24
2005
I warn you …
Neil Kinnock’s speech in Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983, rates as one of the finest speeches ever made in British politics.
It was two days before the General Election. He scribbled the notes from which he delivered the speech in the car on the way to the rally, and his voice was hoarse from campaigning. He was elected leader of the Labour Party at the party conference in October 1983, after Labour’s resounding defeat. He went on to transform the party to make it fit for government.
Here is the full text of what he said.
If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain–when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance–when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty–when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work–when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet–when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort–with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound–when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less–when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday–
- I warn you not to be ordinary
- I warn you not to be young
- I warn you not to fall ill
- I warn you not to get old.
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Quite a contrast with his Nuremberg moment in 1992.
Ah. You refer to the Sheffield Rally on 1 April 1992 (a date pregnant with resonance), in which Neil Kinnock punched the air and shouted “we are all right” to 10,000 supporters in the Sheffield Arena. At the time, it had no impact on the polls, and reporters who were there said it was a great success, but it has subsequently passed into political folklore that it had appeared too triumphalist and diminished Neil Kinnock’s image as a serious statesman.
Neil Kinnock said afterwards on the Frost programme:
Well, twenty years have passed so we’re now in a position to judge the accuracy of Kinnock’s rhetoric.
It seems a bit, err, hyperbolic, no?
Owen replies: err, no. The only bit that does not look prescient to me is the stuff about not being able to borrow.
Err, 1983? Around the beginning of the Lawson boom?
Tim
The benefits of Lawson boom, to its peak in 1989, were not widely shared within the country. They were focused on London and the South East.
J K Galbraith referred to private affluence and public squalor. With growing inequality, poverty within deprived communities outside London, the erosion of public services - I think Neil Kinnock was prescient in his vision of what would happen to British society.
Owen
What’s scary is that under the current administration many of these things are happening :
“ignorance” - the State education system is a disaster
“poverty–when pensions slip” - and companies abandon final salary schemes as fast as they can
“you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system” - no comment.
“not to go into the streets alone after dark” - a lot of old people on our estates obey this principle.
“I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.” - for the Govenment will send a representative into a courtroom to argue for the State’s right to starve a hospital patient to death, if the doctors consider it to be “in the patients best interests”
http://www.ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2005_05_15_ukcommentators_archive.html#111648749042038601
PS I didn’t notice unemployment jumping and people taking less holidays after 1983 - nor do I now.
[...] Some will remember a speech Neil Kinnock gave in 1983 when, on the eve of the General Election, he said that under a Thatcher Government, “I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old.” (Owen has a transcript of the speech.) Well, its 23 years later and we have a Labour Government. Would you want to be sick and old now? Maybe not. Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure. He was on CCU for three days but now is on the far flung corner of Dixon, one of the medical wards. He is partially sighted due to an old stroke, and is hard of hearing. The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels and, oddly, a suppurating area above both ears which Mary thinks is due to the oxygen mask he uses being too tight. He is losing weight because he cannot really manage to feed himself. Mary was in each day over the weekend. Uneaten food from Saturday was still on his bedside table on Sunday. Mary went to the nursing station at the end of the ward. The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Mary remembers that particularly. Mary thinks her husband is dying. She is not sure which consultant he is under, and has not been able to find a doctor to talk to. The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under “visual problems” it says “none”. Mary is in tears and asks what she should do. I suggest she phones the Chief Executive and makes a formal complaint. [...]
[...] Have a disability. (The words of Neil Kinnock come back to me here). If you have a motion disability you can find it hard to use a mouse or otherwise navigate a website. If you have a vision disability you can find difficult or impossible to read the words. Such people often have tools to help them, such as a screenreader, or exploit their web browser’s features by enlarging the text or using the keyboard. A lot of work has gone into these applications and into the browsers to enable all this. Unfortunately each Flash application has to redo all this work to make them accessible, and their creators rarely have the time. [...]
Hi,I’m a 36 year old ,comitted Labour voter in southern England.As a teenager,raised by working-class grandparents,I saw Neil Kinnock as a ‘ modern-day Aneurin Bevan’-his conference speeches,whilst long-winded,were warm,fulll of humanity.It is the longest regret of my adult life that Neil Kinnock was not elected Prime Minister in 1992-he was decent,courageous,and throroughly deserved to take the ultimate prize-good on you,Neil!
Some years ago when Neil Kinnock was leader of the opposition I accompanied him on a number of calls and meetings with various Commonwealth leaders, and spent a good deal of time with him in the car on the way to and from these calls and back at the office between them, over three or four days. I can testify from this experience to his remarkable command of the key facts and figures relating to a host of political issues and a rare capacity for switching rapidly in conversation between them; to his sound, humane and liberal judgement on all of these issues; to the speed with which he would absorb points made to him (for someone with a well-known tendency to long-windedness unless checked by Glenys, he’s a remarkably good listener, a rare quality among senior politicians); to his wicked sense of humour; to his courageous self-knowledge; and to his charm. He was terrific company.
My respect and admiration for him as a socialist, a politician and a person were reinforced by a number of social contacts with him in subsequent years. He is now widely and in my view unfairly underrated. I believe that he would have made an excellent prime minister, perhaps even a great one. If only….
PS: You can still see and hear a clip with scenes from the controversial Sheffield Labour Party rally of 1992 here. I agree with Kinnock’s (and Owen’s) view that while aspects of it were misjudged (he had not wished for or intended the embarrassing triumphalism of the opening minutes), it had no effect on the result of the election, for which Kinnock was in no way to blame.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/