Neil Kinnock's leadership of the Labour Party, and its wider political legacy, has been subject to a vast array of differing scholarly and popular interpretations. To some, he is the “Welsh windbag,” (87) a gaffe-prone political lightweight who lacked the temperament or even intelligence to have been prime minister. For others he is “Ramsay MacKinnock,” (David Howell, “‘Where's Ramsay MacKinnock’: Labour Leadership and the Miners” in Huw Benyon (ed.), Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike [London: Verso, 1985], 181–98) a traitor to Labour's socialist heritage (in the same mold as Labour's infamous first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald) who abandoned his principles for power and still lost in the process. Today, the more complimentary, and increasingly the most popular interpretation, casts Kinnock as a heroic figure. According to this narrative, Kinnock's nine-year leadership, and the profound organizational and ideological overhaul he orchestrated, seemingly saved the Labour Party from terminal decline. Despite losing two consecutive elections, his modernizing revamp of the party's image, abandonment of unrealistic policies, and all-out war against the party's left laid the foundations for Labour's rehabilitation and Tony Blair's eventual landslide victory in 1997.
In his introduction to Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? editor Kevin Hickson claims that the contributions “offer a fresh appraisal” (2) of the Kinnock leadership. The volume has three sections, the first focusing on the wider political, social, and cultural contexts of the Kinnock leadership; the next a deep dive into the numerous changes in party policy Kinnock oversaw, ranging from education and constitutional reform to economics, Northern Ireland, and nuclear weapons; and the third a series of personal reflections from an ideologically wide-ranging collection of political actors. Yet while the question mark at the end of the collection's title invites us to question Kinnock's heroic image, not all the diverse contributors to it take up the challenge.
At its weakest, the contributions tend to uncritically repeat many of the romanticized narratives that cast Kinnock as Labour's unambiguous savior. Anthony Seldon's pub chat with Kinnock himself is a particularly frustrating read for failing to question any of his judgments as leader. For instance, while Kinnock claims to have done his “damnedest” (17) to strengthen the representation of women within the party, his consistent opposition to explicit campaigns for the self-organization and greater representation of women and other marginalized groups (such as black sections) suggests otherwise. Far from a fresh appraisal, many of the other arguments and interpretations Kinnock offers have also been published before in various other studies and biographies.
While Harry Taylor's chapter on Kinnock's battle against the Militant tendency (perhaps his most praised and romanticized moment as leader) provides a helpful chronology and richly captures the perceived threat of “the scourge of Trotskyism” (79) to the party leadership, there is little critical judgment on just how real such a threat really was. There is no mention of Militant's tiny numerical size, for instance, or that Liverpool council's anti-ratecapping stance was emulated by numerous other local authorities, and that its actual policy program was far less radical or experimental than, for example, Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council. The danger here is a mere repetition of well-known but potentially misleading historical myths about the party in the 1980s.
In contrast, by far the most insightful chapters in this volume are those that are refreshingly unsentimental in assessing Kinnock's leadership. In his chapter on Kinnock's awkward engagement with popular culture, Alwyn Turner is not only willing to be critical but also offers up Livingstone as an alternative left-wing politician far more culturally savvy (even considered “cool” [57]) than the Labour leader. While Martin Westlake repeats the misleading ideological binary of modernizers versus traditionalists within the parliamentary party, his helpful history of Kinnock's shadow cabinet demonstrates how the leader's control over the frontbench was not absolute, and indeed by 1992 much of its cohesiveness had “corroded” (72). Mark Garnett and David Denver's study of Kinnock's two general election campaigns challenge prominent partisan myths, demonstrating that the 1984–85 miners’ strike was not necessarily the vote-losing distraction the leadership thought it was (85), that 1987 and 1992 were winnable contests, and that Kinnock's own personal unpopularity played a significant role in both defeats (88). While the 1987 “Kinnock: The Movie” broadcast and the polling-informed communications expertise of Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson have gained mythologized status among Labour's so-called modernizers, Garnett and Denver demonstrate both how the iconic broadcast had little impact, and how the party's spin-doctors made a fatal mistake in over-emphasizing a leader who was both uniquely unpopular, and increasingly seen as ideologically inconsistent (97). Richard Johnson takes a similarly critical stance in his chapter on Labour's attitude to Europe. Johnson characterizes the shift from critical hostility to enthusiastic support for the European Union as “a product of fatalism” motivated by electoralist pragmatism, and more importantly by “a loss of confidence in British political institutions to deliver socialism” (184).
In the final section of the book, there are some interesting personal insights from Kinnock's allies and adversaries. Charles Clarke highlights the debilitatingly negative media environment Kinnock's leadership team were forced to endure (206). Jon Lansman's reflections on Kinnock's early (and mostly half-hearted [220]) associations with the activist left further complicates popular narratives about his ideological transformation. Hilary Wainwright challenges the characterizations of the left at the time as old-fashioned and dogmatic, and argues that Kinnock's crusade against Militant was also part of a proxy war again the wider, typically more creative, popular, and pluralistic left (245).
With such diverse authorship, and the sheer multiplicity of interpretations of Kinnock's leadership, a central theme is sometimes difficult to identify. Simon Lee's chapter, for example, on the economically nationalist elements of Kinnock's early concept of the “developmental state” (42), is complicated by Jim Tomlinson's chapter on the later adopted concept of the “enabling state” and “supply side socialism,” which was specifically defined by a growing “scepticism about the state's role in the economy” (107). Implicit throughout the volume, however, is the clear view that Kinnock's profound changes in the party's policies and organization laid the foundations for New Labour. While Blair and others may have been sometimes “embarrassed by [Kinnock's] presence” (1), he was undoubtedly, as convincingly argued by Patrick Diamond, “the originator of the New Labour project” (238). This is borne out in the very strong policy chapters that make up half of the book. Tomlinson's chapter on Labour's economic policy excellently demonstrates how the critical shift from the interventionist state paved the way for New Labour's accommodation with the free market. Andrew Taylor's chapter on Kinnock's acquiescence to post-1979 trade union legislation similarly shows how such changes prefigured New Labour's emphasis on individual workers’ rights instead of greater collective union power (114) and also directly accelerated Blair's rise to political prominence (121). Joseph Tiplady similarly argues that Kinnock's education policies, particularly with its emphasis on standards, was “proto New Labour” (149). Even Kinnock's mostly disastrous engagements with pop music are seen as foreshadowing Blair's own courting of popular culture in the 2000s (60). Apart from on Northern Ireland (where Kinnock remained committed to Irish unification [165]), almost all of Kinnock's policy commitments were expanded, accelerated, or radicalized under Blair.
Yet if Kinnock was the originator of much of New Labour's electoral virtues, he might also have been the originator of some of its vices. Kinnock's presidential style, the huge centralization of decision and policy-making powers within the leader's office (14), and in particular the firm control of the party's natural executive, and the selection of by-election candidates (13), prefigured the worst excesses of control freakery seen under New Labour. The early embrace of the free market made possible New Labour's later “Faustian Pact” with the City of London (Eric Shaw, “New Labour's Faustian Pact?,” British Politics 7, no. 3 [2012]: 224–49), while the pivot toward Europe set the party on a course to enthusiastically defending a frequently unresponsive institution, and left it out of touch with the widespread discontent in its own heartlands. A more critically penetrating study of Kinnock's leadership could have explored how his changes made Labour (eventually) a formidable electoral machine, albeit one with severe and eventually very damaging political and organizational flaws.
Hickson's collection begins to offer some insightful, critical assessments of a complex political figure who has left a long-lasting impact on the Labour Party, and British politics more generally. There is still, however, more work to be done. A more meaningful scholarly understanding of Kinnock's tenure and its lessons for center-left policy and electoral strategy is possible only with an unsentimental jettisoning of the many partisan myths that have developed in the intervening thirty years.
