Hennessy Lecture 2017: Neil Kinnock

[Music] Oh [Applause] good evening my name is Colin Bailey and I am the president and principal here at Queen Mary University of London and I would like to welcome you to this fantastic university here in the heart of the East End very quickly about the university the university's got history dating back to 1785 we are represented on campus from 162 countries and I always say to our students and our staffs where else can you appreciate and learn from people from different backgrounds different traditions and different cultures at the university we are pushing the boundaries of research and innovation which is having an impact locally nationally and internationally on the economy and on society and I'm really pleased this evening to welcome you to the Peter Hennessey lecture now the Peter Hennessey lecture is a flagship lecture through our Moreland institutes and our Marland Institute is looking at policy in politics the research in hell they are shaping UK life in an ever-changing environment both in the UK and globally now I'm going to ask Peter Hennessey Lord Hennessy to say a few words before we start and introduce our guest of honor Lord Neil Kinnock now pizza is a Netley professor here in our school of history at Queen Mary he is a senior adviser and patrons to the Marland Institute and he is a firm believer of what we've tried to do here at Queen Mary in shaping so many lives of the local population but also nationally and internationally peter is a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and he was a journalist for over 20 years working at the times the Financial Times and The Economist so without further ado I will ask now Peter Hennessy to say a few words and then of course introduce our guest of honor Lord Neil Kinnock thank you very much Thank You Colleen very much for that wonderful warm welcome welcome to you all as well it's a special evening when Neil's around Oscar Wilde and famously said the trouble with socialism it takes up too many evenings but not if Neil Kennex there it doesn't I've know Neil for a long time actually and every every conversations are Sparkle I can remember the first conversation nearly probably can't it's the spring of 76 when Harold Wilson to everybody's surprise as he's standing down as a leadership contest extraordinary leadership field Tony Crossland Roy Jenkins Tony Benn Michael fought your great friend and patron Jim Callahan somebody else had forgotten Denis he I mean what a field day those were the days but Michael didn't that was a bit unfortunate Tony Benn yes to any been our friend no sure we were a friend and Michael for a very honorable man wonderful man didn't want to talk to the press didn't want to be seen to be pushing his own cause so Neil was looking after that side of it and we went for lunch and Bert Aurelia's in Charlotte Street and we talked about our age Tony we talked about nya Bevin the great poet of post-war British politics and it was a terrific time we only talked about Michael for about three minutes but that's how I remember it the first occasion meal and it's been a treat ever since when we've met but the plan for this evening is that Neil and I will converse for about 35 to 40 minutes then we'll have 20 minutes or so for Q&A then we'll go and have a drink so I hope that suits everybody this is hallowed ground here Neil as you know for labor history because it's in this very Hall that climatically on the 26th of July 1945 the count for the live House constituency was in here as well as the Mile End seat and it was in here that claim actually realized he was going to be Prime Minister with a majority so this is holy ground which makes you even more welcome now talking about envious and envious yeah yeah 146 seat majority wasn't it let's go back to the 40s and the early 50s the making of you as a boy and a young man in the 60s out of the labor movement of South Wales talk about the tell us about the compost that made you I can remember those valleys my auntie Molly had a pub in Newport which was dry and a Sunday so we drive up the valleys through your area to the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains it was packed with calories railways the great Emma Vale steelworks and you came out of that formation you're the classic product of the labor movement of the early post-war years aren't you absolutely and indeed an inheritor and the debtor because everything that I am and everything I've tried to contribute and believe derives from that background packed as it was as you say with all the elements and evidence of heavy industry dangerous work coal mines coke works brickwork steel works works were in everything and in fact maybe in news to know I in the house that we lived after my parents left the one room that they had when I was born we went to a terraced house in Vale terrorism today which was rotten with rodents and black beetles that we used to call black pots as in all cholera areas but I didn't recognize that when I was a kid of three or four and at the back of our house with the gasworks running outside the gasworks was the main railway line from Judea down to Newport and we faced onto titre Scolari which closed in 1958 first empty pit closure demonstration I was very involved in and you can imagine what the atmosphere was there my mother I remember I used to come to the door when I was playing in the garden and say Neil coming in and have you tea it's on the table and it's getting dirty energy but I that was the background and of course it was as an awful cliche but it like a lot of cliches absolutely true it was a truly close-knit community and it had a real dynamic and it expressed itself with a materiality articles a world-class silver band which were world champion still survives on vice-president of it they won the World Championships two years ago so they're still going strong a huge male voice quiet and on Sunday Larsson day Sunday of the month right throughout the winter celebrity concerts either Beniamino Gigli chili sing in the Workmen's hall in tunisia so the idea that there were these narrow valleys with narrow views is rubbish because I think that people conscious of their disadvantage and their the neuron us of their condition really very deliberately and collectively extended their reasons massively in order to nourish creativity and in that atmosphere of course a huge premium was put on education both for its fulfillment but also as the means of escape and that was the background without romanticizing at all against which I grew up with a wonderfully loving and happy a hard-working family to call them industrious would be to understate it but they certainly were creative and imaginative as well I'm not extended through the family not just my mom and dad there's a great tradition of adult education the minors Institute libraries yes we're something when they they preserve the preserved in Swansea University how old Frances yes has preserved them but that was entirely natural wasn't it you've mixed with people who were up to their eyes in Hegel just talking beforehand about meal when he was a young workers educational Association lecturer ending up with men and women who'd read everything understood it helped it mind you could take it not back i when I was doing a-levels in a very very creamed Grammar School school you had to get 97% in all three papers to be considered it was formally for Monmouthshire boys which I was until three years before had been a scholarship system they ended that happily but anyway myself and six other lads from Judea I managed to satisfy the requirements and or admitted to the school that Lloyd George in attempted flattery called the Eton of South Wales anyway I went to this school and I wasted my time most of the time I was there wasn't in schools father it wasn't entirely my fault but you know a real premium was put on the ability to show merit and succeed and then you could be excused for thinking you were on kind of conveyor belt and it would just roll along anyway when I was 17 I was doing a-levels and I joined the National Council of labour colleges class in the back room of the tree your arms into Deegan only about 16 or 17 other people there including most notably the survivors of the query club that had been formed by an Aaron Bevin and his contemporaries in the 1920s and it actually run Judea during the general strike they were called to do Soviet and these were very smart guys I think the latest any of them had been in school was at the age of 13 distinguished even amongst this distinguished outfit was council Oliver Jones wonderful man who comforted me once when I said that I hadn't done well in the exams and I wasn't going to be able to love to do Latin next year he said oh don't worry about that young killer don't worry about that at all it's not so long ago there were millions of people walking round speaking fluent Latin and they didn't have a university place among em anyway being smart in this class which I was by far the youngest member of the class and Marcello house here our lecturer from the extramural department in Cardiff University was a wonderful teacher great economies and he was a Hungarian it was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War where he'd been wounded horribly and then captured and tortured and his whole physical frame was as a consequence ruined but he had a mind like a jeweled wonderful man and he said them it was I don't never forget it was the day that the goal took the franc back on the gold standard you might not remember the extraordinary memory anyway we turned up at the class and Marcel said you've heard the news tonight about president de Gaulle what do you think that this means and there was silence and like a smartass I said them and I actually use phrases like this in those days Marcel I think it might be a harbinger of the downfall of capitalism it was such an inelegant phrase the IKE which is why remember it and there was a pause and everybody's very very kind to me and all of it Joan said well I said can I offer a view to our young friend which is what I used to be called unpaid realizing Lea by all means Oliver can I tell you about capitalism which is how people of his generation used to pronounce the word capitalism as you find is like a mountain stream there it is bubbling at the top of the hill you can put a dam on it you can as we found to our great cost build a housing estate on it you can put clutches on it you can do what do you like to control it and when you get to the bottom of the hill there's the bugger coming out again he taught me a lesson about capitalism which I've never forgotten anyway sorry that was all by the way so you know one of the few people around that three people I know anyway who heard and I Bevin speak as a boy and the extraordinary combination of the thought the flights of thought that would combine so many things with perfect timing never over prepared the spontaneity of it which you've very rarely seen in politics now he didn't know where he was starting where he was going to be in the middle or at the end until you heard him did he capture for us what he was like and I well you mean you said earlier in your kind introduction that night was a poet of politics and he was but a very practical poet of politics and it was a therapy pragmatism in order to achieve advance he was always willing to be pragmatic he spoke of very dismissive Lee of what he called so-called socialist who threatened to prom Nashua is everything and nationalizing the thing they are purists and therefore it's most important word and therefore balan and he held them in total skull the ultralift but he so he is this practical poet and to listen to him I think I must have been about 12 when my father took me to hear him indeed it was no I was it's a West twelve he was in serious crisis and the title of the meeting which was also addressed by Michel Fortin Ian Mikado in the workman soul into diga which was a theatre a beautiful theatre that SATs eighteen hundred people but when I spoke there would be two thousand two hundred more because people were standing on inside and was broadcast by tannoy outside in Morgan Street engineer and my father took me on the Sunday night and we got there early so we had a really great seat and nice spoke and I can't pretend that twelve years of age that I comprehended the issues I mean I mean I read the news Chronicle religiously at home or what I didn't read was read out to me because that's what I mean it still goes on it still happens in ours I guess it happens everywhere but anybody hitting a particular resonance sentence from James Cameron or other great writers all the time oh listen to this so you couldn't be but conscious without anything being rammed down your throat of the environment and times in which you were living so that much I knew but I didn't know the intricacies in the way that Devon explained them and it was hypnotic it was it was funny and what I came to recognize to be Cadence's and silences that spoke volumes and sentences that became long and really forceful so they belted you at the end I'm ever sentences the group finished just let the imagination and I never forget I don't remember what quotation it was but there was a quotation from the Bible and there was a damn great chunk of what I thought was Shakespeare but when I did my a-levels I discovered was from Christopher Marlowe's death and it was so resonant and he never condescended to the audience he never avoided using complicated words and sometimes he would use it with an accent he would say and the audience would be running through it I give you an example I can actually quote a speech in the 1959 general election and I died two years afterwards I went down to Abergavenny to the Monmouth constituency to support the Labour candidate Joe Richardson of beloved memory and I never I was seventeen I'd never really encountered any Tories before my whole life I mean I knew we had a big care living down the road from us who as a Tory or said he was but that's because he was a baker and he had a car anyway I went down and I canvassed an absolutely new concept to me I canvassed together with some other youngsters from around South Wales and in support of Joe and the Eva Poole rally was to be addressed by tonight in who convinced me since the 1930s had gone to somewhere in the month instead Ewan see a score I forgive any to speak on behalf of the candidate he spoke for Michael foot when he was in 1936 I think it was and so he came to speak for Joe and then he would air a black rock to the heads of the valleys and finish up in the workman's hall into diga so my intention was to go to the albergue of any meeting and then in a friend's car get up to Julia and listen to both but I was drafted in as a bouncer which was more convincing than it is now because I usually inveterate rugby player anyway and they put me on the doors and I was given the task of ushering naive Evan into the Hall because I was from Judea I don't know if they thought I'd speak his language was something but this was a big event anyway the market the market wall in a bikini and of course now is late it's very late and the poor old sod the only labour councillor in Abergavenny a county councillor was given the task of just keeping the meeting going yeah I don't know if you ever been there Peter but it is a dreadful dreadful roll it it I think it must be worse than giving out the Academy Awards in Los Angeles you know anyway this old fellow was aspirant Li embarrassed in fact he didn't have an H in the proper place in his whole recovery so I was over in the all-boys meant I was over in the hall anyway he trundled on I'm in the front there were two rows of young Tories drafted in by bus from Cardiff who gave my hell of a time and they were violent Liam it was dreadful and he had no means of controlling it and the Chairman didn't want to put off the audience packed absolutely packed out and eventually night to end up came in through the door behind me when I turned on this I'll take you down Stevan he said no no let me get this man so after a minute or so he heard all this heckling and booing and catcalling at this poor old county councillor no rain or money was and he said no boy so I took him down and he was observed coming down the aisle the chair with some relief got up and said come with some friends and Annabelle and two motorists greeting except of course from the young Tories I got on the stage and immediately took out one piece of paper from his pocket which always had I never actually saw him looking at one nevertheless and he leaned into the microphone and almost in a whisper great delight to be here with you victory and the Tories tippet and other people might be applauded and he said that I want to impart you some news the news is I don't hate all Tories and they did exactly what you just did in fact it's fair to say there are one or two of them I can even admire for their kindness to their children and their care for their wives and their resources and narrative so it can fairly be said this voiceless slightly rising in volume it can fairly be said that an air in Devon is not among who detests people just because they are conservatives I hate his snobs end of story and Bailey carried on with his speech and that was just in three sentences four sentences he gone through oh I don't know Henry the fourth part one I mean it was it was extraordinary it was a great great performance but with real import real force and then he went on to make a wonderful speech well come on to Michael foot in a minute his great disciple and your great mentor but the other influences on you in terms of your democratic socialism were reading our age Tony when they're here what was it that hit you between the eyes from Tony and what's relevant now Tony's plain language he was an extraordinarily gifted intellect with the mark of all great intellects he had the ability to be simple and to be deductive in a way that took you through his arguments anybody literally anybody could read understand and then I think sympathize with Tony it's entirely relevant now he wrote a great essay we mean freedom he wrote it in 1942 for The New Yorker and it was in order to convince the United States that they'd done the right thing in December 1941 in joining the British and Commonwealth forces in resistance to the Nazis and they should undie and the Japanese Empire and they should have no doubt about it and it was resonant of resonance not the right word it was it reminded me when I read it later of all Wells lion and the unicorn because here was really forceful progressive patriotism which all will use the term Patriots love their country nationalists hate other countries I think definition especially when you come against the so called alt right and the far right and the Nazis of today they beat their chests for patriotism but you know it's detestation of others that is their main motive rather than love of country and what Tony did in that essay was to convey the absolute quintessential argument for combating the Axis forces and everything that Nazism and fascism meant it was wonderful stuff it didn't prevent him from making the democratic socialist argument in it for instance I mean this is really up-to-date as to the last couple of days when we are getting a rehearsal or repeat yet again of the presentation of the market economy and capitalism as the savior of the world the last refuge of an embarrassed conservative in my view but they were and it being done in a didactic way that can't be expected to win the argument and I mean there are serious arguments in faith in favor of the mixed market economy there's no question about it at all and many of the attributes claimed for it absolutely true but what Tony said was about arguments about the state the state is an instrument no more no less it is not an animated being in stupid greedy hands it will be stupid and greedy in enlightened and generous hands it would be enlightened and generous and when you think about it and all the guff that surrounds philosophies and ideologies of the state to cut through it like that and then he goes on to say it of course it's a very important instrument which is why this such a struggle to control it and then he develops the argument into democracy but the simplicity of that idea to sort of sit back and say well Tom I knew that but I never recognized it in those terms and that's the heartwarming thing about Bevin about all about Tawnia but some other people go grief is another one who you could read or hear and agree with because he'd always thought that but he'd never had the words or the confidence or whatever else it took the poetry to produce that sentence in that way I'd be so damn proud if I could produce a sentence that reduce the state to an instrument no and I didn't need convincing I was already there four years before I read it but the hearing without simplicity and the power of that simplicity was wonderful and that's why he's applicable now that I mean that's a tiny tiny miniscule fragment of the genius of our age Tony but if it induces anybody to go off and read Richard Tory if you can get one of the books then my mission will be served you linked him with George Orwell and again Isaac yes a line in the unicorn yeah written in the Blitz published in 1941 when he will lead of the Labour Party and we'll come to that in a minute as well you said everybody sent to a friend of mine Richard wait after one of our seminars historical seminars that you thought every aspirant member of the National Executive Committee the Labour Party should read it now why should they why should today Shadow Cabinet read it yes both in alone and earlier than that in the road to Wigan PA the second part of road to begin PA which is a polemic the first part is a telling report into poverty and in inequality and injustice the second part is old philosophy and he might even have used the same phrase twice but it's definitely in the road to Burgundy and I'm certain is in the line unicorn the cause of socialism above all else is liberty that reality should ring like a clarion trumpet across the nations instead it is too often buried by ideologues like a jewel in Netanya first I was a kid when I read that first and I thought nobody will ever exceed that passion that clarity and the fact that the man lived by that code exposed humbug and oppression bigotry and despotism little tiny despotisms as well as great big global despotism and did it with mellifluous lee in ways that invited you to turn the page you know a real inspiration talking of inspirations and other great words with my cold foot yeah who you revere wonderful man how important was Michael in motivating you to want to become an MP yourself I should say incidentally I never revered him because he would have scold me if I did I don't know if he had any part in motivating me I was very very fortunate because I was a considerate of his and active in labour politics student politics he took my seat in 1960 after he died you know he was he was elected in the by-election yeah having been excluded from the shortlist by the National Executive Committee I was the youth delegate to the to the constituency party and of course all hell had loose when he was excluded and but on the list was Ron Evans who was very highly regarded local councillor and at being nice agent since 1950 ex Chindit steelwork a really great man I mean great man Ron and a huge paranoid and admirer of Michael and with great generosity he got his group in the constituency to withhold their votes to endorse the National Executive Committee nor let's have a real contest at night and I'd be privileged to go up against Michael foot now there very few people in any walk of life including politics who would do that but they did and they wrote a furious letter to to the National Executive Committee and said they were going to send a strong deputation up to the NEC in order to protest about the way in which the NEC had set aside the candidature of Michael for duly nominated by - lodges and God knows what anyway the NEC relented or at least gates kill resent relented Michael was on the shortlist and God selected as the candidate for the by-election I got a very good majority and everything was fine and obviously I was very active in the by-election I met him only once during the by-election and then subsequently as a university student we had a mutual friend bill Harry the guy who recruited me at 14 years of age the other Labour Party our local county councillor and I Glennis and I used to go walking with Michael on Sunday mornings on the hills around two diga and over to our whale which he loved to do and of course I got to know him very well and got to be his friend as well as his adoring admirer I make a frank confession of that not simply because of his greatness as a gymnast or the speaker's a parliamentarian or an internationalist all those things fine but he was one of the most sensitive kindly courteous men it's probably the most courteous man I've ever encountered and I've known the few ladies and gents who deserve the title but he was a wonderful character and the idea I think he would have sort of brushed it aside make up your own mind if I raised the possibility of seeking a parliament receipt but in any case it was such a distant prospect that until I graduated and got a job and Glennis and I got married and we'd settle down he never really started to formulate as a possibility in my mind and I I don't ever talk to Michael about it though Jill is what if Jill crazy beautiful woman she would go on about it and she might have talked to Michael about it because she certainly talked to Glennis about it repeatedly and also to me you're the next you're the next and I would used to embarrass the hell out of you as you can well imagine and then the way in which very accidentally they'll things fell my way meant that I became a candidate that I was 27 years of age you're elected in 1970 yeah why did you never accept office in the Wilson or Callaghan governments needle because the Michael I'm sure wanted you to he was deputy prime minister or yes yes he did in the Wilson government I have the kind of Knight number 12 shirt I was invited to second the Queen's Speech the royal dress in when we managed not to lose the election in [Music] February 1974 and this was generally in being allocated to a young adventure a way of sending a message the next vacancy in the government is us but I knew it wasn't going to be me because Wilson while in opposition had sent me in his place together with three other backbenchers including his PPS charlie and that sent us to Russia either an official invitation from Brezhnev to visit the Soviet Union and I hadn't been able to do it but asked if he could send for youngsters instead because Wilson had a mixture of fear and respect for the Soviet Union the white heat of Technology speech was actually all about this that Russia would develop as such an economic and scientific power such an industrial giant that this was the contest we were going to have anyway he retained that view which I didn't think about tentative and I'd always been very suspicious of the Soviet Union I think it was Bevin who said it's the future waiting to be born and when I got there for this fortnight visit we decided beforehand that we would go apart from Moscow to new and rebuilt places so we went to Novosibirsk an academic or a dog in Central Siberia which is newly built and but we also went to what was then just becoming called Volga starring God which had been 84 percent rebuilt and to Leningrad formally and latterly st. Petersburg which had been substantially rebuilt and it was remarkable but I came back and I wrote a memo which I thought was my duty to Wilson saying among other things we really didn't have to worry too much about the rise of Russia as an industrial power they literally couldn't make the lifts work so how the hell they were ever going to aim an intercontinental ballistic missile accurately at this I didn't know and it was I was you know 25 percent joking but 75 percent was what I thought was a serious critique of a system of oppression and incompetence where the stupidity was built-in and when we had their couple of KGB people with us who are patently very smart people indeed brilliant people but they would suppress their own thoughts manifestly in the course of a conversation and I thought again as Bevin said that no industrial power has ever succeeded something achieved but none have succeeded in the absence of popular democracy which is still true even when we observe China is still true and you know that view I'd taken throughout even before I'd read them and saying it I knew in my gut that there was something wrong with that system anyway this visit proved and I did era where if it was an era of writing to Wilson saying it where upon his enthusiasm for me as a coming here star diminished greatly so I knew that regardless of seconding the Queen's speech and all the rest of it or proposing the Queen's speech that it wasn't that happen in any case I swapped my position with a guy called ray Carter it was a very decent bloke but was desperately disappointed by not being a junior minister so I felt so sorry for him we were in the chief whips office in number 12 and I said Avery would you like to move this speech oh yeah you you do it instead of me and and I'll take you a place and I'll second it so this book we did and the speaker actually it was 7-7 I actually started to call mr. nee mr. ray Carter anyway Rainey was very happy and was made a junior minister a few months later and that's very good but I knew I'd fallen out of favor Jim was different Jim had been a friend since I campaigned for him in the early 60s very very hard Glennis being the secretary of the social society in University College in Cardiff there were three thousand two hundred undergraduates there eight hundred of them were members of the socialist society so get imagine the forces we could deploy on the street for Jim yeah and we put up his majority from 700 to 7,000 and then to 12,000 then it was all and Jim and I always had political differences but we always got on the really decent man and very generous man anyway you asked me if I would join the government when he became prime minister and I had fundamental differences over the government's probably expenditure policy which I thought was at Staton and as the weeks of passing with the policy for the kind of devolution that they were proposing and I just said the Jim I'm really sorry I would like to serve you and the movement all arrested but it would be profoundly dishonest and inconsistent and so thanks but no thanks and the same thing happened about ten months later I think it was when there was a reshuffle and he asked me again and I said I listen we're leaving deeper in now especially with the devolution arguments and I said you know my first obligation is to try and uphold the interests of my constituency and he would directly contradict the loyalty I would have to give as a matter of Honor to the government so I didn't honey was very understanding he's very kind he was brushed off but he was very kind about it and then a few years later will leap forward you become leader of the Labour Party yourself you're the only man I know who can date his midlife crisis to the hour do you want to explain well no here's a coincidence today's October the third yesterday was October the 2nd and I became leader of the Labour Party about five o'clock on the afternoon of October the 2nd 1983 so that was 34 years ago yesterday and I can as you say I can beat my midlife crisis precisely from then till 2 p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday the 18th of July 1992 and you cease to be leader you had a terribly tough first two years because it coincided with the miners strike flesh of your flesh and yet the leadership of the miners Union was not York style of leadership and then militant the expulsion of militant now I don't sure we've got much time to go into all the detail of that so I mean no no but linking with where we are now I have to be careful here as I'm a neutral sort of person do you think there's a destructive that's very kind do you think there's a destructive gene in the makeup of the Labour Party I mean Denis Healey said to me once years ago there's a nice name drop isn't it yeah when we were talking about the @ly government which Heinrich just written a book home and he reckoned that Labour had run out of things to do that everybody agreed upon once they'd implemented the Beveridge report which was pretty well coterminous for the 4551 on labor governments and thereafter the propensity to fall out it's going to be much higher and when you think of your lifetime there's been at least three great monumental falling so maybe four do you think there's something in the labour party in the labor movement that does lead to this I know what Denis meant especially as he observed the late forties and through the 50s and he was a young member of parliament from 51 right in the middle of the crossfire and of course was international secretary of the party after leaving the forces and I think he fought a seat and he got it to be a Tory marginal but he didn't win and then he won the seat in Leeds so I understand why he would have been scarred in that way by the sheer fruitlessness as he certainly would have seen it of the incessant battles going on between Bevan Heights and gates collides and left and right and so on the Labour Party but I think he would be wrong if he thought that it was because they'd accomplished so much and therefore lost their partner phrase momentum because the great accomplishments and in any case they were absolutely work tired after the years of the depression the war the immense burdens on them as a new government Nora said but I actually think that if clam and Europe biographer so you may profoundly disagree with this if Clem hadn't been so whacked and fed up by 1950 with the way in which affairs were being conducted not just by the Bevin Heights but those who are trying to take action against them and the way in which everybody treated things as a contest for every inch of ground in August with if he hadn't been as we need by that he would have followed his instincts and possibly even have made my foreign secretary or even maybe I don't know because Gates can have the job Chancellor but certainly would have demonstrated respect for nice achievements in establishing the NHS and in being a great housing minister and accomplishing a great deal as well as the adoration by a big chunk not all by any means of the party and some of the trade union movement and if god had occurred I think they would have been a quarrel between Bevin and someone more zealous comrades further to the left or thinking they were the left but it will change the center of gravity it would have moved the center lines of the battlefield and could have been destructive but I think it less likely being destructive so I think that I totally understand Dennis's sentiment and indeed is in sight but I think it's more that there is a a grub in this this lovely flower of democratic socialism with all its ideals and principles and its enlightened purposes and it's extrovert attitude to politics and it's internationalist and all the other reasons that I'm a Democratic Socialist and the Grobe is nor maybe two groups one is there always have been they always will be people in the live body who cherish the idea of power in the Labour Party more than power for the Labour Party and I've had some terrible run to them and then secondly there is the grub which is in all political parties in the very nature of political parties both in democracies and outside democracies of clans tribes clashing personalities that have got very little often to do with ideology and I have a lot to do with aspiration or self praise or eagle I saw Dennis what is the Boris Johnson speaking today I felt by God if ego was air it would have suffocated the whole bloody conference anyway the the I got those grubs and from time to time when there's a source of irritation they can really be a destructive force in the live body and it actually requires a terrific destruction of time and effort to suppress it put it put it back in its box and get the movement to focus on our purpose for being in politics which is to change our society and if we can the world for the better and there's no superior purpose and there's no other instrument in the United Kingdom than the Labour Party for doing that and if you can get people to remember that to diminish and confine those grubs those instincts then believe re sale zone and is a real force but when they distract or dominate then it's much the same thing actually then by god convincing British people that their country should be put in irons is additionally difficult I got the t-shirt before we open out can you give us quickly your assessment of the ecology of the current Labour Party and labour movement well can approach it in this way in politics and in other walks of life - especially in what I will call other creative activities timing has a lot to do with success in politics usually for decades what active people active in politics do is to try to identify the public sentiment of hope expectation aspiration disappointment resentment concern worry whatever really is the dominant tendency in the public and even try to measure it with opinion polls and God knows what but often as the opinion polls have shown there's something undefinable about it but you just hope you can identify it articulate it put the argument that will enable people to identify with you and then you have an election and you've got a better chance of winning that's usually what is happening the search for the understanding of the developing and prevailing public mode sometimes on the basis that even a stopped clock is Right twice a day sometimes the tendency the sentiment the feeling comes towards a political inclination I think that's what's happening now and that's why I think it's not inconceivable that labor could win the next general election and Jeremy Corbyn could be the Prime Minister it isn't that the mood was so much identified and articulated and mobilized and is rewarded by votes it is that this feeling that exists in our country now has been developing for some years I wouldn't put a specific date on it but it's around about 2008 for a mixture of reasons not not just the crash reason to go back before that and this tide has been maybe that's the best analogy this time has been gathering place out in the ocean and is coming towards the beach and it just so happens that Jeremy is there on the beach when the tide washes up now I'm not saying he's at nothing do with it or anything like that a terrific election campaign was fought and the result demonstrates that and is greatly assisted by the extraordinary contemptuous indolence of the conservative campaign it was amazing just astounding so he's assisted by that but that isn't a whole reason either and that's where we are now one last point our makers have talked too long to gain an understanding of this tide which is now reflected in wider society but at least in the Labor Party which I know fairly well I knew it was there and developing from 2010 the reason I knew it was there is I go around doing fundraisers and speaking live party dinners and various other meetings and you know people are very kind of no walls and sometimes I knew that what I'd managed to engender was some laughter and feeling that we could overcome and the extraordinary thing was wherever I went north or south east or west with predominantly working class party membership or university Dawn's or couple of doctors the odd solicitor a few priests on occasions a real mixture it didn't matter what the background or the location people would come up to me and say afterwards nerium nerd it like that for a long time now okay even cutting 40% of all that out for being nice to an old dog it was coming up so often and I would say to add that this phenomenon existed people were getting so outraged by the way in which the coalition government was conducting affair not just with its incompetence but it's terrible arrogance the idea that they were masters of the universe and seeing the injustice is and waste and loss of opportunities and pressures developing around them and they wanted that outrage reflected not in flailing arms and shouting and stamping but with a much more accurate presentation of labor politics and the attack on an argument against Cameron and the Tories and to some extent the Liberals and it wasn't coming so that the moment Jeremy Corbyn got on that ballot paper by this extraordinary series of accidents and the electorate had been transformed by Ed's decision there are free park membership I put the two together and I said to Glennis the next day Corbin you get it and she said oh I don't think so I mean he's a nice enough chap but and I said no he's gonna get it cuz that's the feeling there and I don't even know what the three-pound members feel but I do know what existing members feel and thus it turned out forty nine percent of people who had joined the Labour Party well before that leadership election voted as their first preference with Jeremy Corbyn so I knew it that was there and I knew that tide was ready to break over the reef and with the increasing insecurity in our society the anxieties that come the crisis in lack of housing the price of rented accommodation the insecurity of employment with his terrific irony of more people employed than ever before but in more lousy jobs than have been for a very very long time all those things coming together failing to be addressed I thought when Theresa May made her Downing Street speech and also when she made a conference speech this time last year I don't wait a minute wait a minute we are going to get a kind of Joe Chamberlain Hull Macmillan we understand noblesse oblige we serve the nation kind of tourism and maybe she means some of it I doubt it but maybe she will none I thought she's a steady sort of woman yeah she's stubborn she's inflexible but sometimes sometimes that's a wheels source of strength so whoa she could be serious then a couple of days later she appointed Liam Fox and Boris Johnson and I thought what was gone I think it's time for questions and discussion can then thank you the lights come up and the microphones I'm sure are distributed and can we keep the questions nice and terse so we can get in as many as possible no stake the answers even to it sorry hand up there in the front row of the gallery thanks very much first time around patently we either lost the argument or didn't put it with a vision force because the majority voted to leave what they voted beyond that for no no no no no exactly no I agree with all that analysis yeah and we know it would been transformed if we'd had the vote for sixteen year olds and lots of other things but the fact is we are faced by the result well there's not a word that adequately describes my feelings of concern about it not just disappointment as much - that's much too superficial deep deep deep concern obviously not about my generation so much as about or even my children's generation but my grandchildren's generation I think it is an awful outcome but we are faced with it and whether we didn't put it hard enough or just lost the argument on the day it's there so the first thing to do is to concentrate on the practicality the practicality is there if we have anything other than a substantial transition to ease this gigantic change in the way in which everything not just the economy everything is conducted after 44 years of engagement in the European Union it will be an unmitigated disaster which will severely further weaken our economy which has currently got a balance of trade deficit a balance of payments deficit gigantic borrowing requirement a massive national debt certainly by peacetime standards a productivity deficit a living standards deficit a public services deficit all those weaknesses will be exacerbated by crushing out and so we have got a secure a transitional arrangement and period which will enable two things to occur the first and most obvious is the readjustment of so much in our economy from our ability to check imports and exports so that we can provide proof of origin even without tariffs that it will impose huge costs and enormous bureaucratic obligations on a generation from that simple practical requirement right through to flows of investment and medium and long term investment decisions and the employment that goes with them and the training and skills that go and so on everything everything now if we can't get that transition or they don't try to get that transition I fear even more for the future because that will also then deprive us of the other opportunity provided by transition and that is the opportunity and I'm measuring my words for reconsideration not of an objective of taking back control so-called but what the implications of this change fundamental profound change of relationship is with our nearest neighbors by far our biggest trading customers by far our biggest source of imports and inputs and unless and until people get the chance accustomed to the day-to-day bread-and-butter realities of the prospect of coming out of the European Union the single market systems union I don't really think that there's full comprehension because of stupidity but because of the sheer dimension of the change that there are sufficient people yet who comprehend the consequences of the action that they might have taken for attached but not directly linked in reasons some of them delusions but I don't think many people suffered too much from that even the 350 million pounds a week mythologically going to be allocated to the National Health Service but to give a chance because of the size and longevity of the effects of this decision to reflect and if they need to to take at some future stage a different democratic view of what occurred now I would like to be able to give you a much simpler answer a much more direct answer a much more compelling dramatic answer but I'd be treating you like a fool and I would be speaking as a fool if I said that there was a simple way to deal with this there isn't but there is a way provided that we seek to ensure a way of sliding at the most gradual rate into a changed relationship because the alternative is so appalling and in the course of that giving people another opportunity to examine what it implies for themselves their families their community the future of their young all of which should be the dictating realities on which a democracy takes a decision right in the back yes you've got a good voice for the microphones coming anyway [Applause] [Music] thanks very much and thanks for you Ken remarks I think that we probably and I say this about commentators as well move past the stage where people were prepared to confuse momentum with militant actually as a sentiment as a movement they've never been militant although there are people who are significant in momentum who are not unassociated with the background of ultra-left ism and sectarian politics in the Labor Party and they may have a disproportionate effect upon the directional Affairs in momentum but they are not momentum they don't make up the whole numbers what they and a few others have managed to do is to capture a moment in which they could give the impression in some cases sincere that this was an open house for ideas and enthusiasm and happily a lot of young people were attracted by that especially young people but not exclusively young people were attracted by that in the absence of apparent answers or exciting prospects and I don't mean not superficially I mean the chance to change the world which doesn't only apply the young minds it applies to some old fogies like myself as well which accounts for a lot of New Labour Party membership including those who've also joined momentum no that's I think much near the dimension bit than the idea that they're all interests and they're all trained in Liverpool and they all demand the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy and all the rest of it I thought that was never true certainly of the whole outfit although it would be true of some of those who have a significant part to play in it now how can it be dealt with well part of the answer is time and experience and I don't want it sound like an oldie I'm not talking about years and years and years oh you'll grow up you'll get to know much more when you're my age you'll understand then I'm not saying any of that stuff I am saying that as people who become active in politics and have to confront the dilemmas and determine the priorities in their political thinking they will realize that they the struggle that they have is much greater than they thought it was that's the realization that comes to you and it can come to you as a very early age you don't have to be in your 30s in carrying on a mortgage and God knows what to come to that realization all you've got to do is to look around the world recognize the inefficiencies and the injustice and understand that if there was a simple answer to overthrow these appalling burdens on our society and many others it would have been done and you're gonna have to be a damn sight cleverer and more persuasive in making your argument to a broader and broader spectrum of opinion in our demo see in order to secure the mandate that will give you the power to begin to try and change them building on what's being achieved before now simply being engaged actively in politics knocking doors trying to persuade voters to vote and to vote in the way that you want them to is a very formative experience and people learn fast so the more contact the more acquaintance the more experience the people who are infused about momentum have if they really are serious about securing political power for the Labour Party by Democratic means and they want to advance their society themselves their communities they will learn that lesson very very fast indeed the problem is there's a bit of a distraction this last conference for instance we witnessed a lot of enthusiasm a lot of people expressing what could be dismissed as wild ideas and God knows what and that doesn't disturb me at all that's the tumult of politics that's the cauldron and some of it is very sophisticated and convincing some of it is very crude and discouraging but that's democratic politics fine what really depressed me was the amount of time effort energy put into securing mechanistic changes intended to install one set of opinions in control of the live body not really disappointed me not simply because I disagree with them but because it is such a phenomenal waste of time energy effort and idealism to spend or doing more work um I say this is someone who got a reputation of being a bit of a Stalinist largely because I inherited a very undisciplined Labor Party not a whole lot not even the majority but undisciplined people who paid much more attention to their own passing opinions than to the serious business of trying to secure votes and get elected to power and so consequently we had to become much more formalized than i ideally would have wanted in order to re-establish the seriousness of the labour party and win respect and to a certain extent we did and it provided a foundation from which we could advance now even doing that they always have to be room as long as people were operating within very generous very liberal small-l rules in this Democratic Socialist Party for them to say and think and do what they like as long as they stayed within the rules I think we are moving within danger of moving at least a bit beyond that so there are people who want only conformity with a particular disposition now I don't think it's too late to pull back from that I don't think that that is the ghamdi fate of the live party I do say that if that is the tendency which transcends or comes to dominate the conduct of the party it will never dominate the membership we we we don't have proprietors so the mistake people make we have leaders who are elected we don't have proprietors in the labour party and so it's very important for those who believe the bacon ensconce a particular attitude by getting mechanistic control of various institutions and bodies and committees and whatnot in labour body to disengage themselves from our preoccupation and get on with the business of developing policies that are persuasive and attractive and can secure the breadth of opinion I'm not saying the two are mutually exclusive you need a well-run party you need organization that is certainly the case but never let the organization impede the appeal let it facilitate the appeal and as long as people who recently jungle a body or long-term members of the body understand that our welfare is guaranteed and our strength will develop further if they do forget it they'll be stabbing themselves in the chest and letting down millions in the process Bingle it's nearly drinks time because I asked you one final thought well it's giving up there are a number of young political historians in this audience what do you how would you like them to remember you in their books in the coming decade as a six for two quite muscular turbulently and as a Democratic Socialist some of you believe that believes and always will that the major political and economic decisions that determine human society or the the condition of human society should be consistent with the well-being of human society and in my view that can only be achieved and maintained by accountable pluralistic democracy which is why I'm a Democratic Socialist is this emphasis on society that reduced the word socialism in the first place until not so much marks but Marxists came behind it and tried to pretend that it was scientific and anybody who's done all level physics knows that it's not scientific but that's what I've believed that's what I continue to believe and suddenly of my background and I hope my understanding didn't find it difficult to comprehend the reality that if there was a socialism and a capitalism and I had to choose between the isms I was part of a society and understood it and as it turned out wanted to serve it well as I had absolutely no capital and there was no chance of me being one of those lists and looking at the well-being of society I think that Democratic bodies and democratically motivated people who invest their effort and their imagination in trying to produce a better society will use capital for its best purpose and that's generating wealth for the breadth of humanity rather than hoarding it taking it out of one hole in the ground and putting it in another hole in the ground just taking some pickings in between and people could think of that as simplistic but you can torture yourself in trying to provide definitions of your own purpose I don't think you can do better than they decide whether you want society your community the rest of humanity to flourish or whether you want it to be subject to accident and fate I know what my logical choices [Applause] [Music]

Channel: QMULOfficial

Views: 12,144

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Keywords: Queen Mary University London, Peter Hennessy, Neil Kinnock, Hennessy Lecture

Id: ZOFAvKEFp8E

Length: 82min 33sec (4953 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2017