Neil Kinnock Quotes

I manifest no paranoia when I say that there has been in the Labour Party an element which has treated realism as treachery, regarded appeals to party unity as an excuse for suppression of liberties and scorned any emphasis on the importance of winning elections as a contaminating bacillus called 'electoralism'.

Someone up there likes me.

We support the efforts to keep the pits open until exhausted.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

If anyone wants to know why we must conduct ourselves [with commonsense and realism], just remember at all times, with all temptations, how you, each and every one of you sitting in this hall, each and every Labour worker watching this conference, each and every Labour voter, yes, and some others as well, remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the tenth of June. Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the ninth, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'

We must not look for some kind of Messiah.

The roots of defeat which were put down by some of the elements of our party in the two or three years after 1980 made victory difficult to achieve.

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 - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing.

In the years between our defeat in 1979 and our defeat in 1983 Labour was increasingly seen to be a party slipping towards impossiblism, succumbing to fads, riven by vicious divisions, speaking the language of sloganised dogma – and usually voicing it in the accents of menace. It was almost as if sections of the party measured the purity of their socialism by the distance which they could put between it and the minds of the British people.

I didn't come to it intellectually, I came to it pragmatically. What intellectual appeal there was came initially entirely from Bevan mainly because of the way in which Bevan, in speech and writing, articulated exactly what I was feeling.

[Margaret Thatcher is a] stubborn Salome who wants the miners' heads on a plate.

Wankers and whingers.

Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man.

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. And I warn you not to grow old.

David Frost: If you haven't got nuclear weapons, the choice in that situation would be to subject your forces to an unfair battle.
Neil Kinnock: Yes, what you're suggesting is that the alternatives are between the gesture, the threat, or the use of nuclear weapons, and surrender. In these circumstances the choice is posed, and this is a classical choice, between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable.