When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  This should have been the opening. It is more measured than the beginning Kinnock actually uses because here he largely confines himself to description. He mostly (with the exception of loaded errors such as the use of the word ‘cheat’) allows the listener to supply the verdict. The rhetorical tactic here, on first glance, appears to be a separation between those benighted people for whom the election has come just in time and who can therefore be saved, and the implied others who would be just fine with no election.

  On closer inspection, there is no real tension here because the whole population is included in Kinnock’s first category and literally nobody is in the latter. So the election has come just in time for everyone, which makes a mockery of the long list of categories and doesn’t sound especially likely. This is better than the opening but it is still overwrought. Kinnock sounds like he thinks the country is going to the dogs, and there are never enough people who think that to win an election.

  Kinnock in truth always spoke more freely to the Labour movement than he did to the nation. It is the familiar dual audience for anyone who does a grand political speech. In his brilliant speech at the Labour conference in Bournemouth in 1985, Kinnock had let it be known where his heart, and also his talent, really lay: ‘I speak to you, to this Conference. People say that leaders speak to the television cameras. All right, we have got some eavesdroppers. But my belief has always been this, and I act upon it and will always act upon it. I come here to this Conference primarily, above all, to speak to this movement at its Conference.’ In this instance, the conference would have lapped up the idea that everyone was suffering from the Tory government, but that is not a message to take out to a nation. Kinnock makes Britain sound rather downtrodden and defeated, and he therefore, implicitly, associates Labour with those who are losing out from the current dispensation.

  This is an important part of any political coalition and very much a part of the essential purpose of the Labour Party, but it is never enough to secure victory. Speeches can profitably be analysed according to their split between optimism and pessimism. A leader of the Opposition deals in pessimism, so it is important to add a shaft of sunlight too. Otherwise it is too gloomy, as it is here. When Kinnock spits out the words, as he did, it sometimes sounds as if he is relishing the pain.

  They only care when they are cornered. That’s the difference between us. We are democratic socialists. We care all the time. We don’t think it’s a soft sentiment. We think that care is the essence of strength. And we believe that because we know that strength without care is savage and brutal and selfish. Strength with care is compassion – the practical action that is needed to help people lift themselves to their full stature. That’s real care. It’s not soft or weak. It is tough and strong. But where do we get that strength to provide that care? Do we wait for some stroke of good fortune, some benign giant, some socially conscious Samson to come along and pick up the wretched of the earth? Of course we don’t. We co-operate, we collect together, we co-ordinate so that everyone can contribute and everyone can benefit, everyone has responsibilities, everyone has rights. That is how we put care into action. That is how we make the weak strong, that is how we lift the needy, that is how we make the sick whole, that is how we give talent the chance to flourish, that is how we turn the unemployed claimant into the working contributor. We do it together. It is called collective strength, collective care. And its whole purpose is individual freedom. When we speak of collective strength and collective freedom, collectively achieved, we are not fulfilling that nightmare that Mrs Thatcher tries to paint, and all her predecessors have tried to saddle us with. We’re not talking about uniformity; we’re not talking about regimentation; we’re not talking about conformity – that’s their creed. The uniformity of the dole queue; the regimentation of the unemployed young and their compulsory work schemes. The conformity of people who will work under tough conditions and take orders and accept pay because of mass unemployment that they would laugh at in a free society with full employment. That kind of freedom for the individual, that kind of liberty can’t be secured by most of the people for most of the time if they are just left to themselves, isolated, stranded, with their whole life chances dependent upon luck!

  Much of the reason the Labour Party has been so historically good at losing general elections is wrapped up in the opening sentences of this passage. Hannah Arendt once asked why the Left is so preoccupied with motive. Kinnock locates the difference between Labour and its political rivals in their absence of good will. The Tories are not just wrong; they are also bad people who have to be forced to care. As well as being historically inaccurate, this insult is an absurd way to try to persuade Conservatives to vote Labour.

  The difference between Labour and the Tories in fact lies in their differing levels of optimism about the efficacy of state power. The hardest questions in politics, said Isaiah Berlin, are the conflicts between good and good. Here Kinnock makes a cartoon of politics by making it a contest between good and evil. In his 1985 speech he devotes a section to defining what he calls the ‘enabling’ or the ‘opportunity’ state. Most ordinary people don’t ever think of the state as being enabling, or indeed of being anything else at all, expect occasionally intrusive and irritating. Speeches entitled ‘The Something State’ are a left-of-centre political obsession.

  Still, that would have been better than the rest of this section, which is a dense and complex argument that could have been lightened by an example. Kinnock is arguing that genuine freedom is more than merely the absence of restraint. A person cannot be free, he is saying, unless certain prior conditions are satisfied, and those conditions always require collective provision of services. It might have been better to walk through an example of, say, an elderly man in receipt of social care. The services that are necessary in order to ensure that he is able to enjoy the elementary freedom of going for a walk would have made the same point quicker, more vividly, and probably more comprehensibly.

  Think of the brilliant way Kinnock used metaphor in his famous speech to the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1985. This was the speech in which he took on the Militant entryists in public, to devastating effect, decrying the habit of the leaders of Liverpool council of hiring taxis to deliver redundancy notices to workers. The inspired verb Kinnock chose for the journey of the taxis was ‘scuttle’. The image is that of insects, the black cabs feeding on something grotesque, the word he had used to introduce the image. By contrast, a lot of the audience will have been lost in this passage. An audience can only bear so much philosophy.

  A story would also have been a better answer to the charge that Kinnock places against himself. It is often said by the political Right that the political Left’s commitment to equality will in fact end up in a state of uniformity. If Kinnock had illustrated his point with a dramatised example he would have sounded less defensive than he does here. He ends on a theme that could have been developed more – the role of brute luck in our life chances. Making a fortune is too often a matter of good fortune; our life chances depend too much on chance.

  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 all our predecessors were ‘thick’? Did they lack talent – these people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together? Were those people not university material? Couldn’t they have knocked off their A Levels in an afternoon? But why didn’t they get it? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings, were they weak? Those people who could stand with their backs and their legs s
traight and face the people who had control over their lives, the ones who owned their workplaces and tried to own them, and tell them: ‘No. I won’t take your orders.’ Were they weak? Does anybody really think 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; no arrangement for their neighbours to subscribe to their welfare; no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals.

  Here Kinnock hits gold. This is what can happen when a speaker finds a theme and their rhythm and imagery coming together in harmony. We feel we are there, living with those previous Kinnock generations. So many memorable rhetorical passages come in threes, and this one almost does too. Kinnock in fact mashes two of his three together. He asks three questions of the previous Kinnock generations: did they lack brains, talent and endeavour? In the writing he runs the first two together so he moves from brain power to hand craft and back again, merging talent with intelligence. Whether or not this was deliberate, it works neatly because one of the abidingly foolish distinctions in British life has been the gap between those who work by hand and those who work by brain. Ever since the technical schools that were promised in Butler’s 1944 Education Act failed to appear, the British schools system has been thoroughly inhospitable to those whose talents are not conventionally academic. By merging the two notions Kinnock brings them together rhetorically and creates the widest possible canvas on which he paints the idea of talent.

  And how vividly he does so too. This is a good example of another general rule about speechwriting, indeed about all writing: write in particular, not in general. Kinnock could have made the point about opportunity with statistics on social mobility. Plenty of politicians had done so before and plenty have done so since. I have written this speech myself more than once. Every one of these mathematical treatises combined is not worth a single sentence of this passage.

  The most important word here is ‘Kinnock’. In that one word he defines a family of real people who then live and breathe as we hear the account of their lives. It is important too that Kinnock does not feel sorry for them. He is not recounting a tale of woe and loss. The Kinnocks were strong people who lived with brio. Such people deserve better. The idea that one generation should do better than the next could be described as the British political dream. It has been the implicit bargain of post-war British politics, although the bargain appears to have been compromised in recent years. There has been no more eloquent expression of it than this passage in this speech. Indeed, so memorable was this refrain that Joe Biden, later Barack Obama’s vice-president, delivered what might generously be described as a tribute and less generously as a rip-off at a debate in Iowa in September 1987, during his bid for the presidency. Biden blatantly repeated Kinnock’s structure without any attribution. ‘Why is it’, he asked unoriginally, ‘that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? … Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? … Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of north-east Pennsylvania and would come home after twelve hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.’ The revelation of the cover version led directly to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

  There is one last point to make to demonstrate why this passage is so good. Kinnock asks a series of questions about his ancestors which we assume to be rhetorical. Were they thick; did they lack talent; were they weak? But the source of the emotional impact is that he then answers the questions, which turn out not to be rhetorical at all. It was because they were denied a platform upon which they could stand.

  Note how Kinnock’s version is so much better than Biden’s. That is because Kinnock builds the suspense for longer, and the answer comes as the conclusion to a problem that sounds, by the time Kinnock has finished, intractable. Biden compresses the whole section and his answer comes too easily. Note too that this is the difference between political traditions that Kinnock got so wrong before. Politics is not ill will on one side versus good will on the other. The real divide is over how fatalistic people are and how optimistic they feel about the capacity of the state to improve individual lives. By locating the source of his ancestors’ lack of progress in poor public policy and support, Kinnock places himself so much more cleverly as a social democrat than he ever does when he is insulting Tories. There is a lesson here: the critique of your opponent is implicit in a clear description of your own view. You don’t help yourself when you serve up insults on a trowel.

  I think of the youngsters I meet. Three, four, five years out of school. Never had a job and they say to me ‘Do you think we’ll ever work?’ They live in a free country but they do not feel free. I think of the fifty-five-year-old woman I meet who is waiting to go into hospital, her whole existence clouded by pain. She lives in a free country but she does not feel free. I think of the young couple, two years married, living in Mam and Dad’s front room because they can’t get a home. They ask ‘Will we ever get a home of our own?’ They live in a free country but they do not feel free. And I think of the old couple who spend months of the winter afraid to turn up the heating, who stay at home because they are afraid to go out after dark, whose lives are turned into a crisis by the need to buy a new pair of shoes. They live in a free country. Indeed they are of the generation that fought for a free country but they do not feel free. How can they – and millions like them – have their individual freedom if there is not collective provision? How can they have strength if they do not have care? Now they cannot have either because they are locked out of being able to discharge responsibilities just as surely as they are locked out of being able to exercise rights. They want to be able to use both. They do not want feather-bedding, they want a foothold. They do not want cotton-wooling, they want a chance to contribute. That is the freedom they want. That is the freedom we want them to have. Freedom with fairness; that is our aim.

  The technique of citing real examples in political speeches is fraught with danger, which is perhaps why Kinnock avoided it earlier. The stories are impersonal, the characters close to abstractions. It is not quite clear whether he has really met these people or if they are constructs from what he surmises must be the case in a country under the yoke of Thatcherism. The effect is therefore muffled because it feels as though he may have invented his dramatis personae to make the point of his story. Citing a real person in a speech closes the distance between the politician and the people and interrupts the barrage of statistics and conceptual argument. But it is hard to pull off, because even when the politician cites a real person the audience is suspicious that the speechwriters have engineered the meeting with the express purpose of using it in the speech. A bit like schoolchildren being astonished when they see their teacher in real life, we do not imagine that politicians have any encounters with actual voters that are not choreographed.

  That is what leads to passages like this one which lies somewhere between abstract and personal. It works well enough, and it is important that it does, because it carries an argument of genuine weight. The political Left has always maintained that freedom must be a question of the capacity to act rather than merely the absence of coercion. The married couple cited by Kinnock are formally free, but their freedom is less useful to them because they cannot afford a home. The fifty-five-year-old woman lives a free life but one that is limited by pain. This directly recalls (not that Kinnock was a great reader of philosophy) a famous passage by Thomas Hobbes in which he writes of being fastened to his bed by sickness. Hobbes maintains that sickness is not really a curtailment of freedom. The ill person is free to leave but unable to do so, which is a different thing. No, says Kinnock, it is not a different thing. The only freedom worth having is the freedom that can in fact be exercised.

  Vividly and colloquially, Kinnock also devotes his words, as h
e did his career, to the attempt to secure a majority in Parliament. In Bournemouth he had chided the purists in his party – ‘the people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency-tacticians’ – and quoted Aneurin Bevan’s dictum that the victory does not have to be complete to be convincing. Bevan and Kinnock were democratic socialists. At a time when the Labour Party has collapsed into theoretical barrenness it is an elementary lesson that will have to be learned all over again.

  The Tories have fixed upon a future dominated by financiers. They have nothing to put in place of the oil and in their low-tech, no-tech future of teashops and warehouses there is no place for an industrial strategy. There is just more asset-strip and sell-off, more run-down and redundancy, more dependence on imports and less commitment to exports. That has been their record in the past eight years. It is the prospect of their future. There is no prudence or progress in that. There is no patriotism in it either. They are literally shouting down, selling off and selling out Britain. And everyone in this country, whoever they are, wherever and however they live, must ask themselves: ‘How do we pay our way if that is our future?’ How do we pay out way in the world? How do we get the necessities? How do we help the needy? How do we influence others? How do we buy when we do not sell? How too do we pay our way at home? How do we generate the wealth necessary to give employment, to provide education and health care, to finance decent pensions? And the answer is, at home and abroad, if we do not make goods and market goods then we do not pay our way. That is not a future which I am prepared to accept. It is not one I am prepared to offer my children or my contemporaries. For it is a future of great fortunes for the few and of decline and insecurity for the many. That is where we have been heading through industrial contraction and trade loss and unemployment ever since Margaret Thatcher went into 10 Downing Street. It is among the greatest reasons for putting her out of 10 Downing Street. And that is exactly what we and the British people will do.