It is twenty years since Neil Kinnock was elected leader of the Labour party. At a time when people are asking whether the Tories will ever win again or even rediscover their earnest desire for power, it is all too easy to forget that similar questions were being asked then about our party.
Nearly seven years into the new Labour government – and with the lack of any serious alternative choice in British politics – those questions seem light-years away. But the outcome would have been different without the leadership of the man I served for six years as the party’s director of campaigns and communications.
The 1983 election saw Labour’s lowest share of the vote since 1931 and its lowest actual vote since 1918. Out of 209 MPs, just three were elected in southern England outside London, and the party lost 119 deposits. Not only would Mrs Thatcher’s landslide majority take fourteen years to claw back but, of the 30 million ballots cast, Labour had scraped past the SDP-Liberal Alliance by just 700,000 votes – even though Britain’s electoral system gave Labour nine times more seats.
The party that Neil Kinnock was elected to lead after that meltdown possessed very severe and fundamental problems. It was riven from top to bottom with splits and in-fighting, and Militant and other Trotskyist infiltration had spread like a cancer. The party’s policies and preoccupations were distant from those that concerned the British people; and the relentless media assaults were largely deserved and unanswerable. This all had to be turned round if Labour was to survive, let alone return to power.
For all the work that moderate trade unionists like John Golding had done to halt the hard-left rot on the National Executive, Neil Kinnock’s famous speech at the Bournemouth conference in 1985 marked the start of the way back. He laid down the law that the Labour party no longer tolerated Militant and the hard left sectarianism of figures across the movement like Arthur Scargill and Derek Hatton and their fellow travellers like Eric Heffer and Tony Benn. It would take many more years of tough battles to defeat those who used our party as a flag of convenience for their extremism and personal ambition.
Of more fundamental importance was Kinnock’s and the modernisers’ determination to reconnect the party with the real world and see off those who fought under the banner of ‘no compromise with the electorate’. To many voters the party appeared to have lost interest in issues they cared about. Instead it obsessed over unpopular policies like nuclear unilateralism, opposition to council house sales and nationalisation. It was unable to come to terms with voters’ demands for trade union reform, reasonable tax levels and local councils that served the needs of their rate payers rather than their employees.
Reconnection and renewal is what keeps progressive political movements alive. Parties can survive for long periods as defenders of social interests and standard bearers of once powerful ideologies and as instruments of individuals’ own political ambitions. This may even help them get elected every once in a while. But without a relevant governing project, in touch with the changing social and political climate, they will not prosper in the long-run.
Voters expect their leaders to take the tough decisions for long-term prosperity, even if they are controversial and complicated to explain. By shunning reform and failing to demonstrate any understanding of the future, the party in the 1980s had alienated not only millions of floating voters but also what some casually still refer to as the ‘heartlands’ vote. Indeed, under 40 percent of trade unionists voted Labour in 1983. More strikingly, despite the deepest recession since the 1930s and with more than three million jobless, less than half the unemployed voted for Michael Foot.
That is why fundamental reconnection with the aspirations of Labour’s core support led to Kinnock’s revitalisation of Labour at the 1987 election. Described as Labour’s ‘brilliant election defeat’ because of the impact Kinnock made in the campaign, this further loss nonetheless enabled Labour to survive and to be reinstated as the principal challenger to the Conservatives. But it was Kinnock’s wholesale re-examination of the party’s policy programme following this further defeat that became the vehicle for Labour’s subsequent advance. As this gathered pace, Labour inched back into the minds and affections of mainstream voters.
This renewal process was like draining a swamp after years of the party talking to itself or, more often, tearing itself apart. Centre-left values and principles were not junked – they were rediscovered under layers of dogma and rhetoric like valuable natural wood hidden by multiple coats of age-old paint.
Only in this way could progressive goals be re-established for a new age – fighting inequality, extending social justice and building social solidarity – and modernising those policies that required a different response to meet public aspirations and expectations.
The revisionist direction that Kinnock set in the 1980s provides a lesson for us today as new issues and policy choices emerge even at this time of apparent electoral dominance. Labour’s success in delivering economic stability and the end of the Cold War have diminished some of the old debates about unemployment and inflation and made redundant old fears of communist takeover.
In their place, the advent of new technologies, mass communications and globalisation and their impact on the state’s ability to provide economic and personal security mean nations face different challenges, and not ones they are generally able to tackle by themselves.
Winning the arguments for reform and modernisation means going out and explaining not just what we are doing but why we are doing it, and for what end.
It also means serious consultation, both across the movement and wider still. This requires a confidence and openness, a mature attitude to constructive debate as well as respect for healthy internal dissent – something that was more of a luxury in Kinnock’s day, given the general state of the party.
But nasty, personalised attacks on Kinnock from the hard left of the party were not all he had to contend with. As his reforming zeal and programme gathered momentum, and started to show early signs of electoral success, the right panicked. And as their fears of Labour revival grew, so did the shrillness and bitterness of their attacks on Kinnock.
The smears by reporters and editors in the rightwing Tory press took a personal toll on the leader. I saw it at first hand in the undermining of confidence and bouts of depression that these often savage attacks engendered in him. They took their toll on the party, too, most notably in the 1992 election when both the man and his policies were viciously and systematically misrepresented to the British people.
The party’s conclusion that this must never be allowed to happen again drove the professionalisation of our media relations. The protection we sought was the right thing to do and has helped deliver two landslide victories in a new age of rolling broadcast news and intensified newspaper competitiveness. There have been negative side-effects since and in our first years in government we allowed ourselves to fret too much about media sensationalism and the next day’s headlines. Wisely, this is being remedied.
Neil Kinnock’s achievements in helping to heal the fissures in our party and providing the springboard leading to electoral success in 1997 were immense – even though he was denied the opportunity to serve as prime minister himself. The current state of the Tory party shows how easy it is for apparently hegemonic political forces to fall quickly into disarray. The lessons of how Kinnock’s party regenerated itself in the 1980s and 1990s remain crucial for Labour today and in our challenge to imprint our values on Britain in many decades to come.