YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Kinnock

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2026-01-19
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2026-01-19
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  1. “People could accuse him of being an aristocrat. 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, we'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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Tony Benn intervened to say that these are not our houses to dispose of. These are the Haus of the community. And that provoked me into intervening myself. I'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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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, one 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. I've 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 and the home policy committee,”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Now, these decades later. Now, in the party, there had 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. But 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. said 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”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “We're 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. And 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 counsellors 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think I can best answer your question by focusing on one of the things that you refer to, self-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 terrace 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 councillor house. And my parents lived there for 17 years old together. 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 had spent generations in a house”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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. The labor movement, the Labour Party, Democratic Socialists have always got to be relevant.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It did months, eight months altogether, I think, and hundreds of hours, and it drove me nuts and it distracted everybody and 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 of morale, which is slightly different. But they were going to get it on that morning or that afternoon in 1985 anyway.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “He could have easily. I mean, what I couldn't have dreamt of was that reaction that you referred to have happened getting up and shouting at the platform and Erica for walking out, which gave a dramatization that made the occasion even more memorable. I couldn't have dreamt of that, and it 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, take on militant, then we were going to have to follow up the speech with a knockdown dragout process of evidence gathering and prosecution.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The duesy performance, which was stupid, but there we are. So 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The night before the leader's speech and 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 ten on the Monday night before.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Of the Caulfields, 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. I 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 Only not winning because of my lack of endeavor.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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. They 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. The 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”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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. the miners would be on the back foot politically because they had no democratic mandate and the consequence would be a divided labor force”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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 a different ways entirely, ideologically committed to the idea of total victory. The 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “In the week 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 Corps Board. In other words, she was prepared for a minor strike, what she never anticipated but must have delighted her was the fact that the minor strike started in March with the summer coming not far behind And most amazing of all, that the strike was undertaken without a pith head democratic ballot, which is unprecedented.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “A resentment against the coal miners in the wake of the 1974 strike and election was monumental. Thatcher and others believed that they would one day be a reckoning and they 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 Scargill had become president of the National Mine Workers. And Thatcher was going to confront him, but eventually back 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Scargill embraced the ideas of Ablet, even though Ablet had in the wake of the general strike, rejected his previous belief in syndicalism. By the 1960s, 70s, Scargill and former member of the uncommunist 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 and establish a much better form of accountable democracy.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “China's 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. Anyway, Ablet was the leader of the Southwales 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “His body boils down to, or it's the other way around. The syndicalists are called syndicalists because of Les Syndica. 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 under Rosa Luxemburg, then in the midst of all that there emerged in South Wales, it happens a man called Noah Ablet, 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 Wales.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Years, 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “In a sense, it was in no way uncomfortable for me to be against Gargill because I was for the miners. If I put it into the 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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. And 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Exactly. I mean, Willie, Ted Heath, all the rest of it, they can. 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. And 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, their 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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 labor and were not emulating these policies set out and demanded by the Social Democrats. Now, 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “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 labor 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 have been such an impediment, we begun to see a real reduction in support of the Social Democrats. And eventually it ended up with them being defeated in the brutal by-election by screaming Lord Setch, at which point the SDP was...”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “In some ways, Venice'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 allied with the Liberal Democrats. So this gave Thatcher a quite remarkable opportunity, but I've always said it's a real war in the Falklands, the appearance of the beginnings of economic recovery, and the political war between the SDP and labor gave her that gigantic majority in 1983. How did I deal with them? Well, first of all, by denouncing”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “They were never going to see that number of unemployed again. And it daunted. 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 Dutch.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “War and learn a great deal that took him away from his background in 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 Selston Mann after the hotel in which they drew up this manifesto which was very radically right-wing, dropped after two years in government because unemployment had unbelievably reached one million which provoked absolute outrage in a generation that had thought”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Countrymen and women. So although they were conservatives, when 1945 came and the gigantic labour majority and the extraordinary accomplishments of the Athley 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 eldest statesmen of the Conservative Party. They included Willie, who had been a guard's officer, or maybe he was in a tank regiment, but he had a notable...”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “What do 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 Oxford, 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. They then served in the war. And in many cases altered their perception of their fellow countries.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “The sense 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 Uminos.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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 the president of the Oxford Union, for instance, he 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.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “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, he 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”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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. Jim, again, in a funny way, a man with self-doubts, although huge capacities. Jim was borne 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, I was still only three or four percent.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Government, of course, because they could then mobilize the resentments and disappointments about the government striving as a minority government and into the early 80s where they got a complete grip on Liverpool Council and substantial influence in a few other parts of the United Kingdom.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “If I can manage to be brief, yes. People describe this Trotskyads and sometimes think of themselves as follows of Leon Trotsky tend to be on the ultra-left fringe of the Labour Party. They have always existed. from the earliest days of the Labour Party, way back in the wake of the First World War. There have always been people who espoused the idea of revolutionary change and believed that if they established their policies and made their arguments, the time would come of such frustration and rejection of capitalism and its mores and attached cultural subordination, that the people of Britain would want to embrace a party of the ultra-left with ultra-left leadership. And they've never been particularly well organized, except for a short period in the mid to late 1970s with a Labor government.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Fine sense of humor, charismatic personality, and a nice guy who became, I think, unfortunately focused on the possibility of running the Labour Party. He always put, it seemed to me, a much greater emphasis on power in the Labour Party than power for the Labour Party.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Is garbage. It's gobbled. The idea that there was some great ideologically fundamental divide. In the Labour Party, derived from the fact that Tony, in the wake of the 1970 general election defeat, Discovered a form of assertive socialism as he saw it, which did involve being resistant to the European community, becoming for the first time in his life a unilateral disarmament becoming an unconditional supporter of union action that resisted the Prices and Incomes Acts and policies to try and control and rationalize inflation.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Well, broadly, the left was a tobibe left with a tiny fringe that emerged of ultra-leftists, of people who had a devout belief in extra-parliamentary activity. The leader of that very small faction in the parliamentary party, much broader outside parliament, was Tony Benn. you refer to him in your question and I intervened, it was because Tony Ben was a member of the shadow cabinet in 70 to 74 and then the cabinet from 74 to 1979 and of course didn't rebel in any sense whatsoever although constantly agitated as the man who could redeem the Labour Party And enable it to recover, as he put it, from its drift to social democracy”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The power, but they didn't have enough money. But in any case, they would always acquit themselves of any accusations, of incompetent government by having that permanent excuse. And secondly, I believe that the form of devolution being offered wasn't a serious effort at decentralization because he was denied to England, obviously, and was only a panic reaction to some by-election results in Scotland and Wales, which I still consider back in the 1970s was the case. And the most important thing was that any degree of separation, that form of distinctiveness would disadvantage whales in any negotiations over financial settlement. And that proved to be the case. With the Barnett formula, who's a dear friend of mine, Joel, dear friend of mine, who became the most caustic critic of his own proposals.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “There's fundamentally this if decentralization was good, which it is and was, and I wish we had it, we still haven't, then it was good for everybody. And there were dangers for Scotland and for Wales, which was my particular concern in having the form of devolution or decentralization that was being offered. I thought it was counterfeit because of several reasons. First of all, it would provide any party that was resistant to Whitehall or Westminster. Didn't matter which party it was with a permanent excuse for opposing the proposals of and what concerned me a Labour government, either because they didn't have enough power or because they had”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Left on the back benches for five years. Well, I'm telling you what it got to. Not all the public expenditure stuff, but over devolution during the period of the debate on the Walesville and the Scotland bill, and my resistance to the government's proposals. Whips used to ask me if I'd like the evening off so that at least they paid me and it didn't make any difference in the labor numbers. So I saw a lot more of my children, which was wonderful than I otherwise would.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “No, they kept on crashing into me with proposals that didn't really suit my constituents. I mean, that's, you've been the MP, and that is your fundamental duty. That's it. In fact, there's not much else of an excuse for rebelling when you've been elected as a member of a political party. You do owe loyalty, but you also owe your judgment. And without being arrogant, sometimes the judgment contradicts that of the government. So you have to do what your duty requires.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But it was almost entirely about two things one with the Labour government, minority Labour government. I felt that their public expenditure policy was entirely wrong. As events proved, I'm not claiming any great king's insight, but it was obvious to me that they were wrong. And years and years later, Dennis was a beloved friend. Dennis Healy was the Chancellor and said we were all out of our tiny Chinese mines and so on and so forth acknowledged that we were more right than the Treasury was. Anyway. And the other one was a devolution. And the other one was devolution.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Back then. Yes, absolutely Veteran of the 1920s and 30s when he'd been a miners agent, real tearaway, a man of great erudition, an endless reading, and quite remarkable figure. And he was sort of taking me up onto the mount and showing me all of the limitless.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And she was 24, maybe. And with a degree of trepidation and this lovely big old house in Merthedville, and we had tea with all the things you'd expect, including Welsh cakes and salmon and salad, of course. Anyway, Esso eventually says, would you like to come into the front room? So we go into the front room. I'm not kidding you. There were two gigantic aspidestras in the room. It was like stepping back into the 1880s. Quite extraordinary. And I've had good reports about you, young man, from Mrs. Sephora Dafis. So I've been giving consideration to what should occur in the event of my retirement. And I think you could be. A suitable replacement.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “No, no, I would have had to go again, partly because SO Davis, the Labour Member of Parliament for Mr Tydville, then in his 80s and a man of great accomplishment and of almost equal vanity, a lovely old guy in many ways, had invited myself and Glenys to tea on a Sunday in his residence in Merthyr Tydville. out of courtesy and because Mrs. Sephora Davis his wife was the chairman of the Merthyr Tidville branch of the Workers Educational Association where they had a big branch and I used to do lectures and organize courses and so on so Denis and I turned up on this Sunday afternoon I would have been about probably I was about 20”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, I know a member of the House of Lords. That is an eye blink of progress 30 years. Anyway, we did it all again. I was asked Alistair, I think, knows this. I was asked a question after I'd made the speech about the hospital. Mr. Kinnock, you are just out of college. You've never worked in industry properly. How could you cope with a hurly burly of being our representative? This is one of Lance Rogers' guys, obviously. So I said, well, if my parents had kept me in school The years that they did, and you, and they had allowed me to go to university. And I graduated with my degree and gone up to Markham Colliery and asked the manager for a start, you wouldn't be selecting me. You'd be certifying me. Anyway, the roof came off. And that's how I won by 76 votes to 70.”

    2026-01-19 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 171. Neil Kinnock: A Labour Rebel’s Path To Power (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source