief swing to the left in the early 1980s, Neil Kinnock had taken charge of the party in 1983. Kinnock argued that Labour had to ‘adjust to a changing economy’ by appealing to ‘a changing electorate’, including the ‘docker … who owns his house, a new car, microwave and video, as well as a small place near Marbella’.37 Labour, argued frontbencher Michael Meacher, needed to recruit ‘the technocratic class – the semi-conductor “chip” designers, the computer operators, the industrial research scientists, the high-tech engineers – who hold the key to Britain’s future … The growing underclass of have-nots, large and desperate though it is, can only in the end come to power through policies that assist, and are seen to assist, the not-so-poor and not-so-powerless.’38 Unsurprisingly, given such sentiments, the national party offered lukewarm support to the NUM during the miners’ strike of 1984–5.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

The passion that his cause and his despairing supporters so badly needed was, for him, a private virtue. ‘When you are a doctor, you have to learn to control your tears, your grief,’ he said. Without passion the political centre could not – and did not – hold. On the Saturday after the election I was in Edinburgh to hear Neil Kinnock address the Scottish Miners’ Gala. Having until then only seen gobbets of his speeches on television, I had not realized how devoid of content they were. The empty phrases rolled round the interior of a damp marquee. His audience, which had been warmed up by some formidable old-timers like Mick McGahey of the National Union of Mineworkers, was in a nostalgic mood.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

So, there was no challenge to the increasingly unfair way in which British capitalism operated, to the way ownership responsibilities were discharged or to the centrality of the City of London and the financial sector to the British economy. According to Margaret Cook, her husband Robin felt physically ill when he first had to support New Labour’s policies.3 On holiday in France with Alastair Campbell, Neil Kinnock accused the bankers of having the party by the ‘fucking balls’. The two men laughed about the irony of the situation even before New Labour had ‘taken its 30 pieces of silver’.4 If senior figures like Kinnock and Cook were private, angry dissenters, rank-and-file MPs were more openly rebellious.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Today only 5 per cent of Americans believe the Republicans are ‘compassionate’, and as Arthur Brooks said, ‘If you take elected Republicans, paid staff, and blood relatives out of that [5 per cent] it probably rounds to about zero.’7 Indeed, even a majority of American conservatives believe the Republicans are uncompassionate, and I’d be amazed if the same wasn’t true of Tories.8 Neil Kinnock said in a famous speech in 1983 that if the Tories won: ‘I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old.’9 I knew that Thatcher’s famous quote ‘there is no such thing as society’ was sort of misinterpreted, that she meant society was not one composite whole but made up of a number of smaller networks of clubs, communities and ‘little platoons’ in Burke’s words.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

We can’t go your way.”31 Sarkozy was characteristically more confrontational: “David, we will not pay you to save the euro.” Then he turned on the newly elected Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt (by coincidence married to the son of the former British Labour leader and EU commissioner Neil Kinnock) when it seemed she was pushing for something all twenty-seven EU members could agree on: “You’re an out, a small out, and you’re new. We don’t want to hear from you.”32 Everywhere in Europe, the response was devastating. France’s Le Monde newspaper concluded that “The Europe of 27 is finished,” while Germany’s Der Spiegel declared “Bye-Bye Britain.”33 The governor of the Banque de France, Christian Noyer, told a newspaper that based on economic fundamentals, the agencies should downgrade Great Britain rather than France because it had “higher deficits, more debt, higher inflation and less growth.”34 Europeans were appalled at how the last-minute injection of finicky points about bank regulation could stymie what was supposed to be a breakthrough on the regulation of budgets in Europe.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

The Liberal-SDP Alliance, formed in part by moderate defectors from Labour, benefited from the party’s self-immolation, but never quite managed to establish itself as a credible alternative to Thatcher’s reign and ultimately fragmented the forces of opposition to her, thus cementing her rule. Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, was a more serious contender to national leadership, but he, too, was hampered by his party’s resistance to change. Thatcher’s resounding defeat of the miners rebounded on Labour itself, which had drawn much of its power from the trade union movement and had correspondingly identified itself with the miners’ cause (even if Kinnock made a point of denouncing their violence and often undemocratic tactics).

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

And after his campaign failed, I was lost.” In early September, Connaughton took a break from the campaign to attend the Alabama–Penn State game. He was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside when a news bulletin came on the radio station: Biden, at a debate in Iowa, had plagiarized a speech by a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock, even stealing Kinnock’s identity as a descendant of coal miners. As an isolated case it would have been a story without legs. But having already brought down Hart, the media—Maureen Dowd and E. J. Dionne in the Times, Eleanor Clift in Newsweek—smelled another scandal and they competed to dig up other Biden faults: lines lifted from Hubert Humphrey and RFK; a badly footnoted law school essay that resulted in a failing grade; exaggerated claims about his past.

GCHQ
by Richard Aldrich
Published 10 Jun 2010

With all legal remedies now exhausted, the focus of the GCHQ trade unions’ campaign was now the repeated promises from the Labour Party to restore union rights in full.66 In 1983 the Labour leader, Michael Foot, had pledged himself to ‘restore in full all rights of the trade unionists at GCHQ’. In 1984 and again in 1987 his successor Neil Kinnock gave the same undertaking. The Labour Manifesto for the July 1987 general election included the promise, but Margaret Thatcher was returned to power for a third time, albeit with a reduced majority.67 The last trade unionist at GCHQ, Gareth Morris, was sacked on 2 March 1989.68 Ironically, the government’s drive to bring in the polygraph, arguably the main reason for the abrupt nature of the ban in January 1984, failed.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

‘I know we’re asked to make briquettes of it, but can you tell me why we get so much of it?’ Housing remained a continuing, high-profile worry, though at least the much-disparaged prefabs (described by Mary King in her diary as ‘a blot on the lovely English scenery’) were for the time being still going up. Neil Kinnock’s family moved in November 1947 to a new two-bedroom prefab on a council estate at Nant-y Bwch. ‘It was like moving to Beverly Hills,’ he recalled. ‘It had a fridge, a bath, central heating and a smokeless grate . . . and people used to come just to look at it.’ As for clothing restrictions, Anthony Heap’s experience a few weeks earlier was probably typical: Hopefully hied up to Burton’s branch at The Angel, to order one of the fifteen ‘made to measure’ suits that comprise their present weekly ‘quota’.

Gorbachev: His Life and Times
by William Taubman

While “not an intellectual,” he had a “very good memory and a disciplined head,” and was “quick on the uptake,” much “quicker than his more ‘intellectual’ wife” to get the point of the unfamiliar plot of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte and to “appreciate the spirit and humor of the production.” Whether addressing British or Soviets, he seemed extraordinarily “natural.” But he could be tough, even brutal. When Labour party leader Neil Kinnock privately pressed him on human rights, particularly on the case of dissident Natan Sharansky, who had then been in a Soviet prison for seven years, Gorbachev responded with a volley of obscenities and threats against “turds” and spies like Sharansky. Prison was “where he would stay,” Gorbachev warned (although he himself would release Sharansky as part of a larger exchange of detainees in 1986), and Britain would “get it right in the teeth” in a “merciless” denunciation of its own human rights violations if that was the game it wanted to play.139 At the end of the visit, Mrs.

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

There was also the small matter of ties with Europe: a good chunk of the Conservative Party wanted a European free-trade zone, but nothing more, whereas the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which the UK government signed, seemed to imply an element of political union with the EEC (now rebranded as the European Union or EU); right-wing Tories were apoplectic and their frequent and very public demonstrations of disloyalty further hobbled the Major government. The Blair years Wracked by factionalism in the 1980s, the Labour Party regrouped under Neil Kinnock and then John Smith, though neither of them reaped the political rewards. These dropped into the lap of a new and dynamic young leader, Tony Blair (b.1953), who soon pushed the party further away from traditional left-wing socialism. Blair’s cloak of idealistic, media-friendly populism worked to devastating effect, sweeping the Labour Party to power in the general election of May 1997 on a wave of genuine popular optimism.