171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1)

33:16And you told us in Bournemouth about this. I did. I did. Indeed. Okay. Right. I'm going to hand back to you on the 1970s, because as you say, we're getting ahead of ourselves. What I wanted to ask you, Neil, is when you get into Parliament, you saw very close up and got to know very well three of the leaders at the time. It just went very, you know, literally in a sentence, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Michael Foote. Harold, utterly brilliant, but assailed constantly by self-doubt for reasons I could never really fathom and brought down eventually by illness. Because in any other set of circumstances, if he'd sustained his full energy and capacity, he would have only moved when he wanted to.

33:58Jim, again, in a funny way, a man with self-doubts, although huge capacities. Jim was born down throughout his life by the fact that his background was too poor to enable him to go to university. And he really did envy those of us who came from a generation where it had become much more usual for kids from working class backgrounds to get there. When I went there, it was still only three or four percent of the age cohort were going to university. But that was huge by comparison with Jim's day. And despite his accomplishments, the fact that I still think he's the only person to have had the three great offices of prime minister, foreign secretary and home secretary.

34:48He still had this inner doubt about his abilities. and I did have one or two conversations over the years with him in which I was very dismissive as somebody who'd worked in adult education about the idea that he could be a full commanding intellectual presence without a degree. And he simply didn't agree with me. And Michael was shy. and flamboyant, was coy and adventurous, and someone who had a fundamental belief in the superiority of British radicalism, progressive radicalism. And so from an early age, even when he was a member of the Liberal Party and Liberal President of the Oxford Union, for instance.

35:53He had this belief in emancipation of the people economically, socially, and culturally, which was impeded by the system, which when he became a shipping clerk in Liverpool in the early 1930s and encountered desperate, desolating poverty, turned him into a very radical socialist. He was a great man who had unremitting loyalty to his friends and one of the best levels of understanding of young people I've ever encountered in a politician. Which brings us to the Tories of the 70s. Hold on, hold on. Before we leave that, you joined the Labour Party when Michael Foot was leaving. Yeah, I can understand that.

36:43Yeah, exactly. I love the intellectualism. I loved the writing I loved the whole that's the sense that's right I mean his pen was magical in the sense that what he produced was wonderful his writing was indecipherable and Una his secretary was I used to say she was responsible for his greatness because she'd written it all how she ever understood his handwriting God only knows okay Neil Rory quick break and then back for more

37:19hi everybody it is dominic sandbrook here from the rest is history now you have probably been watching the scenes on the streets of iran you may be wondering where all this comes from so on the rest is history we have just recorded a four-part series on recent iranian history so it kicks off with the iranian revolution that brought down the shah muhammad rezar palavi in 1978 1979 1979. And it's actually his son who is now leading opposition to the Ayatollahs from exile in the United States. So in this series, we explore the history behind the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the end of the 70s. Where did people like Ayatollah Khomeini come from?

38:01Where did their ideas come from? Why did they have so much support? Why was the Shah driven out of Iran in the first place? And what did it have to do with American intervention and indeed British intervention in the 1950s. And we look at the unfolding story of the revolution, and then the amazing story of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, the taking of initially 66 hostages by the Iranians. This is probably the story that I've most enjoyed researching and writing. So please, if you're interested in Iranian history and what's going on, check it out. And if you want a taster, we have a clip for you at the end of this episode.

38:45So Neil, let's just have a look at some of the Tories of the 70s. I don't know who you'd select, but I'd love to know about Ted Heath. I'd love to know a bit about Enoch Powell, maybe Willie Whitelaw. Give us a sense of these people that you saw when you arrived in the 70s. What you saw is what you got with Willie. He was robustness on legs, but like a lot of his generation. And this includes Ted Heath and Francis Pym and Lord Carrington and others. Some of them had come from aristocratic backgrounds, some from prosperous middle-class backgrounds, and got to 1939, usually in Oxbridge, without much encounter with the normality of life, because to be prosperous in their upbringing in the 20s and 30s was simply not to encounter many of the realities of life that were commonplace to huge majorities.

39:45They then served in the war, and it, in many cases, altered their perception of their fellow countrymen and women. So although they were conservatives, when 1945 came, and the gigantic labor majority and the extraordinary accomplishments of the Atlee government in terms of full employment, the welfare state, the development of the economy, the subsidizing and support of basic industries. They were the people who persuaded the conservative leadership not to drop any of it, to oppose it vociferously, but in government, not to change it. And by the time we get to the 1970s, these people are the elder statesmen of the Conservative Party.

40:38They included Willie, who had been a guards officer, maybe he was in a tank regiment, but he'd had a notable war and learned a great deal that took him away from his background and his public school and all the rest of it and put him very firmly, feet on both ground, in the center ground of politics. Now, the same thing applied to quite a lot of the others. Ted Heath made a temporary departure from that consensual politics in the period before the 1970 election, when he embraced what became known as Selstam Man after the hotel in which they drew up this manifesto, which was very radically right wing.

41:30Dropped after two years in government because unemployment had unbelievably reached one million. which provoked absolute outrage in a generation that had thought they were never going to see that number of unemployed again. And it daunted Ted. Ted did a U-turn, which then in turn generated serious and bitter resentment in parts of the Conservative Party, which is why he was overthrown and replaced by Margaret Thatcher. Neil, right at the heart of the moment that you are taking over leadership is this new party is emerging called the SDP. The SDP is this incredible thing. More than 20 MPs defect to this new centrist liberalist party.

42:19Only one Tory. And you end up with these huge beasts, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rogers, Shirley Williams, leaving the cabinet, going to it. They get up to 25 % of the polls. The Labour Party's down to 23 % in the polls, looks for a moment as though the Labour Party's now in third place and it could be finished, and this whole new political force emerge. In other words, it feels a bit like, it must feel for the Tories at the moment, was reform. So what lessons did you learn from that and how to deal with them? And are the lessons actually the Conservatives could learn in dealing with reform today?

42:51In some ways, Glennis's definition of the SDP was very accurate. She said, they're trying to represent themselves as the Labour Party without the unions, but with the bomb. And that was a very opposite definition. And of course, they were a gift to the Tories because they divided the anti-non-conservative vote almost down the middle, especially after they'd allied with the Liberal Democrats. So this gave Thatcher a quite remarkable opportunity. What I've always said is a real war in the Falklands, the appearance of the beginnings of economic recovery, and the political war between the SDP and Labour gave her that gigantic majority in 1983.

43:42How did I deal with them? Well, first of all, by denouncing them, because I couldn't afford to be represented as in any sense SDP Mark II, but simultaneously seeking to jettison those parts of the Labour policy that really impeded the possibility of getting the breadth of support that we'd need to win an election. And I knew that was going to be a long slog. I used to speak of a two-innings match. I didn't think that we could ever do it in one election. Of course, that was pretty obvious and right. And then as we gradually disgorged these policies that had been such an impediment, we began to see a real reduction in support of the Social Democrats.

44:37And eventually it ended up with them being defeated in the brutal by-election by screaming Lord Such, at which point the SPD was finished. They weren't defeated. They had fewer votes. The Screaming Law Search didn't win the violation. No, quite absolutely. They had less votes than David Sachs. Neil, what are the lessons, if you were Kemi Badenow, dealing with the fact that you've got Tory MPs defecting to reform, reform ahead of the Conservatives in the polls? What would be the lesson for her on how to deal with this new party, this new threat? Well, she's got to take them on, denounce them in the way that I denounced the STP, while adopting our form of the policy areas that really were acceptable to and could be sincerely embraced by Labour and were not emulating these policies set out and demanded by the Social Democrats.

45:38Now, the differences on the left of politics are more subtle than they would be on the right of politics. But nevertheless, that is the avenue that she has got to follow in order to try to restrain the slippage to reform and to restore the conventional patriotic Christian Democrat welfare state supporting market liking small government demanding but never doing conservative party of your antecedent. You're referring to Willie Whitelaw here. That's what my auntie said. Exactly. I mean, Willie, Ted Heath, all the rest of it. The conservatives can succeed when they have no ideology. They have a presence, an organization, and they can attract the expectation of steadiness, dependability, reliability amongst the public.

46:45and still in office give the impression, sometimes under Thatcher genuine, otherwise not genuine, of being abreast of and slightly ahead of change. Now, when they do that, they're a formidable force. When they depart from it, well, we see what happened in 2024, and it would happen again. People from the SDP have long suggested that the changes I made were possible because of the pressures imposed by the existence of the Social Democratic Party. The opposite is true. They were a damn nuisance because every shift that I argued for, every change that I made drew the accusation of being SDP Mark II.

47:35And so that slowed the whole process of change. It meant that I had to argue on an additional front and not just on the straightforward merits or lack of them of a policy. And they really seriously got in the way of change. So instead of being the agency of change, they were an impediment. Now, you became leader of the Labour Party in the wake of Michael Foote, leading the party to a pretty catastrophic defeat in 1983. And I guess the early stages of your leadership were defined in many ways. I mentioned briefly earlier, the battle with militant, but there was also the minor strike. Just take us through both of those in order, minor strike, and then we'll come on to dealing with militant.

48:22How hard was it for you to be seen to be, quote, taking on or being very anti-Scargill? We all knew what you felt about Scargill. When in your blood was this visceral belonging to mining as a community. Arthur Scargill, the radical leader of the National Union of Miners, who was the great face of the miners' strike against Mrs. Thatcher in the 1980s at the time when she was closing coal In a sense, it was in no way uncomfortable for me to be against Scargill because I was for the miners. If I put it into context, I never had much time for Scargill. I'd met him first in 1969 in the first National Miners Conference that I went to.

49:12And would you put him in that group that you were talking about earlier that believed in extra parliamentary revolutionary change? Yes, but he was more of a syndicalist. I'm sorry about another ism, Rory. What's a syndicalist? I'll tell you what a syndicalist is. Syndicalism developed in the mid-19th century in France under, I think, a man called Proudhon, who offered the idea that power grew and should grow from the point of production. So that consequently, their workers, Marx came to call the proletariat, could secure emancipation by the use or withdrawal of their labor. I'm simplifying things.

49:57That's why the French call the unions les syndicats. Which is what it boils down to. Oh, it's the other way around. The syndicalists are called syndicalists because of les syndicats. And that was adopted as a thesis by an element in the labor movement, especially in the wake of the First World War. It had existed beforehand, but in the wake of the First World War, when there was this buzzing, boiling confusion of isms in the wake of the revolution in Russia and all the rest of it, and indeed in Germany and Rosa Luxemburg, Then in the midst of all that, they emerged in South Wales. It happens a man called Noah Ablett, who is a brilliant speaker and a wonderful organizer, a coal miner, originally from the West Country, but from the Ronda Valley, who secured dominance of the South Wales Miners Federation and preached syndicalism, which seemed to be an entirely rational creed to a lot of people because obviously the whole of the life of those industrial areas derived from coal mining, from production and the sale of their output, which created massive fortunes on a Musk level, if you want a modern comparison.

51:21Anyway, Ablett was the leader of the South Wales Miners' Federation and the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, who got the TUC in 1926 to adopt a general strike, which lasted for nine days in the transport and other industries, but lasted for, I think, seven or eight months in the coal mining industry. And to fast forward, I'm being mean here, but Scargill is the heir of that tradition, the intellectual heir of that tradition. Scargill embraced the ideas of Ablett, even though Ablett had, in the wake of the general strike, rejected his previous belief in syndicalism. By the 1960s, 70s, Scargill, a former member of the Young Communist League and a reluctant member of the Labour Party, as far as I'm concerned, was putting forward the idea, which he articulated during the strike, that by exercising their industrial power, the workers of this country could dislodge a government which was utterly opposed to them.

52:33and establish a much better form of accountable democracy. Just once more for listeners, quick summary of what Thatcher was doing with the mines, what Scargill was opposing, and the choice that you were faced with on trying to work out what position to take against Thatcher, what position to take against Scargill, what you felt the right policy was towards mining. The resentments against the coal miners in the wake of the 1974 strike and election was monumental. Thatcher and others believed that there would one day be a reckoning, and there should be. And so by 1981, when Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister again, a very unpopular prime minister at the time, there was a strike, a pay strike, threatened in the coal mining industry, by which time Arthur Skagel had become president of the National Union Mine Workers.

53:34And Thatcher was going to confront him, but eventually backed down because she realized she hadn't organized in anticipation of a national coal mining strike. And to everybody's astonishment and delight in the coal fields, the miners won their paying claim and some of the concessions and advantages in addition. In the wake of that experience in 81, Margaret Thatcher insisted on the building up of cold stocks, which by the spring of 1984 were 40 % above their usual level. She secured changes in the law, which denied the families of strikers any form of welfare benefits. She organized a national communication arrangement for the British police forces and secured the appointment of Ian McGregor to be chairman of the National Call Board.

54:40In other words, she was prepared for a minor strike. What she never anticipated, but must have delighted her, was the fact that the minor The strike started in March, with the summer coming not far behind. And most amazing of all, that the strike was undertaken without a pit-head Democratic ballot, which is unprecedented. Who made you a blood boil more at that time, Thatcher or Scargill? Oh, I couldn't tell you. I mean, I've said, and I repeat, Scargill and Thatcher deserved each other. Nobody else did. I mean, they were both in different ways entirely ideologically committed to the idea of total victory.

55:27The difference being one was a prepared conservative prime minister and the other was a man who was willing to exploit the superhuman solidarity and loyalty of coal miners, especially young coal miners, who feared justifiably for their future. Do you have any regrets about any of your handling of that time? Yes, in the sense that while I'd made my position clear publicly and privately to Scargill and the NUM executive at the outset of the strike, that there had to be a ballot. Because if there wasn't a ballot, the strike would lack legitimacy. It would be impossible to attract sympathetic action from other trade unions and workers.

56:20and the miners would be on the back foot politically because they had no democratic mandate. And the consequence would be a divided labor force. And what are you saying? You feel you didn't push for that hard enough, fight for that hard enough? I should have said it at more regular intervals, more loudly, so that I would have reduced the possibility of misrepresentation. There would have been misrepresentation with the kind of media that we've got in any case. And it suited the conservative political interests, obviously, to misrepresent my position. But I should more forcibly have said this strike will not be successful and worse, will end in disaster if it lacks legitimacy, which can only be gained with the ballot.

57:16The reason that I didn't say it more forcefully or with increasing publicity is that by the time we were in the third and fourth month of the strike and several of the coal fields, particularly South Wales, had endured a loss of wages as a result of the work to rule before the strike started, and then the strike itself, and the deprivation of communities and families. What I didn't want to do was to give any impression that I wasn't supporting their cause, the case for coal, which was Britain's main energy source at the time, preponderant energy source, and had a serious economic argument to support it.

58:04I didn't want to give the impression that I was flagging in my support for their cause, and thereby, apart from demoralizing them, which would have been terrible, to allow Scargill the opportunity to claim that they were only not winning because of my lack of endeavor. Let's just go back to that militant speech in 1985. As you know, I'm a great lover and student of oratory. And I think it was one of the finest oratorical moments of the last century, frankly. And you remind us what you said. I'd love to be reminded. Can you remember the great lines of that speech? There are people who can recite the whole speech, or at least that part of it.

58:52I can't. But when you woke up that morning, and I've worked with you on speeches, you're a complete nightmare because you got the red pen out until the very, very end of the process. You basically write all your own speeches. But did you know when you woke up that morning, you were going to say the things that you said in the way that you said them and with the effect that they had? I didn't wake up that morning because I had been in the bed, which was my appalling habit the night before the leader's speech in conference for a variety of reasons, none of them really good ones. I didn't start to write those speeches until at least half past 10 on the Monday night before the Duesli performance, which was stupid, but there we are.

59:34So I woke up on Monday morning, as it were, as I had on several previous mornings, determined to make that speech or that part of the speech. And so I had no doubt at all about it. I hadn't rehearsed the phrases in my mind or anything, but I knew that I was going to use a relatively recent development of them sending out redundancy notices by taxi because they couldn't get the unionized council workforce to distribute the redundancy notices. I was going to use that as an illustration of their malignancy and their incompetence. I knew I was going to say that, but not in the precise syntax that I offered.

1:00:24And did you know it was going to have the kind of impact that it did, both in terms of the moment of some of your critics storming out in a sort of self-indulgent way, Derek Hatton responding the way that he did, but above all, I think the longer-term impact, which means that we can still talk about it so many years later with quite a lot of our listeners absolutely clear what we're talking about. They were going to get it whether they liked it or not. But it could have gone wrong for you. Oh, it could have, easily. I mean, what I couldn't have dreamt of was that reaction that you referred to of Hatton getting up and shouting at the platform and Eric Heffer walking out, which gave a dramatization that made the occasion even more memorable.

1:01:09I couldn't have dreamt of that. And I was just very fortunate that that was their reaction. I mean, I was provoking them into a fight, which I was looking forward to. Because the thing that I realized, which very few other people did, was that whatever I said on that day, if we were going to, quote, quote, take on militant, then we were going to have to follow up the speech with a knockdown, drag out process of evidence gathering and prosecution. Which went on for a long time. I did. Months, eight months altogether, I think. And hundreds of hours. And it drove me nuts and it distracted everybody.

1:01:49And it was a reminder all the time of the division in the party. But it had to be done. And I would have done it the year before, but I couldn't do it in the middle of the minor strike. I mean, if I was lucky, it wouldn't have been heard. And if I was unlucky, which I would have been, it would have been morally destructive or destructive immoral, which is slightly different. But they were going to get it on that morning or that afternoon in 1985. I can feel Rory gagging to relive the moment. So the speech that we remember goes, I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions.

1:02:34They're then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour Council, a Labour Council hiring taxis to scuttled around the city, handing out redundancy notices to his own workers. Yeah, up we go, up we go, up we go. I mean, the phrase in that, that told the story really irrelevant to the real needs, irrelevant to the real needs. That is, in my view, that's the cardinal sin. That's the Labour movement, the Labour Party, democratic socialists have always got to be relevant.

1:03:22Neil, one of the challenges then as you go forward, is you're now the leader of the Labour Party. You've taken over from Michael Foote. He's gone into 1983 with what most listeners will remember as the longest suicide note in history. A developing perception amongst bits of the British public is that Labour had gone to left wing underfoot. And you're beginning to sense as you go into 1987 that Labour needs to move more to the centre ground, win back those centre voters, and that some of the policies which are really angering the Labour left, one example of that will be Thatcher's attack on the unions, but another eventually becomes sales of council houses, are in fact actually quite popular with Middle Britain.

1:04:08So you then are faced with a real problem, right, which is that the idealistic ideological left of the Labour Party wants to remain very purist. And actually, even today, I noticed when I was an MP in 2015, I remember going into election and people saying, do you want to ride police horses into the face of the working man? Are you going to sell off council houses? This stuff becomes kind of mythical. But you're having to deal with the fact that you sense that the center ground British politics and middle ground voters actually in favor of things like the sale of council houses. How do you deal with that as a leader?

1:04:40I think I can best answer your question by focusing on one of the things that you refer to, sale of council houses. Now, I was brought up in a council house. My family were very, very, very relieved to move out of the appallingly bad terraced house that we had and into this centrally heated, fully equipped indoor toilet and bathroom, all mod cons in the kitchen, prefabricated house. Wonderful. It was a council house. And my parents lived there for 17 years altogether. And there were elements in the Labour Party who were resistant to any sale of council houses. I was actually in favor of it because I did comprehend that people who'd spent generations in a house, were very resentful at the idea that when the parents died and the tenancy was relinquished, there was nothing left, not simply in terms of monetary gain, but in terms of the home being disposed of by powers beyond their control.

1:05:56And I comprehended that. And what I most opposed in the Thatcher proposal was the way in which she prohibited by law the use of the revenue from the sale of councillors for new build and refurbishment, which I thought was utter madness. $63 billion it eventually amounted to that simply was at the disposal of the Treasury and not at the disposal of the local councils. It's a major cause of the social housing rental crisis we've got in the country now, these decades later. Now, in the party, there'd always been councils that sold council houses and derived success from them because they used the resources for new build and development and improvement and so on.

1:06:48But the element in the party that resisted any form of sale led by Tony Benn was an area of policy and people that I knew had to be overturned. And I set it as a primary objective when I was elected leader. And I can recount, in order to illustrate exactly what occurred, we got to the home policy meeting where a paper prepared by Jeff Rooker, now Lord Rooker and a dear friend and comrade, I'd made the housing spokesman, showed how the Labour Party could adopt a comprehensive policy for the sale of council houses and the renewal of housing stock. Wonderful. When we got to the meeting, the only way I could derive a majority in that meeting was if one of my two great trade Union mates on that committee.

1:07:48One went out for a smoke and the other one went to the toilet. And because they weren't there, I got a majority of one. They repeated the performance at the National Executive Committee and it was made a policy recommendation for the conference. Now, I'm gone into that detail in order to describe to you the sociology, if you like, of the Labour Party decision-making process at that time. In the course of the argument in the Home Policy Committee, Tony Benn intervened to say that these are not our houses to dispose of. These are the houses of the community. And that provoked me into intervening myself.

1:08:34I'd taken an oath not to intervene, just to get the vote, get it over with, Let the boys go to the lavatory and go out. You're not going to tell me temper got the best of your deal. But I burst at that and I said, Tony, you've never paid a rent or a mortgage in your life. This is class warfare. Exactly. Absolutely. And I gave him a proletarian lecture on the huge advantage of council housing and ownership, which I'd enjoyed since the day after I got married. And he was flabbergasted. Presumably this was an infuriating thing for Ben because it was always a great weakness that people could accuse him of being an aristocrat.

1:09:15Of course. And he was such a good guy. He was a nice man that he was really upset by my tirade. Anyway, we got a majority of one. The policy was changed and that was an alteration in the center of gravity of the Labour Party. But that left Europe, the bomb, trade union legislation, nationalization, and a few other things to be also changed. But I wasn't pursuing the center ground. I was trying to dispose of policy packages that were seriously and obviously impeding the Labour Party and any possibility of advance. And I just thought that, and I made the argument, that if you want the Labour Party to be doing good things, to be doing socialist things.

1:10:10We've got to get rid of these impediments so that we can get the power to do good. And eventually, of course, that's the argument that won. Well, that is what we'll talk about in part two of this interview. We'll talk about more about Thatcher. We'll talk more about Neil's elections and more about his life since then. So if you enjoyed that and you want to listen to more, we'll be back next week. But if you want to hear it straight away you have to become a member of the rest is politics plus and you do that if you don't know by now by going to the rest is politics.com but for now thank you very much thank you

1:10:53hello it's steph mcgovern here from the rest is money if you want to know why despite announcing major plans for the rail network the government keep derailing themselves give our latest episode a listen. There's also been another screeching U-turn from the government on digital IDs. And we're talking about Trump, whose fight with Fed Chair Jerome Powell has gone up a level. Has he met his match?

1:11:22Hi there, it's Dominic Sandbrook again from The Rest Is History. Now, I mentioned during the break that we have a new series on recent Iranian history. So here is a short extract for you. If you want to hear the whole series, then search for Revolution in Iran on The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts or search for us on YouTube.

1:11:54there are crowds in the streets every day there are attacks on banks and restaurants every day and already in some towns in iran power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by revolutionary strike committees now if you're with the revolution this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. And in his memoirs, Ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US embassy and looking out through an upstairs window. And he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings.

1:12:32And he thinks something has to change. We have to do something. So on the 9th of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title Thinking the Unthinkable. And he says, the Shah is finished. It's over. And if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the Shah right now. And it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. If you enjoyed that clip, then please search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.