History of the Labour Party – The Labour Party History of the Labour Party Kinnock and the policy review With Labour heavily defeated in the 1979 election, the party began a new period of soul-searching. Internal debates about the party constitution dominated, and led eventually to the forming of a breakaway group, the Social Democratic Party, in 1981. Michael Foot, the veteran left-winger, was elected leader but he was hampered by divisions within the party and proved unable to reverse Labour's decline in support. With Labour moving further to the left, the 1983 election resulted in a crushing defeat. Labour gained 27.6 per cent, its lowest showing since 1918 and not much above the Liberal/SDP Alliance. Hope for a revival in Labour's fortunes came from Welsh MP Neil Kinnock, who replaced Michael Foot as leader in 1983. Kinnock first sought to sideline the extreme left within the party, such as the group Militant, and then to restore Labour's image with the general public.

His speech to the 1985 Party Conference, where he attacked Militant from the platform, was seen as a sign of the new Labour leader's courage and commitment to change. This was followed by changes to Labour's image, headed by a new Campaigns and Communications directorate under Peter Mandelson. A visible sign of the changes afoot was the replacement of the party's emblem - the red flag - by a red rose at the 1986 conference. Even with such changes, Kinnock was unable to recover much ground and Labour still lost the 1987 election heavily. More thorough-going reform was necessary and therefore the party began a process of policy review. The outcome, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change, ended Labour's commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, high taxation and old-style nationalisation. Labour's fourth successive election defeat was a major shock to the party. Kinnock's successor, Scottish lawyer John Smith, promised to continue the process of reform, including tackling the trade union block.

At the 1993 Party Conference Smith won the vote on One Member One Vote (OMOV), removing direct union representation in parliamentary selections, by the smallest of margins, and largely due to the last-minute speech by John Prescott. If he was careful in his dealings with the party, in the Commons Smith was less restrained. Immediately after the election the Tories were wrong-footed by the crisis in sterling and exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Black Wednesday as 16 September 1992 became known, was a gift to Smith, who used his considerable parliamentary skills to attack the Conservatives. With record-breaking (for the time) local election results in 1994, John Smith was rightly optimistic about the future of the Party. "A chance to serve, that is all we ask", Smith told a gathering of Labour supporters on 11 May 1994. The event was to be his last. Early the next morning he suffered a massive heart attack. Just as with Gaitskell in 1963, Labour had lost a leader on the verge of power. New Labour The ensuing leadership contest saw the election of Tony Blair, the youngest-ever leader of the Labour Party.

Blair was widely known to be a moderniser and his leadership election statement was clear that Labour must be reformed radically if it was to win office again. Yet for any still in doubt, Blair showed his true intentions in his first speech to party conference as leader, when he called for the updating of Clause IV of the party's constitution. While opposed by some traditionalists, the proposed change won overwhelming support at a special conference in April 1995. This was followed in 1996 by the publication of New Labour, New Life for Britain, the draft manifesto that was discussed and voted upon by party members across the country. Labour's agenda was fully costed, to avoid the arguments over tax that had dogged them in 1992, and centred on five pledges: education; crime; health; jobs and economic stability. Party members gave the proposals clear endorsement - with 95 per cent backing the plans. The 1997 election campaign saw the Tories in decline - over sleaze, tax rises and division. Labour's campaign, by way of contrast, was smooth and efficiently run.

The party targeted 90 marginal and 216 key seats - the constituencies it had to win if it was to gain a majority. In the event new Labour was shown to have underestimated its popular appeal, winning a landslide total of 418 Labour MPs, including a record 101 Labour women, and a majority of 179. As a Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair gave new direction to the country with the introduction of a National Minimum Wage, one million more jobs, smaller class sizes in primary schools, and the biggest ever sustained investment in the NHS. On 7 June 2001 Tony Blair led Labour to a second successive victory in a General Election, winning by another landslide. Labour won a majority of 167. Four years later, on 5 May 2005, Labour achieved a first in its history: a third consecutive term in government. Labour had run a positive campaign on investment in public services including the slogan "If you value it, vote for it" in the run up to polling day. The Tories, in contrast, led by Michael Howard had run a negative campaign, largely on immigration and crime. Labour's majority was 67.

On the steps of Downing Street the next day, Tony Blair said: "It's a tremendous honour and privilege to be elected for a third term and I'm acutely conscious of that honour and that privilege. When I stood here first eight years ago I was a lot younger but also a lot less experienced. Today as well as having in our minds the priorities that people want, we, I, the government, has the knowledge, as well as the determination and commitment, to deliver them." Neil Kinnock, the man who saved Labour 25 September 2014 Neil Kinnock, the man who saved Labour Tony Benn saw him as the great betrayer and he led his party to two general election defeats. But now the best platform speaker of his generation has got his bounce back – and Kinnock’s reputation is on the rise.

By Francis Beckett Sign up for our weekly email * A man of his word: Gerald Scarfe’s Sabre-Toothed Ptorydactyl, SDP dodo and Lesser Welsh Speckled Dragon (Kinnockus Pillockus Rhetoric), 1989 When Neil Kinnock told Ed Miliband that he should consider standing for the Labour leadership, the latter mentioned the little matter of his brother, David. Kinnock told him: “If you don’t mind David standing against you, why should David mind you standing against him?” “It’s not that simple,” said Ed. Kinnock replied: “Nothing is ever that simple.” Kinnock laughs as he tells the story, but it’s a solemn laugh. In the 31 years since he was elected Labour leader himself, nothing has been simple for Neil Kinnock. If you listened to Tony Benn or Arthur Scargill, he was the great betrayer. Others believe that he has saved Labour twice. He saved it when he was leader from becoming an irrelevance after the Benn ascendancy.

And then by helping to make Ed Miliband leader he saved it from becoming a mere US-style electoral machine whose default position was to support the rich and powerful. Today, as Ed Miliband goes into a make-or-break conference in Manchester, Kinnock is still prominent in his corner. Is Ed Miliband the Kinnock de nos jours, as is often said by his disparagers? Not at all, says Roy Hattersley, who was Kinnock’s deputy from 1983 to 1992. “They are completely different. Neil is the orator, the Nye Bevan figure. Ed is the cerebral politician, the Hugh Gaitskell figure.” Back in the 1950s, Bevan personified Labour’s left and Gaitskell its right. Hattersley treasures the moment when Ed Miliband told him: “I’m a Croslandite,” because this establishes him in the Gaitskell camp. But Kinnock says: “It’s a different generation with new challenges. There are lots of issues he [Miliband] doesn’t have to address. The conditions facing me required a bare-chested approach.

It now needs greater subtlety.” It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar personalities. Kinnock is noisy, extrovert, affectionate and emotional, and he was, as Hattersley says, “the best platform speaker of my generation”. No one accused him of being geeky. By contrast, Miliband is quiet and thoughtful, charming but no tub-thumper, probably less sensitive to criticism than he sounds, and very clever. He told Kinnock that he was going to address Labour’s conference without notes. “I was terrified,” says Kinnock, but: “He does it brilliantly. It’s a sign of real depth.” However, their leaderships have this much in common – the media and some of their party colleagues went in hard and early to kick the bounce out of them. The Bennites (for Kinnock) and the Blairites (for Miliband) predicted that neither would be prime minister. With Kinnock, it worked. It won’t work a second time if there’s anything Kinnock can do to prevent it.

I first met Neil Kinnock in 1982, when I was Labour’s press officer for the Peckham by-election at which Harriet Harman entered parliament. The grim, sectarian chairperson of the Peckham Labour Party women’s committee watched Kinnock exchanging rugby reminiscences with a senior policeman sent to look after our walkabout, and muttered furiously: “How macho!” He had already made enemies. His refusal to support Tony Benn against Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981 had cost Benn the job. Benn never forgave him. Even in old age, in the final volume of his memoirs, published last year, Benn could not bring himself to mention Kinnock without a cruel sneer. He records attending an event and seeing guests who included “Neil Kinnock, now 65, laughing boy Kinnock”. Kinnock’s ready laugh is one of his most attractive traits. In March 1983 the Labour Party lost one of its safest seats, Bermondsey, in south-east London, in a by-election.

(It was won by Simon Hughes for the Liberals against Peter Tatchell.) The day the dreadful result was declared, Labour strategists, in a spirit of bravado, called another by-election straight away instead of delaying in the hope of better times. I again found myself in demand as a press officer. One cold day that month, I went to Darlington station to meet a short, sturdy, noisy young man with ginger hair and a loud houndstooth suit. He stepped smartly off the London train, borrowed £5 from me and took everyone he found in the nearby party headquarters to the pub. In Darlington in 1983 you could buy a substantial round of drinks with £5. He did not stop talking for a moment in the pub. As a stream of ideas tumbled out of him, each one perfectly wrapped in an evocative phrase, the ageing Labour grandee Barbara Castle listened in uncharacteristic silence. She seemed to be seeing the reincar­nation of her dead hero, Aneurin Bevan. Eventually we dragged Kinnock across to the biggest hall in town, which seated hundreds and was packed out.

He spoke for a full hour, making his audience laugh and cry in turn at his attacks on Margaret Thatcher’s government. “Now, the cabinet wets – By the way, do you know why they call them that? It’s because that’s what they do when she shouts at them.” Then I took him to a private room and whispered that I had overheard a plot to oust Michael Foot as leader. Kinnock buoyed me with his optimism, and for a good five minutes we both believed that soon Foot would be prime minister. We went down to the hotel bar, where a huge press pack was assembled; this was certainly the last by-election before the general election. There he took them on. This journalist had written a load of rubbish about Footie; that one was so deeply in hock to the Tories that he played “See the conquering heroine comes!” every time Maggie wiped her feet on him. As others left for their beds one by one, Kinnock’s musical Welsh cadences followed them to the hotel lift. On the train home the next day, he snagged the houndstooth suit on a nail. No one has seen Kinnock in a loud suit for years.

Seven months later, after Labour’s crushing defeat in the general election, Kinnock was elected leader of his party. He was 41 and his best years were over. At once, the Conservatives, the newspapers and the Bennites set to work on him. Those who remember only the party leader, struggling to find words sufficiently boring that they offered no hostages to fortune; or the demoralised figure who gave up the leadership after his second general election defeat in 1992; or the European commissioner mastering the dead language of Eurocracy, stare in disbelief when I tell them that in the early 1980s he was easily the most exciting politician in Britain. Born in 1942, Kinnock was the political leader of the Look Back in Anger generation. John Osborne’s play premiered in 1956, the year Britain invaded Suez and learned she was no longer a world power, and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and showed that communism was no longer a proper vehicle for the idealism of the young.

It was the generation to which both Osborne and Arnold Wesker spoke, a generation that believed it owed a debt to Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan; that spoke of socialism and Jimmy Porter’s great, brave causes. Youth found the voice that had been stifled by the grey conformism of the postwar years; a voice that had not yet turned into the muddled strivings of the late 1960s and the harsh sectarian stridency of the 1970s. Yet he also carried Labour’s history as no other politician of his time could do, a man of the left with the revivalist socialism of the Welsh valleys. Michael Foot saw him like that, for Foot was Aneurin Bevan’s friend and biographer and Kinnock’s friend and mentor. At the 1970 general election, aged just 28, Kinnock became MP for Bedwellty, one of the safest Labour seats in the country. After Labour’s 1979 election defeat, he entered the shadow cabinet as education spokesman, still aged only 37.

If we had been told then that, 35 years later, Neil Kinnock would never have occupied any post in government, and that selective education would be stronger than ever, we would have laughed at so absurd a notion. “Education is something he feels very deeply about – he knows it changed his own life,” Fred Jarvis, the then general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, told me. “And he’s not afraid to say the word ‘comprehensive’, which makes him unusual in today’s Labour Party.” Jarvis is still one of Kinnock’s friends. He was, for those days, young and inexperienced when he became Labour leader in 1983, and felt in need of advice. A posse of clever men and women a decade younger than himself, politicians of the harsher era of the 1970s, became his praetorian guard: the Cambridge graduates Patricia Hewitt and Charles Clarke, who had been president of the National Union of Students (NUS); the Oxford graduate Peter Mandelson, who had been chairman of the British Youth Council. Kinnock says they “had been student union officers very young, and after that they came and worked for me”.

Among the other Kinnock confidants who had cut their teeth in student politics were the former NUS president Jack Straw and John Reid, a former young communist. Fighting the ultra-left was in their bones. They had fought them in the student unions and now they fought them for Kinnock, unrelentingly and obsessively. They told him he had to acquire gravitas. Hewitt erected a barrier between their leader and the lobby journalists, who were used to the old, genial, witty Kinnock. Roy Hattersley says that Clarke did Kinnock great harm by protecting him when he did not need protecting. “It was a terrible mistake,” Hattersley told me. “Clarke told him not to make speeches, because he only needed to make one mistake to lose the next election. But he would not have done that. He knew how not to do that. So Kinnock, this great platform speaker, just stopped using that talent. It was a dreadful waste.” (Clarke declined to be interviewed for this article.) Kinnock’s protectors told him that his personality was all wrong.

The noise, the passion, the bons mots, the houndstooth suits – everything that had endeared him to the public before he was elected leader – it all had to go. He started to wrap himself up in grey flannel suits and grey woollen phrases. Brendan Bruce, the Conservative director of communications for part of Kinnock’s time as leader, has said: “He was badly let down by his image-makers in recent years. There were endless things they could have done.” It seemed as though they did not trust their man not to bungle if let out without a leash, and perhaps Kinnock started to take himself at their estimate. Vicious attacks from right-wing tabloids and left-wing rivals punctured his skin, which turned out to be thin for a top politician. The magic went out of his relationship with journalists. His sure broadcasting touch started to desert him as he began to weigh every word and waffle to cover policy divisions. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he felt unsure of himself. Kinnock knew he was young and inexperienced for the job. He could be the first person since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 to become prime minister without having served in a government.

When Hugo Young, the late Guardian commentator, wrote that he had “a pass degree in industrial relations from Swansea University on the second try in a bad year”, the sneer, according to Hattersley, “worried Neil much more than it should have done”. References in Kinnock’s papers suggest that Hattersley is right. “Hugo Young was a friend of mine, and I told him that this was an appalling and stupid thing to write,” Hattersley says. “Neil could hold his own intellectually with anyone he might need to, as Labour leader or as prime minister.” Young was an Oxford man, like every prime minister since 1945 except Churchill and Callaghan (and later Major), who did not go to university. The snobbery should not have upset Kinnock, but, as Hattersley recalls, it did. Unfair attacks, whether from Norman Tebbit on the right, Tony Benn on the left, or Hugo Young on the higher intellectual plane, wounded him. As Denis Healey once said to Hattersley: “It’s all right for us. We’ve been up to our eyes in shit for years.

He’s not used to it.” Kinnock and Hattersley had fought each other for the leadership, but, unlike Blair and Brown a generation later, they buried their personal differences in the common cause. “Neil and I got on,” Hattersley wrote in his autobiography Who Goes Home?, adding rather archly: We were never soulmates. Perhaps we were not even “pals” – Neil’s definition of the proper relationship between leader and deputy. But we only grumbled about each other in private and went to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate mutual respect. The 1984-85 miners’ strike was probably the worst 12 months of Kinnock’s life; nothing hurt so much as the pain inflicted when Arthur Scargill persuaded some of the mineworkers that Kinnock, the son and grandson of Welsh miners, had betrayed them.

He was sure Scargill was leading them to disaster, and as he told me afterwards: “I still curse myself for not taking the chance and saying, to a miners’ meeting – I would not have said it to anyone else – ‘You will not get sympathetic action without a ballot, and coal stocks are piled up.’ ” He says now: “Conducted in a different way, it could have had a different outcome.” There was then – and still is, even now, though they are getting rather long in the tooth – a collection of keepers of the pure Scargellite faith who were young men and women in the 1970s. Twenty-five years after the strike, I watched these grim folk, hugging their ideological correctness to themselves like a comfort blanket, cheer wildly as Scargill addressed a London rally and said: “If Neil Kinnock had have called on the whole working class to support us, Thatcher would have been out in a year.” They must have known it was nonsense. The 1987 general election resulted in another big defeat for Labour. The wounds from the media campaign, from Kinnock’s long battle with the Bennites, and especially those from the miners’ strike, went deep.

The ebullience that came naturally to him in 1983 was starting to look forced by 1987. On Clarke’s advice, Kinnock decided he must get rid of cherished policies: unilateral nuclear disarmament, public ownership of key industries, the repeal of all of Thatcher’s anti-trade-union laws. Yet, despite the relentless rebranding and repackaging, his advisers insisted that there were still vestiges of the old Kinnock to be suppressed. Mandelson wrote privately to Hattersley that Kinnock’s “values and rhetoric are still tied strongly to the ‘have-nots’. He cares too much. He’s too much of a socialist and hates the idea of being seen as anything different.” Labour’s then pollster Bob Worcester of MORI looked at the evidence from his research and said there was a different problem. Kinnock, he said, must go back to being Neil. The statesmanlike waffling was not going down well. But the skids were under Worcester, because his advice too often conflicted with that of the praetorian guard. They had forced Kinnock to give up the simple, direct, passionate language that won hearts.

He was now delivering his thoughts in shapeless bundles of words. Kinnock’s enemies, and perhaps some of his friends, had done something much more terrible to him than he did to them. They made him, just occasionally, boring. Yet Labour was still polling better than the Conservatives. Its by-election results were improving. Its results in the European elections of 1989 were good. The Bennites were in full retreat. The poll tax, introduced first in Scotland in 1989 and then in England and Wales in 1990, was hugely unpopular. But Labour’s internal feuds were poisonous and well publicised, and Kinnock’s personal poll ratings stubbornly refused to improve. Near the end of 1990 the Conservative Party finally dumped Thatcher and elected John Major to succeed her. Major hastened to get rid of the poll tax and Labour’s climb in the polls halted. Eight days before polling day in the 1992 general election came the Sheffield rally. It was supposed to be, as an internal memorandum put it, “a TV spectacular . . . full of music, movement of people, light effects . . .

As the main BBC News comes on air, we will set off the indoor pyrotechnics, light shows and confetti guns . . .” Earlier speakers overran, so Kinnock appeared on the platform late, and as he did so the 10,000 keyed-up people at the Sheffield Arena erupted. His repeated “We’re awright!” went down a treat in the hall – and came across dreadfully on television. But the problem was not Kinnock’s performance: it was the gaudy triumphalism of the whole affair. And if the praetorian guard had not kept the lid so firmly closed on Neil Kinnock, the dam inside him might not have burst on that Sheffield stage. The election lost, Kinnock departed with haste and dignity and in 1995 became one of Britain’s two European commissioners. A decade ago he left the commission, took a peerage, and seems to have got his bounce back. The scion of miners had carried the heavy burden of being Scargill’s scapegoat for three decades.

But the last time I met him, just a few weeks ago, we were coincidentally both at the Hampstead Theatre in London to watch Wonderland, Beth Steel’s fine play about the miners’ strike. Kinnock couldn’t contain his delight. “The whole thing was brilliant,” he said. “And all the more amazing because Beth Steel was a baby when the strike took place, though her dad was a pit deputy – he only retired two weeks ago. The production, acting, staging was all great and the story was told with accuracy and passion. She’s doing banking next. Can’t wait!” A few days later he was still enthusing, but less excitably: “It had a core of passionate dispassion. She was committed to pursuing a truth about the times from the perspective of the coalfield. She conveyed the sense of hopelessness overcome by determination to deal with adversity.” Charles Clarke still says Kinnock was a great Labour leader – but the sting in the tail is that he does so in order to draw an unfavourable comparison with Ed Miliband, who he predicts will not win next year’s general election. “I think the most likely outcome is a Tory overall majority,” Clarke told the Huffington Post.

“Neil has far, far more qualities than Ed Miliband as a leader. Neil was a fantastic leader and brought Labour back towards victory.” Kinnock disagrees vehemently: “Ed is very bright, gutsy, and he takes on the big targets and presses them with intelligence and courage. Look at what he’s taken on: the press, the banks, the energy companies; he stopped us from becoming engaged in Syria [with the House of Commons vote on intervention in 2013]. Without his insight and fortitude, Cameron would have got his majority for that. “He’s the opposite of David Cameron, who is superficial.” And the opposite of Tony Blair? “Very different from Tony Blair,” Kinnock says, quickly and seamlessly. All those years of not answering questions taught him a few lasting lessons. But Hattersley spells out what Kinnock is careful about: “I think Neil felt it was time we had a leader who was real Labour.” Hattersley says the old Kinnock is back, with all the bounce – and he is not sure it ever quite went away. “You watch him going round the Labour party conference this year,” he urges.

“He knows he made a huge contribution; he knows that history will show he saved the Labour Party. “He’s very content.” Neil Kinnock - Wikispooks Neil Kinnock 2 October 1983 - 18 July 1992 Preceded by 2 October 1983 - 18 July 1992 Deputy 18 June 1970 - 16 February 1995 Shortly after his February 1990 release from jail, Nelson Mandela meets Neil and Glenys Kinnock Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock (born 28 March 1942) is a British Labour Party politician. Neil Kinnock served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1970 until 1995, first for Bedwellty constituency and then for Islwyn. He was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1983 until the Labour Party leadership election in 1992, making him the longest-serving Leader of the Opposition in British political history to date, and the longest never to have become Prime Minister.

Following Labour's fourth consecutive defeat in the 1992 general election, Neil Kinnock resigned as leader and resigned from the House of Commons three years later to become the European Union's Transport Commissioner. He went on to become the Vice-President of the European Commission under Romano Prodi from 1999 to 2004. In January 2005, he was elevated to the peerage becoming Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty in the County of Gwent. Soon after his release from prison in apartheid South Africa on 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela chose Sweden as his first port of call in Europe because of all the support the ANC had received over many years from the Swedish government, especially from prime minister Olof Palme who was assassinated by agents of the apartheid regime in February 1986. Ingvar Carlsson , Sweden's new prime minister, invited British politicians Neil and Glenys Kinnock to come to Stockholm in April 1990 and greet Mr Mandela . That meeting was recalled by Neil Kinnock in a television interview on 8 December 2013 (three days after Nelson Mandela 's death).

[1] Contents 12 External links Early life Neil Kinnock, an only child, was born in Tredegar, Wales. [2] His father Gordon Herbert Kinnock was a former coal miner who suffered from dermatitis and later worked as a labourer; and his mother Mary Kinnock was a district nurse. [3] [4] Gordon died of a heart attack in November 1971 aged 64; [5] Mary died the following month aged 61. In 1953, 11-year-old Neil Kinnock began his secondary education at Lewis School, Pengam, which he later criticised for its record on caning in schools. He went on to the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, obtaining a degree in Industrial Relations and History in 1965. A year later, Kinnock obtained a postgraduate diploma in education. Between August 1966 and May 1970, he worked as a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). [6] He was married to Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, Glenys Kinnock in 1967.

They have two children – son Stephen (born January 1970), and daughter Rachel (born 1971). They now have four grandchildren. Member of Parliament In June 1969 Neil Kinnock won the Labour Party nomination for the constituency of Bedwellty in Wales (later Islwyn) for the 1970 general election]]. He was elected on 18 June 1970 and became a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party in October 1978. On becoming an MP for the first time, his father said "Remember Neil, MP stands not just for Member of Parliament, but also for Man of Principle". Labour government policy at the time was in favour of devolution for Wales, but the wider party was split. Calling himself a 'unionist', Kinnock was one of six south Wales Labour MPs to campaign against devolution on centralist, essentially British-nationalist grounds. He dismissed the idea of a Welsh identity, saying that "between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century Wales had practically no history at all, and even before that it was the history of rural brigands who have been ennobled by being called princes".

[7] In the Wales referendum 1979, the proposal for devolution was rejected. Following Labour's defeat in the 1979 general election, James Callaghan appointed Neil Kinnock to the Shadow Cabinet as Education spokesman. His ambition was noted by other MPs, and David Owen 's opposition to the changes to the electoral college was thought to be motivated by the realisation that they would favour Kinnock's succession. He remained as Education spokesman following the resignation of Jim Callaghan as party leader and the election of Michael Foot as his successor in late 1980. He was known as a left-winger, and gained prominence for his attacks on Margaret Thatcher 's handling of the Falklands War in 1982. Leadership of the Labour Party First period (1983–1987) After Labour's heavy election defeat in June 1983, the almost 70-year-old Michael Foot resigned as leader and from the outset it was expected that Kinnock would succeed him.

He was finally elected as Labour Party leader on 2 October 1983, with 71% of the vote, and Roy Hattersley was elected as his deputy; their prospective partnership was considered to be a 'dream ticket'. [8] His first period as party leader – between the 1983 and 1987 elections – was dominated by his struggle with the hard left, then still strong in the party. Kinnock was determined to move the party's political standing to a centre-left position. [9] Although Kinnock had come from the Tribune Group left of the party, he parted company with many of his former allies after his appointment to the Shadow Cabinet. In 1981, when still Labour's Education spokesman, 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. 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 (NUM) into a national strike (in opposition to pit closures) without a members' 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: [10] The strike's defeat early in the year, [11] and the bad publicity associated with the entryism practised by the Militant tendency were the immediate background for the 1985 Labour Party conference. [12] Earlier in the year left-wing councils had protested at Government restriction of their budgets by refusing to set budgets, resulting in a budget crisis in Militant-dominated Liverpool City Council. Kinnock attacked Militant and their conduct in Liverpool in one of the best remembered passages of any post-war British political speech: "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. "I'm telling you <amid a deafening chorus of boos>, I'm telling you, and you'll listen, you can't play politics with people's jobs and people's services." One Liverpool MP, Eric Heffer, a member of the NEC left the conference stage in disgust at Kinnock's comments. [13] In June 1986, the Labour Party finally expelled the deputy leader of Liverpool council, the high profile Militant supporter Derek Hatton, who was found guilty of "manipulating the rules of the district Labour party". [14] By 1986, the party's position appeared to strengthen further with excellent local election results and a thorough rebranding of the party under the direction of Kinnock's director of communications Peter Mandelson.

[15] Labour, now sporting a continental social democratic style emblem of a rose, appeared to be able to run the governing Conservative Party close, but Margaret Thatcher did not let Labour's makeover go unchallenged. The Conservatives' 1986 conference was well-managed, and effectively relaunched the Conservatives as a party of radical free-market liberalism. Labour suffered from a persistent image of extremism, especially as Kinnock's campaign to root out Militant dragged on as figures on the hard left of the party tried to stop its progress. Opinion polls showed that voters favoured retaining Britain's nuclear weapons and believed that the Conservatives would be better than Labour at defending the country. [16] 1987 general election In early 1987, Labour lost a by-election in Greenwich to the Social Democratic Party's Rosie Barnes. As a result, Labour faced the 1987 election in some danger of coming third in the popular vote. In secret, Labour's aim became to secure second place. [17] 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". [18] This was directed by Hugh Hudson and featured Kinnock's 1985 conference speech, and shots of him and Glenys walking on the Great Orme in Llandudno (so emphasising his appeal as a family man and associating him with images of Wales away from the coalmining communities where he grew up), and a speech to that year's Welsh Labour Party conference asking why he was the "first Kinnock in a thousand generations" to go to university. Joe Biden, who was at the time the Delaware Senator and presidential candidate, and later the US Vice-President, plagiarised lines from the speech for his own campaign speeches in the summer of 1987. [19] On polling day, Labour easily took second place, but with only 31 per cent to the SDP-Liberal Alliance's 22 per cent. [20] Labour was still more than ten percentage points behind the Conservatives, who retained a three-figure majority in the House of Commons.

However, the Conservative government's majority had come down from 144 in 1983 to 102. [21] Significantly, it had gained 20 seats at the election. [22] Labour won extra seats in Scotland, Wales and Northern England, but lost ground particularly in Southern England and London, where the Tories still dominated. Second period (1987–1992) A few months after the election, Kinnock gained brief attention in the United States in August 1987 when it was discovered that then-US senator Joe Biden of Delaware plagiarised one of Kinnock's speeches during his 1988 presidential campaign in a speech at a Democratic debate in Iowa. [23] This led to Biden's withdrawing from the race. [24] The second period of Kinnock's leadership was dominated by his drive to reform the party's policies to gain office. This began with an exercise dubbed the policy review, the most high-profile aspect of which was a series of consultations with the public known as "Labour Listens" in the autumn of 1987.

[25] After "Labour Listens", the party went on, in 1988, to produce a new statement of aims and values—meant to supplement and supplant the formulation of Clause IV of the Labour Party's constitution (though, crucially, this was not actually replaced until 1995 under the leadership of Tony Blair ) and was closely modelled on Anthony Crosland's social-democratic thinking—emphasising equality rather than public ownership. At the same time the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament was dropped, and reforms of Party Conference and the National Executive meant that local parties lost much of their ability to influence policy. In 1988, Neil Kinnock was challenged by Tony Benn for the party leadership. Later many identified this as a particularly low period in Kinnock's leadership—as he appeared mired in internal battles after five years of leadership and the Conservatives still dominating the scene and ahead in the opinion polls. In the end, though, Kinnock won a decisive victory over Benn and would soon enjoy a substantial rise in support.

[26] The policy review—reporting in 1989—coincided with Labour's move ahead in the polls as the poll tax row was destroying Conservative support, and Labour won big victories in local by-elections. n December 1989, he abandoned the Labour policy on closed shops — a decision seen by many as a move away from traditional socialist policies to a more Europe-wide agenda, and also a move to rid the party of its image of being run by the unions. [27] Neil Kinnock was also perceived as scoring in debates over Margaret Thatcher in the Commons — previously an area in which he was seen as weak — and finally Michael Heseltine challenged Thatcher's leadership. She resigned on 28 November 1990 to be succeeded by John Major . Kinnock greeted Thatcher's resignation by describing it as "very good news" and demanded an immediate general election. [28] Public reaction to Major's elevation was highly positive. A new Prime Minister and the fact that Kinnock was now current leader of a major party reduced the impact of calls for "Time for a Change".

Neil Kinnock's showing in the opinion polls dipped; before Thatcher's resignation, Labour had been up to 10 points ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls (an Ipsos MORI poll in April 1990 had actually shown Labour more than 20 points ahead of the Tories), but many opinion polls were actually showing the Tories with more support than Labour, in spite of the deepening recession. [29] By now Militant had finally been routed in the party, and their two MPs were expelled at the end of 1991. The majority in the group were now disenchanted with entryism, and choose to function outside Labour's ranks, and to take advantage of opportunities created by Margaret Thatcher 's unpopular 'poll tax'. 1992 general election, backbenches and retirement In the three years leading up to the 1992 election, Labour had consistently topped the opinion polls, with 1991 seeing the Tories (rejuvenated by the arrival of a new leader in John Major the previous November) snatch the lead off Labour more than once before Labour regained it.

[30] Since Major's election as Conservative leader (and becoming Prime Minister), Kinnock had spent the end of 1990 and most of 1991 putting pressure on Major to hold the election that year, but Major had held out and insisted that there would be no general election in 1991. In the run-up to the election, held on 9 April 1992, most opinion polls had suggested that the election would end in a hung parliament or a narrow Labour majority. [31] In the 1992 election, Labour made considerable progress – reducing the Conservative majority to just 21 seats. It came as a shock to many when the Conservatives won a majority, but the "triumphalism" perceived by some observers of a Labour party rally in Sheffield (together with Kinnock's performance on the podium) may have helped put floating voters off.

[32] Although internal polls suggested no impact, while public polls suggested a decline in support had already occurred, [33] most of those directly involved in the campaign believe that the rally really came to widespread attention only after the electoral defeat itself, [34] with Kinnock himself changing his mind to a rejection of its negative impact over time. [35] [36] On the day of the general election, The Sun newspaper ran an "infamous" [37] front page featuring Kinnock (headline: 'If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights') that he blamed in his resignation speech for losing Labour the election, along with other newspapers who had backed the Conservatives in the run-up to the election. [38] The following day's headline in The Sun was the triumphalist 'It's The Sun Wot Won It', which Rupert Murdoch, many years later at his April 2012 appearance before the Leveson Inquiry, stated was both "tasteless and wrong" and led to the editor Kelvin MacKenzie receiving a reprimand.

The Labour supporting Daily Mirror had backed Kinnock in the 1987 election and again in 1992. [39] Less unexpected was the Financial Times backing of Kinnock at the 1992 election. Kinnock himself later claimed to have half-expected his defeat in the 1992 election and proceeded to turn himself into a media personality, even hosting a chat show on BBC Wales and twice appearing – with considerable success – on the topical panel show Have I Got News For You within a year of the defeat. Many years later, he returned to appear as a guest host of the programme. Neil Kinnock announced his resignation as Labour Party leader on 13 April 1992, ending eight and a half years in the role – making him the longest serving opposition leader in British political history. He had gained this distinction in November 1990, and no subsequent opposition party leader has yet matched this record. [40] John Smith, previously Shadow Chancellor, was his successor as party leader. [41] He remains on the Advisory Council of the Institute for Public Policy Research, which he helped set up in the 1980s.

He was an enthusiastic supporter of Ed Miliband's campaign to lead the Labour Party in 2010, and was reported as telling activists, when Ed Miliband won, "We've got our party back". [42] EC Transport Commissioner In 1995, marking the end of his 25 years in parliament, Neil Kinnock was appointed one of Britain's two members of the European Commission, which he served first as Transport Commissioner under President Jacques Santer. [43] This came less than a year after the death of his successor as Labour leader John Smith and the election of Tony Blair as the party's new leader. [44] Support for a Lockerbie Inquiry On 23 February 1997, former British diplomat Patrick Haseldine sought to enlist the EC Transport Commissioner's support for a Judicial Inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing . On 3 March 1997, Neil Kinnock's office replied that Neil Kinnock "read your letter to Mr Pickles , MP with interest.

I regret, however, that it would not be appropriate for him, in his capacity as European Commissioner, to express views about the desirability of a judicial inquiry." However, on 12 December 2013, Kinnock responded to a subsequent email from Haseldine that "I am prepared to support the call for an UN Inquiry" into the deaths of UN Officials Dag Hammarskjöld and Bernt Carlsson ". EC Vice-President In 1999, Neil Kinnock was obliged to resign as part of the forced, collective resignation of the Commission, but there was never any suggestion that he himself had done anything corrupt. He was re-appointed to the Commission under new President Romano Prodi and now became one of the Vice-Presidents of the European Commission. His term of office as a Commissioner was due to expire on 30 October 2004, but was delayed owing to the withdrawal of the new Commissioners. During this second term of office on the Commission, he was responsible for introducing new staff regulations for EU officials, a significant feature of which was substantial salary cuts for everyone employed after 1 May 2004, reduced pension prospects for many others, and gradually worsening employment conditions.

This made him disliked by many EU staff members, although the pressure on budgets that largely drove these changes had actually been imposed on the Commission from above by the Member States in Council. British Council In February 2004 it was announced that, with effect from 1 November 2004, Neil Kinnock would become Chairman of the British Council . Coincidentally, at the same time, his son Stephen Kinnock became head of the British Council office in St Petersburg, Russia. Lord Kinnock resigned as Chairman in the summer of 2009. [45] Life peerage At the end of October 2004, it was announced that Neil Kinnock would become a member of the House of Lords (intending to be a working peer), when he was able to leave his EU responsibilities. He was introduced to the House of Lords on 31 January 2005, after being created Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty in the County of Gwent.

[46] [47] On assuming his seat Neil Kinnock stated: "I accepted the kind invitation to enter the House of Lords as a working peer for practical political reasons." When his peerage was first announced, he said, "It will give me the opportunity... to contribute to the national debate on issues like higher education, research, Europe and foreign policy." His peerage meant that the Labour and Conservative parties were equal in numbers in the upper house of Parliament (since then, the number of Labour members has overtaken the number of Conservative members). Kinnock was a long-time critic of the House of Lords, and his acceptance of a peerage led Will Self to accuse him of hypocrisy. [48] [49] Personal life (L to R) daughter Johanna, wife Helle , Stephen Kinnock MP , dad Neil and mum Glenys on Thursday 7 May 2015 Neil Kinnock is married to Glenys Kinnock , Britain's Minister for Africa and the United Nations from 2009 to 2010, and a Labour Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1994 to 2009.

When she was made a life peer in 2009, they became one of the few couples to both hold titles in their own right. The two met while studying at Cardiff University, where they were known as "the power and the glory" (Glenys the power), and they married on 25 March 1967. [50] Previously living together in Peterston-Super-Ely, a village near the western outskirts of Cardiff, in 2008 they moved to Tufnell Park, London, to be closer to their daughter and grandchildren. [51] They have a son, Stephen and a daughter, Rachel, who works for Ed Miliband . [52] Stephen Kinnock is married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt , Prime Minister of Denmark (2011-2015) and leader of the Danish Social Democrat party. [53] Stephen was assistant director of the British Council in Sierra Leone, head of the British Council office in St Petersburg and used to work at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

On 7 May 2015, Stephen Kinnock was elected Member of Parliament for the safe Labour seat for Aberavon in South Wales. Rachel was in the Political Office at 10 Downing Street under Gordon Brown . On 18 January 2009, Glenys Kinnock revealed on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that she and Neil Kinnock had received a personal invitation from Joe Biden to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama and Biden on 20 January 2009 at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Biden was elected Vice-President of the United States in 2008, but twenty years earlier had made the mistake of copying one of Kinnock's speeches. The luck of the Tories: Kinnock and New Labour | Books | The Guardian London Review of Books The luck of the Tories 'That's it. I've just wasted eight years of my life' said Neil Kinnock when the 1992 election results were announced. Or had he laid the foundations for the future triumphs of New Labour? Ross McKibbin examines the aims and achievements of the Labour leader stuck in permanent opposition, and catches some familiar faces on the way up All hail...

Neil Kinnock greets Tony Blair Monday 4 March 2002 10.45 EST Kinnock: The Biography by Martin Westlake Little, Brown, 768 pp., £25, 25 October 2001, 0 316 84871 9 Neil Kinnock is a problematic figure in modern British politics. He was leader of the Labour party for nine years and presided over a number of profound changes in both its structure and its policy. All nine years, however, were spent in opposition. He was, furthermore, the only Labour leader (at least since Labour began electing 'leaders') never to have held a ministerial post - being PPS to Michael Foot for a year does not count. He is the only British party leader to have been an EU commissioner - and is likely to remain so. As a result his record in 'government' is hard to judge, since what the commissioners do (unless it is thought to be scandalous or incompetent) is rarely before the public eye. Yet they are powerful people, and Kinnock has plainly had some success: but his power and success have registered little with British opinion.

What the public knows of him, therefore, is largely a product of the way the Tory press treated him when he was leader of the Labour party. No other Labour leader, not even Michael Foot, was subject to the kind of personal abuse that Kinnock received - received (the odd outburst aside) with remarkable stoicism - and this undoubtedly coloured the popular view of him. As a result, he is rather hard to place, both as political leader and in the history of the Labour party. Martin Westlake's biography does much to place him and certainly encourages the reader to reflect on the recent history of the Labour party. It is not exactly an official biography, but it is sympathetic (though not uncritical) and was written with Kinnock's support. Kinnock's own comments - on his own and others' views - form the core of the book; they are supplemented by material from his extensive personal archive, by much oral evidence and by wide reading in newspapers and secondary literature. Since Kinnock was never in government the evidential basis of Westlake's biography is not diminished by the Thirty-Year Rule.

The European Commission's archives and a reworking of Kinnock's papers aside, what we have here is probably as much as we ever will have. As such, it is a useful and often revealing book. Its most interesting aspects are to do with Kinnock's leadership of the Labour party and his relationship with New Labour: indeed, how far he was responsible for New Labour. Kinnock, it seems, thinks of his leadership as, on the whole, a failure. When the first result of the 1992 election was declared - a swing of only 2% to Labour in Sunderland South - he said: "That's it. I've just wasted eight years of my life." In retrospect, he may think differently; but even then it was possible to do so, or to think that 'failure' was too strong a word. When he became leader in 1983 the party seemed almost down and out; it had won just 209 seats in the election of that year, and in terms of votes was in real danger of being overtaken by the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

In 1992 Labour won 271 seats, regained much of its urban support, and polled twice as many votes as the Alliance. Perhaps more significantly, Kinnock had taken on and defeated Militant, and, in a (literally) bruising campaign, despatched the hard left. All of this required considerable courage. There is no doubt that he left the party in much better electoral shape than he found it. Yet one's memory is of failure and wasted opportunities. And of a generally discreditable and puzzling episode in modern British politics: not only was the tabloid press's treatment of Kinnock contemptible, but he evoked strange snobberies which have now largely disappeared from British life. It has been argued that any Labour leader at the time would have received the same treatment. But that is surely not so. It wouldn't, for example, have happened to either Callaghan or Healey. Some have suggested that it was because he was Welsh: the English have an ineradicable stereotype of the garrulous Taffy and Kinnock was made to fit it. Yet this, again, is hardly true.

Some English, for instance, might have feared Lloyd George or Bevan, but many more respected and hardly any mocked them. The problem was, as Westlake notes, that Kinnock's career was "founded on his oratorical powers", not on any great achievement in government or politics, and that he was perhaps the last politician of whom this was true. As a result, it was difficult for people to associate him with anything other than talking. Besides, his sort of inspirational oratory doesn't mix well with the modern media. Ramsay MacDonald, a similar kind of orator, suffered badly from the radio, which was ideally suited to Baldwin's more reticent style. Michael Foot had a reputation as a compelling and persuasive speaker, but that isn't how he appeared on television. In fact, Kinnock is a witty man and was perfectly capable of puncturing Thatcherite absurdities. But he chose not to use his wit on those occasions when it would have been most effective: notoriously during the Westland debate. (Though, despite what was said at the time, I doubt that it would have made much difference.) What emerged was everybody's idea of a certain kind of windy politician.

Disraeli, an expert in self-fashioning, said that England, subject to fogs and a large middle class, required grave statesmen. But Kinnock was not a grave statesman. Indeed, that is one of his more attractive features. At the time, however, his seeming to be neither witty nor grave undoubtedly undermined him as Labour leader. In this respect his political manner contrasts pointedly with that of both his successors. About the second major theme of Westlake's book - the extent to which the modern Labour party, New Labour, is Kinnock's creation - Roy Hattersley wrote last year that "the Blair Project is not a continuation of Neil Kinnock's reforms. Kinnock wanted to establish a new and improved form of socialism. Blair believes he has found an alternative" (Tribune, 28 September). For Hattersley, who was Kinnock's deputy and whose views on New Labour are well known, that Kinnock should be thought to have spawned New Labour is a formidable charge. Nonetheless, what strikes one, reading Westlake's biography, is just how much New Labour owes to Kinnock.

Much of what he did of course had to be done: the 1983 election manifesto had committed Labour to many preposterous policies and the relentless negativism of Kinnock's leadership in part arises from that. He was also, understandably, reluctant to support any policy likely to prolong the party's interminable ideological wrangling: doing nothing was better than doing anything. Yet it is more than this. Kinnock knew what he did not like, but had little idea what he did. He seems to have been uninterested in the details of policy, let alone in the party's 'aims and values'. Westlake suggests that, even as a student politician, Kinnock was a 'pragmatist': in short, interested primarily in 'what works'. For better and for worse he appears surprisingly uninfluenced by his background and upbringing in the Welsh Valleys. This detachment allowed him a degree of hard-headedness, but also left him increasingly susceptible to the ideologues of the market. "In the manner of the convert," Westlake writes, "he went about the task with a zeal which eclipsed anything which more traditional men of the right, such as Shore and Hattersley, could have contemplated.

The problem was that Kinnock knew better what he did not want than what he wanted. Having taken such pains to shed one set of ideological baggage, Kinnock was in no hurry to take up another." He records an incident in 1988 when a statement in a party document on Aims and Values (largely drawn up by Hattersley but issued in both names), arguing that, other than in certain areas such as health, education and social services, "the operation of demand and supply and the price mechanism is a generally satisfactory means of determining provision and consumption," had to be modified to meet the objections of people like John Smith. A pillar of the old right of the party, a man still rooted in its traditions, Smith didn't feel that Labour had to start all over again. Kinnock became increasingly irritated with people who resisted the party's modernisation, whether they came from the right or the left. It is, however, unclear what modernisation meant (and means), other than basically accepting the status quo established by Mrs Thatcher.

Although Kinnock denies it - he says, for example, that Labour supported entering the ERM at an impossibly high rate only for cosmetic reasons - it is likely that, even with John Smith as chancellor, Labour would have been almost as ill-prepared for office under Kinnock as it was under Blair. Striking, too, is the way the same names crop up. Charles Clarke, appointed chairman of the Labour party by Blair (it was once a prerogative of the NEC), became Kinnock's research assistant in 1981 and then effectively head of his private office. Clarke's CV is worth noting: "Like Kinnock he had been an active student politician, but on a national scale, first as treasurer then (in 1975) president of the National Union of Students. From the soft left of the party, he had, from an early stage, the kind of realistic outlook that had come to loom larger and larger in Kinnock's own thinking. Over the following decade the Clarke-Kinnock symbiosis consolidated this tendency, until ultimately it became the defining characteristic of Kinnock's approach to politics." Patricia Hewitt, now secretary of state for trade and industry, is another example.

She was originally Kinnock's press secretary but adopted a more aggressive stance than the title implies. Kinnock himself was fascinated by journalists, while Hewitt, in Westlake's account, was largely (though not wholly) interested in TV and radio, and in presentation. Her comments on the 1983 party conference are, as Westlake says, "enlightening". She complains that Glenys Kinnock came on to the platform from the wrong end on the Sunday; that there were two empty seats behind the leader, and one on the NEC front row and so on. It was the way the conference appeared visually to the media that seems to have concerned her. She was probably the one who attempted (unsuccessfully) to give Kinnock a makeover, to turn him into the grave statesman that Disraeli thought the English demanded. Hewitt's was a style now all too familiar. She became Kinnock's 'gatekeeper', and according to Westlake, a "wall had descended between Kinnock and the media".

Equally familiar is the sight of a party obsessed with media management, yet curiously ineffective in its actual dealings with the media, and without a strategy for coping with their hostility other than to fawn. There are other recognisable names. Kinnock was very dependent on Peter Mandelson: when Mandelson resigned as director of communications in order to stand for Hartlepool Kinnock "almost literally" hopped with rage. He thought Mandelson "irreplaceable"; without him Walworth Road would "collapse". And there are the protég&#233s. Blair was made employment spokesman in December 1989. This was, Westlake says, "a significant pointer to the Labour party's future" - with which no one would disagree. Blair's first task was to rid the party of its commitment to the closed shop. The closed shop seemed to be a violation of the EU Social Charter, to which Kinnock was committed, and thus had to go. Blair got rid of it at speed, without the usual processes of consultation. Kinnock thought him impetuous but gave him his full support, and I don't imagine Blair did the job reluctantly.

There were other appointments of the 'Oxbridge and/or NUS' type, many not well received by much of the party. (Kinnock, however, declined to appoint Alastair Campbell press adviser for the excellent reason that he was more use to the Labour party at the Mirror.) Kinnock's, in fact, was the first of the New Labour 'courts'. Wilson had a kitchen cabinet, and all Labour leaders have had confidants. But Kinnock's was something different, both in size and function, and anticipated the courts which surround and protect Blair and Brown. The relationship between Kinnock and New Labour makes clear, I think, that the origins of New Labour in the 1990s are to be found in the soft left of the 1980s. Why that should be the case, why the old right should have remained much more attached to a traditional social democracy, is a difficult question to answer. There is no doubt something in the sociology of the soft left which made it readier to abandon that tradition, but the real answer may have more to do with a fundamental intellectual confusion.

The Labour party's soft-left modernisers could not see that exceptionally fortunate short-term circumstances were as much responsible for Conservative electoral success in the 1980s as long-term structural changes. Indeed, the modernisers hardly even recognised the existence of fortunate circumstances. The rapid decline of the industrial working class, profound shifts in the economy and in expectations of life, were things to which Labour had to adjust, but they alone were not, as Labour was inclined to think they were, responsible for Thatcherism's triumphs. Without good luck and the favourable moment the Conservative party would not have won those four elections. The Labour party's failure to make a distinction between long-term change and short-term luck had two consequences. It meant, on the one hand, that Labour had no explanation for the depth and speed of the Conservative party's collapse in the 1990s and, on the other, that by renouncing so much of the Labour party's history, by conniving at the delegitimation of the state and the public sector, it has devised few alternatives to those policies which brought the Conservative party to ruin in the first place.

That the Conservatives' electoral success was purchased by an almost fabulous neglect of the country's social infrastructure and the creation of widespread poverty, that these sooner rather than later would catch up with them, was instinctively understood everywhere except among the country's political elite. It has taken the Labour party nearly five years to come to terms with that. And the state as an organising agency has been so thoroughly undermined, ideologically and physically, that it is still unclear whether Labour can do much about it. Whether we think Kinnock was the saviour of the Labour party or its gravedigger depends very much on what we think of New Labour, and how far we agree with Hattersley that Kinnock was seeking not to abandon socialism but to introduce a new and improved form of it. Somebody had to disembarrass Labour of the infantile disorders of the early 1980s and Kinnock did that very well. As a result his successors were able to exploit the Conservative party's various disasters in the following decade. Kinnock, furthermore, did not (does not?) share New Labour's overt or covert admiration for Thatcher. He retained a moral critique of the 1980s unfashionable in the contemporary Labour party.

And I like to think that he would not have dismantled the country's comprehensive school system. Yet there is little in Westlake's book to suggest that he was indeed seeking a new and improved form of socialism - if he was, he didn't find it. Given his attitude to policy, to what underlay the electoral success of the Conservative party, the people he promoted and whose guidance he sought, the only alternative likely to emerge was New Labour. · Ross McKibbin's Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 is out in paperback. He is a fellow of St John's College, Oxford. · To read more online essays from the current edition of the London Review of Books visit the LRB . The extensive online archive of essays from past includes Alan Bennett's Diary and much more.

Question: Who did Neil Kinnock replace as Leader of the Labour Party in 1983?
Answer: Michael Foot