Neil Kinnock

The Right Honourable Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock, PC (born 28 March, 1942) is a British politician. He was an MP from 1970 to 1995, and was the leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992, when he resigned after the 1992 general election defeat. He subsequently served as a member of the European Commission from 1995 until 2004, and is now head of the British Council.

Becomes Labour Party Leader

His first period as party leader - between the 1983 and 1987 elections - was dominated by his struggle with the hard left. Although Kinnock had come from the left of the party he parted company with many of his previous allies on his appointment to the shadow cabinet by Michael Foot in 1980. In 1981 Kinnock was alleged to have effectively scuppered Tony Benn's attempt to replace Denis Healey as Labour's deputy leader by first supporting the candidacy of the more traditionalist Tribunite John Silkin and then urging Silkin supporters to abstain on the second, run-off, ballot.

Related Topics:
1983 - 1987 - Hard left - Shadow cabinet - 1980 - 1981 - Tony Benn - Denis Healey - Tribunite - John Silkin

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All this meant that Kinnock had made plenty of enemies on the left by the time he was elected as leader ? though a substantial number of former Bennites gave him strong backing. He was almost immediately in serious difficulty as a result of Arthur Scargill's decision to lead his union, the National Union of Mineworkers into a national strike (in opposition to pit closures) without a ballot. The NUM was widely regarded as the Labour movement's praetorian guard and the strike convulsed the Labour movement. Kinnock supported the aim of the strike - which he famously dubbed the "case for coal" - but, as an MP from a mining area, was bitterly critical of the tactics employed. In 1985 he made his criticisms public in a speech to Labour's conference widely regarded as the best he ever delivered stating:

Related Topics:
Arthur Scargill - National Union of Mineworkers - Labour movement - Praetorian guard - 1985

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The strike wore on. The violence built up because the single tactic chosen was that of mass picketing, and so we saw policing on a scale and with a system that has never been seen in Britain before. The court actions came, and by the attitude to the court actions, the NUM leadership ensured that they would face crippling damages as a consequence. To the question: 'How did this position arise?', the man from the lodge in my constituency said: 'It arose because nobody really thought it out.'

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The strike's defeat and the rise of the Militant Tendency meant that 1985's Labour conference in Bournemouth should have been a disaster for Kinnock (as 1984's - in the middle of the strike - had been). Instead, by sheer force of personal will, Kinnock turned it into a triumph with a powerful attack on the Militant-dominated Liverpool City Council and the direct confrontation with Scargill referred to above. The passage of his speech referring to Militant and Liverpool is one of the most famous of any post-war British politician's:

Related Topics:
Militant Tendency - 1985 - 1984 - Liverpool City Council

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I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

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In 1986 the party's position appeared to strengthen further with excellent election results and a thorough rebranding of the party under the direction of Kinnock's director of communications Peter Mandelson. Labour, now sporting a continental social democratic style emblem of a rose, appeared to be able to run the governing Conservatives close, but Margaret Thatcher did not let Labour's makeover go unchallenged.

Related Topics:
1986 - Rebranding - Peter Mandelson - Social democratic - Rose - Conservatives - Margaret Thatcher

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The Conservatives' 1986 conference was well managed and effectively relaunched the Conservatives as a party of radical free-market liberalism and Labour suffered from a persistent image of extremism, especially as Kinnock's campaign to root out the Militants dragged on as figures on the hard left of the party tried to stop its progress. Kinnock's personal commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament also hurt the party as voters remained concerned about the intentions of the Soviet Union even under Gorbachev. In early 1987, Labour lost a by-election in Greenwich to the Social Democratic Party's Rosie Barnes.

Related Topics:
1986 - Radical - Free-market - Liberalism - Unilateral nuclear disarmament - Soviet Union - Gorbachev

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As a result Labour faced the 1987 election in some danger of coming third in the popular vote and in secret Labour's aim became to secure second place and secure a good 35% of the vote - effectively cutting into the Tory majority but not yet in government.

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Labour fought a professional campaign that at one point scared the Tories into thinking they might lose. Mandelson and his team had revolutionised Labour's communications - a transformation symbolised by a party election broadcast popularly known as "Kinnock: The Movie" which was directed by Hugh Hudson and featured Kinnock's 1985 conference speech, and shots of he and Glenys walking on the Graet Orme in Llandudno (so emphasising his appeal as a family man and associating him with images of Wales away from the coal mining communities where he grew up) as well as a speech to that year's Welsh Labour conference which was later appropriated (disasterously) by Joe Biden asking why he was the "first Kinnock in a thousand generations" to go to University.

Related Topics:
Party election broadcast - Hugh Hudson - Welsh Labour - Joe Biden - University

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On polling day Labour easily took second place, but with only 31 per cent to the SDP-Liberal Alliance's 22 per cent. But Labour was still more than ten percentage points behind the Conservatives, who retained a three-figure majority in the House of Commons.

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