Background
Mr. Kinnock, welcome to Berkeley.
Thanks very much.
Tell us a little about what drew you into politics.
I grew up in the South Wales mining valleys. My father was an ex - coal miner
and a laborer in the steel works, and my mother was the local district nurse. They
weren't strongly political people; they had very firm affiliations to the Labour
Party in terms of voting, but they weren't members of the party at that stage. In our
household there was always lively conversation about the issues of the day, and I
had a very close relationship with my grandparents, who had been through all of
the strife that preceded the Second World War in the twenties and thirties, and had
a humorous and illuminating way of conveying what their lives had meant to them.
That, and I think my ability to witness what was going on around me in the late
1940s and the 1950s made me determined as a kid that there were problems that
could be and should be resolved: problems of welfare, of opportunity, of equality.
Because I had the fortunate encounter with people in the Labour Party locally in
South Wales, who were inviting, I joined the Labour Party when I was fourteen,
and it was simply being involved in a collective effort to resolve what I saw to be
the problems of the community surrounding me. I took to it as naturally as I did
football, I guess, or chasing girls.
Being a Politician
What would you say are the skills that really matter in
this work of politics?
I think understanding is the basic skill. If you move beyond simply being an
activist to being a representative, your basic duty is to comprehend and then to
articulate the ideas, the realities, the hopes of those for whom you are working. I
suppose that doesn't just apply to being a representative, it applies to being an
activist as well, but that's the fundamental skill. Now you are assisted, of course, if
you can write or speak fluently, but I think the most important weapon is to offer
the authentic voice of those whose cause you're trying to undertake. It doesn't
mean you have to use their colloquialisms or speak in the same accent or share
exactly the same background, but you must show that you are part of their pulse.
In this endeavor, I guess the media has become both a
friend and an adversary. How do you deal with that?
Modern media, particularly television and radio, should have offered democratic
politics an absolutely unequaled opportunity to inform and mobilize opinion. They
should be representative channels, and channels not only of debate, but of
investigation and supervision by the democracy of the governors of democracy.
Instead of that, they are a bent channel. Because of their emphasis on the urgency
and sensationalism of news, we are in the age of the soundbite and that often
obscures rather than illuminates both detail and reality. Therefore, I think that
we're going through an age, perhaps it will change, in which there is a great
wasted opportunity; that instead of the media being a source of empowerment for
the peoples of democracies, it's become a source of distortion of the news and
information that should be enlightening and empowering them.
Now, for a politician, it means that you are constantly aware of having to speak
through a veil to the people that you're trying to address. In the old days, or even
to some extent now, if you speak to a large meeting where at least they are there,
they are hearing what you have to say, they're seeing the bumps and bruises as
well as the smiles and the flashes of sunshine. But the media can determine, to a
great extent, both the force and the nature of what you say. It's Marshall
McLuhan's maxim writ large: the medium is the message; and that inhibits
politicians. It also means that they mold what they say and the approach that they
make, not so much to the democratic audience that they're seeking to meet, but to
please and to conform to the channels established for them by the media. I think
we've got to be extremely cautious and vigilant about the way in which things
develop in the future. It's not very happy now.
Because of your party system, do you have less of a
problem in this regard than, say, the United States,
where our politicians seem increasingly to be inundated
with the trivial and the public discourse that has
turned into a soap opera?
I think we've got the soap opera problem. It isn't entirely a consequence of the
form of televisual and broadcasting media that we've got; the politicians contribute
to it as well. Perhaps it isn't quite as severe in Britain as it is here because our
media are, I think, more sophisticated and demanding, less superficial than the
media in the United States of America, and that's not an assertion of international
superiority, it just so happens that the quality is better. I think in Britain we've got
to try to safeguard ourselves against moving that one step further backward, which
would put us in the United States situation, where there appears to me, as an
outside observer though frequent visitor, to be a bias against understanding, a
deliberate effort to diminish and trivialize basic and very important political issues.
To what extent can you learn politics in books? Do you
have to do it or come out of an environment such as
yours, which drew you into it?
Certainly your ideas can be refined and informed, and politics without books is
simply chest beating. There has to be judgment information in order to articulate
what you feel, inform what you feel. But in addition, politics without that basic
impulse of principle, of mission, of conviction, is just a job like any other. So
you've got to try to mix your sense of basic values, of ethical persuasions, of
purposes in changing the world for the better, with the wisdom of the ages and the
information of your contemporaries, and try, out of that combination, to provide
both an incentive for people to engage in democratic politics and a series of
practical answers to the problems and pressures of their time and the hopes that
they've got for the future. So rhetoric, principle, ethics, convictions, without that
basis of information, would be entertaining but not terribly useful in terms of
improving the world.
Isn't the principle inevitably tarnished by the process
of compromise, which is central to democratic politics?
No, I don't think so. Because democratic politics, by definition, requires the
translation of principles into answers that can be of assistance to the people, the
community, a country, the world. The view that I take is one that I expressed fairly
frequently when Mrs. Thatcher was prime minister in Britain. She constantly
described herself as a "conviction politician," and I used to have to say that a
politician that was all conviction and no consensus was a danger, one that was all
consensus and no conviction was a misplaced person, and the important task was
to be able to mix conviction and consensus in order to deliver real answers. It's a
task upon which I think Mrs. Thatcher failed, and I have yet to succeed.
Left-of-Center Politics
What about the problem that the left-of-center parties
have these days with the fact that there are such great
budget constraints, a real lack of resources to do the
kinds of things policy and principle might dictate?
They are two things that have to be done. One is to take the sum available and
organize its collection and distribution better, so that the bills for the society are
not higher, that the society gets better advantage out of what's spent. In the United
Kingdom, it's probably easier because we've got an entirely different system of
budgeting, and a much more developed welfare state of government intervention.
Even though that's been cut back radically in the last fifteen years, it's still stronger
and more substantial than it is in the USA.
I'll give an instance. The kind of thing that I'm promoting now from my place on
the back bench is a change in the taxation system that would mean no rise in the
taxation burdens on the country, or even levels of taxation for the huge majority of
people. But because it would be specifically targeted to the financing of health and
community care services, it would guarantee an income to the national health
service that is not guaranteed at the present time, and there then could be not only
a better supply of resources to that vital service, but also a much better link in the
public mind between what they're paying in their taxes and what they're getting
from this fundamental service.
So changing the system within those global limits is one of the answers; but the
second one is to make the case, and it's an arduous case to make, but it
nevertheless has got to be made, that nothing is for nothing. That if a society
demands higher quality, better security, more opportunity, stronger standards of
care, and that's not available under current budgets, there's going to be a time
when on an equitable basis, on a fair system of taxation, some people are going to
have to pay more. I recommend that argument, not because anybody wants to tax
for its own purposes, but because the alternatives to raising the sources for
universally necessary services, universally and on a fair basis, is to drive people
into buying it across the counter, and the result is that those who can afford it will
afford it, although they'll pay much higher prices, and those who can't afford it get
left out. And then you have a crisis of division in a society which produces its own
dangers and its own injustices. So for the health of the whole society, you have to
make the argument that at some stage and in some respects for some services, the
society as a whole has to pay a higher price on a fair basis. I don't think that any
rational person, let alone one on the left of politics, can afford to evade that reality.
That's a hard problem of articulation, isn't it?
Because as the traditional bases of the left-of-center
parties become more prosperous in some parts, they are
an easy target for conservative parties -- that was the
experience here. Tell me about that challenge. How do
you move people in the way you could when you were
worried about a more narrow constituency?
I had an experience in the last couple of days in New York, an exchange with a
very prosperous businessman, a man who considered himself to be liberally
minded. He was reporting just how well the American recovery was going ahead,
and how very satisfied he was with that, and nobody would describe him as being
on the left of politics, he was just a man without hang-ups -- which is always very
welcome. And then he went on to say that the problem is that all of this great
movement forward is limited to, yes, a majority, but not an overwhelming
majority of our society. "I sometimes wonder," he said, "how high we can build
the walls." Now, when someone from that stratum in American society is
beginning to understand the costs of division, of under-provision, underperformance, and the creation and expansion of an underclass -- what those costs
are for the whole of society -- then we're moving into a new era of politics. Not a
return to the Keynes consensus, but a new era in which interdependence, which is
fundamental to my beliefs, is understood, and that a point comes for a society
where you cannot have the creation of corrals, of rings of wagons that protect the
prosperous against the effects of the outside society. That the people who have
been prosperous must take a wider social responsibility or else live in virtual
incarceration, protected and paying huge bills for that security in a variety of
forms, which is a very unhappy and unproductive existence.
In a variety of ways, that's the argument that I make: what is the most practical
course for society? Is it to pretend that societies, the world indeed, is not
interdependent, or to acknowledge the reality and follow the course of economic
and political policies, constitutional policies, human rights policies, world trade
policies that arise from that understanding of interdependence. I think a lot more
people are gradually beginning to understand that there is only one thing more
expensive than making provision and that's not making provision.
You are addressing the problem that all political
parties have now, and especially parties of the left of
center, which is defining that new agenda and moving
people in that direction and getting a majority in a
democracy. Your experience as the leader of your party
involves a lot of heavy work in trying to reform your
own party and change an agenda. What are some of the
problems that a political leader confronts in that
regard? Obviously, you have a vision and you have an
ability to articulate it, but let's get to nitty gritty
now. Drawing on your experience, what are the other
difficulties and frustrations that one encounters in
establishing a new agenda?
Well, the main difficulty is vanity, self-indulgence, out of which even amongst
those people who would describe themselves as great radicals, comes a great
conservatism. They're stuck where they are, they hang up "do not disturb" notices
on their minds, and it's rattling them out of that inertia, self-satisfied inertia, that's
the main task.
In my case, what I have to do in the British Labour Party is to keep on in a variety
of ways saying to these people, "What are you in politics for? If you're not in
politics to secure power, to translate your ideas in ways that will be of benefit to
the society in general, but specifically to those that you most want to help -- the
wretched, the vulnerable, the young, the old, the sick, in our society -- if you're not
in politics to secure power, why don't you do something useful like take up flyfishing or shark-hunting, because that would do a lot more and you'd get out of the
way." Eventually, over the years, with some rhetoric, some nagging, some arm
twisting, some would say some arm breaking, you eventually get them to face up
to a reality. And when they do, they quite enjoy it, of course, because what it does
is to make them realistic without diminishing the basic idealism that gives them
the energy, the impetus to be politically engaged on the left. And what they'd been
afraid of up till then is taking off their garb of purity. A number of times I have to
say that to be pure is to be barren. You've got to get your hands dirty if you're
going to be of any help at all to your fellow human beings. When they adjusted to
that, they were quite happy with it at the end. Took a long time!
International Issues
What do you see as the effect of the end of the Cold
War on political parties in the West in general and
especially on the left-of-center parties?
It's strange, because in the postwar, and indeed the pre-war period, there was an
unbridgeable abyss between Democratic Socialism, of which I'm a part of, and
Soviet communism. Whilst there were people in every establishment in the
Western world who would regard themselves to be diehard opponents of
communism, I have to say that in the Democratic Socialist movement there was an
extra dimension to our quarrel with communism. It wasn't simply strategic, or born
of a fear for the market system, but it was fundamental and ideological. And what
always astounded me and still astounds me is the way in which despite that history,
decades of history in which Democratic Socialism showed itself to be not only
divergent from but hostile to communism, there was still in the public mind of the
West an idea that we were somehow a wholly-owned subsidiary or another part of
the corporate organization of world communism.
Your opponents were saying that.
And of course, there would be gestures on the left, self-indulgent gestures that
would sometimes give the impression that we did have a kind of alliance with
communism. I don't mean with specific communists; I've shared platforms in
resistance to industrial closures, against the Vietnam War, and anti-apartheid
movements with people who are communists, and that's fine. I respect the fact that
they were part of those movements for liberation, okay, but I'm talking about
communism, the organization, the ethos of communism. And because of those
occasional gestures from the left of being accommodating of the Soviet system
and because of the attacks of the right, there has been fixed in the public mind in
all of the Western countries the idea that the corrosion and collapse of communism
under the burdens of its own incompetence and injustice somehow signaled an end
of socialism
What we've had to do over these last few years, not to sufficient effect as far as I'm
concerned, so we're still having to do it, is to demonstrate that what died was
Soviet communism, what continues to live is Democratic Socialism. In a world
whose interdependence is proved daily and whose need for cooperation is
demonstrated by the hour, we who should have interdependence and cooperation
as a central part of our ethic as far as the world and its operations are concerned,
should consider this to be a time of great opportunity, because we've got answers
that the world could use.
Now, I think that's the only way to deal with it, to say it was next to damn all to do
with us when it existed. In the wake of its collapse, we have to demonstrate that
the command economy, the regimented society, the oppressive idea of the party
and police state are what we regard to be enemies, alien to our belief. Our basic
value is individual liberty. We are realists and understand that can't be achieved
without cooperative and collective activity in society, and that, in the name of
democracy and individual liberty, is what we offer to the world. Making ourselves
absolutely distinct should be an easier task now that the hammer has snapped and
the sickle is blunt.
What about the problem posed in this international
environment of international solidarity between
socialist and left-of-center parties versus national
interests. That is, as labor parties of a particular
country, concerned about the condition of workers and
so on, is there a tension there, or do all the forces
point in the direction of cooperation?
No, there's a tension there, and it's very clear that in the short term there are many,
not only industrial classes, employee classes in many countries, but ownership
classes as well who say that the answers must lie within the nation-state, within
the established ideas of sovereignty, and while there's every sympathy for the
world, we've got to look after ourselves first and all the rest of it. So, there is a
tension between that and the creed that says there are no single-nation answers to
any of the major problems of the world now, and that the course of cooperation,
partnership, entanglement, entwining, and common agendas is the only sensible
course to take.
Now, to do it on a philosophical basis is not to be persuasive, so we have to do it
in the context, for instance, of the operation of global corporations, in the context
of the international effect of environmental damage, in the context of the division
between the North and South of the world. So that even if people aren't compelled
by the moral argument for supporting and sponsoring economic growth in the
South, and relieving starving and suffering people, they must be persuaded by the
idea that destitute people make lousy customers, they've got no money, they buy
nothing. So that there's an interdependence between the industrial manufacturing
productive world and the poor world, and one of the answers to the huge levels of
unemployment that we've got now, for instance in Europe, is to economically
enfranchise the South of the world so at the very least people become customers
instead of supplicants.
We can meet those arguments of introversion, of nationalistic attitudes, in the
short term by saying realism takes us in the direction of international cooperation,
and if you want to secure a future five years from now, the policies of generosity
and extroversion must take their place, and not the policies of meanness, shortsightedness, and introversion. We win arguments on that practical basis in a way
we never could if we only made an appeal to the sentiment or to the morality,
valid though that appeal to the morality really is.
Conclusion
If you were talking to a group of students about going
into politics, given this agenda and you own experience,
would you tell them that this is an exciting time to
consider it, or do you have any warnings for them?
I'd never tell them to go into politics. There are people who regard politics as a
career. I've met some them, they are some of the most boring people I've ever met
in my life, because unless being engaged politically has something to do with
inspiration and a purpose, whether you come from the democratic right or from the
democratic left, a purpose of trying to make the world better -- if you haven't got
that, then don't bother.
If you do get engaged, get engaged because you understand that whatever impulse
you might have for trying to make things better, it is highly unlikely that you'll be
able to do it alone. You therefore require to be organized with like-minded people,
broadly like-minded people, because you don't want to enter a sect in order to try
and get the show on the road, get things moving.
Thirdly, the virtue that will be most tested if you've got any guts in you at all is the
virtue of patience. Look forward to a lifetime of frustration with occasional bouts
of interest and satisfaction -- but that's life in general in any case. If people were
only looking for perpetual satisfaction, nobody would ever get married, would
they?
That's correct. Well, Mr. Kinnock, thank you very much
for joining us in this conversation and sharing with us
your views on the political life and what that life is
like. And thank you very much for joining us for this
Conversation on International Affairs.
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