by Alan Davies
There were various different age groups and they cooked up some funny stories. The group of six- to seven-year-olds contained a skinhead who was so hyperactive, and frightening to the other kids, that I had little choice other than to make him the star of the video. He had a nine-year-old brother who looked identical with shaven head and green bomber jacket. He had told me his younger sibling would ‘fight nine-year-olds’. That afternoon I waited to see who would pick them up. When their dad appeared it was no surprise to see he was shaven headed with a green bomber jacket on. He swept his youngest up in one arm and, without irony, said: ‘That’s my boy.’
One of my fellow camp staff, Steve, was from Mersey-side. He had pitched a tent, without permission, in Epping Forest, where he was fending off hundreds of mosquitoes every night. I invited him to stay at our house. My dad was predictably annoyed:
‘I can’t believe you,’ I said.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he said.
Steve helped him with a bonfire in the garden and told him about the architecture course he was on at Huddersfield Polytechnic.
‘Nice chap. He’s studying architecture, you know,’ said Dad.
‘I know,’ I said, swallowing his intimation that architecture was preferable to drama.
In August, Arsenal were due to play their first game of the 1985–86 season at Anfield. Steve was a big Liverpool fan. I went up to stay with him at Hoylake, on the Wirral, and he took me on to the famous Kop end amongst the Liverpool fans, where I kept my southern mouth shut, as Liverpool began another triumphant season with a 2–0 win.
The sun was out and the atmosphere was happy and good-natured. Everyone there loved standing on the Kop and being part of something bigger than the sum of its parts. There was one idiot though, poisoning it. Every time Arsenal’s black full back, Viv Anderson, attacked down the right, this one individual would concoct some abusive diatribe finishing each time with the word nigger.
He knew he could take the opportunity to stand on the terrace and vent his spleen in anonymity as long as no one dared to question him. A few people were tiring of his ugly voice, and uglier sentiments, until eventually, from a few steps up the terrace behind him, a voice with a calm scouse brogue said:
‘My dad’s a nigger.’
We all waited to see if the racist would spin around, looking to see who’d dared say that, but he didn’t. He never said another word. He looked straight ahead while we all looked at him. Me and Steve grinned at each other and I looked round to see who’d produced this pearl of scouse wit. He was a middle-aged man, slightly overweight, with a twinkle in his eye and a half-smile playing under his grey beard. He didn’t want the racist to turn round and clock him, not least because he wasn’t black.
He did look like he’d enjoyed shutting the bloke up though, and he looked a lot like John Peel.
Neil Kinnock
Neil Kinnock’s speech to the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth was a thrilling spectacle. The most passionate and lyrical evocation of what it meant to be a Labour supporter, and what the values of the Labour movement are, that I had ever heard. I sent off for a copy of the text of the speech, so excited was I by its sentiments, its vigour and its emotive truth.
This was what I had always wanted, someone to say how I felt. If I were asked why I supported the Labour Party I may have cited an opposition to privilege and a desire for social justice but little more. Kinnock described with real feeling just what the Labour movement had achieved for him and others like him. Actual achievements in improving the lives of the disadvantaged. It was compelling and appeared unanswerable. A plea to remember that good can only really be done in power and the unelectable are of no use to anyone.
After this speech the Labour Party will never be the same again. It is indeed a watershed. It may launch the bitterest quarrel in even Labour’s turbulent history but Neil Kinnock judged that his party was going nowhere politically unless he confronted the people in his own ranks who are driving disillusioned Conservative voters into the arms of the [SDP–Liberal] Alliance. Disunity usually damages a party but this may be the split that many potential Labour voters have been longing for. If he wins them over, Neil Kinnock’s 1985 Bournemouth speech will be a landmark in British political history.
John Cole, BBC Political Correspondent, at the Labour Conference 1985
Labour supporters everywhere were galvanized. It had been depressing for years to see the party tearing itself apart, more concerned with in-fighting and factional scrapping than with uniting to take on and defeat an unpopular Tory government.
The real damage had been done in 1981 with the establishment of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, by four former Labour ministers, David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins.
Labour, from then on, appeared left to the left. The party was seemingly unbalanced and unelectable. The former Labour ministers in the SDP attracted mainly former Labour voters and nowhere near enough of the disillusioned Conservatives John Cole referred to, leaving the vote split and the Tories comfortably in power with a huge majority, despite only three out of ten of those on the electoral roll voting for them.
The 1983 election defeat had been shattering and humiliating for Labour. The subsequent miners’ strike, led by the hard-left militant Arthur Scargill, had left Kinnock virtually wasting a year on internal battles rather than taking on the government. The Labour leadership was at constant odds with the NUM leadership over the legality of the actions taken in support of the strike. Aware that public sympathy for the miners was strong, and the son of a miner himself, Kinnock was frustrated to see that sympathy being strained by mass confrontations with the police.
The refusal of the NUM leadership to accept the consequences of the breaking of the new Tory labour laws, and the persistence with mass picketing leading to criminal cases, resulting in huge fines for the union and its members, had angered the leadership of the Labour Party. The insistence of Scargill on leading his men into a class war led to greater hardship than was deemed necessary. Kinnock’s refusal to promise reimbursement of the fines served on miners under the Tory legislation was to come to a head at the Labour conference. This was indicative of the kind of self-destructive internal warfare that was splitting the party and leaving an election win seemingly a million miles away. Kinnock decided he’d had enough and turned on the Militant Tendency.
This hard-left section of the party, epitomized by Liverpool’s City Council led by Derek Hatton, was tackled head on amid stormy scenes in the Bournemouth Conference Hall. Kinnock launched into a passionate tirade against Hatton and his council:
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, outdated, 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, I’m telling you, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services and with people’s lives
This was the vanquishing of the hard left. Expulsions from the party would follow and the ground was being laid for a modernizing of the party that would ultimately see it electable again.
Kinnock had previously always been on the left, which made his rounding on them personally significant to him. He was accused of hypocrisy as he undertook changes in policy to move the party to the centre in the hope of winning power.
He had been a popular figure amongst supporters of CND, a unilateralist and regular attender, with his wife Glenys and his good friend and political ally Michael Foot, at rallies. Later, though, he conceded unilateralism, so unpopular was it with the electorate.
As a young man in the House of Commons he had stayed put, with fellow left-winger Dennis Skinner, as the rest of the house trooped through to the Lords to hear the Queen’s speech, so staunch was he in
his opposition to an unelected second house. Nearly three decades later he accepted a seat in the House of Lords as a baron in order to continue real, practical work on causes he believed to be right.
In a lifetime in politics, idealism and realism can sometimes mix with and strengthen each other; at other times they are like oil and water.
Losing to John Major in the 1992 general election led to Kinnock resigning as leader, absolutely certain that a vicious personal campaign against him, led by the Sun and the Daily Mail, had caused enough wavering voters not to put their trust in him. He was very close to becoming prime minister but he undoubtedly paved the way for Labour’s subsequent victory in 1997.
In 1985, though, he was a vibrant and exciting orator, whose performance at the conference was welcomed excitedly by party activists and ordinary labour voters alike.
The watching David Owen realized that now Labour might return to their previous strength and that would be at the expense of the SDP. That experiment, with its disastrous splitting of the vote, was over. The SDP Gang of Four should have stayed within the Labour Party.
For me it was less the bashing of Militant that was significant and more Kinnock’s statement of values. I was profoundly opposed by now to all privilege. The Tories and their supporters plainly benefited most from entrenched privilege in British society and only the Labour Party wanted to tackle it. My life experience consisted of a catastrophic spell at a grim public school full of Tories, and a life-changing, life-saving even, spell at a council-run and council-funded further education college. On that basis alone I was convinced of the value of the Labour Party.
Furthermore, the notion of self-interest governing an individual’s actions in relation to others and society as a whole seemed wrong. Margaret Thatcher said in 1987, ‘There’s no such thing as society’, letting slip her true view of the world as a rat race, a survival-of-the-fittest battle where only the idle would be disadvantaged. This absurd notion, that if you work jolly hard the rewards of life would inevitably follow, was repellent.
At university there was a student who owned a cigarette lighter that cost £85. To the rest of us this was a small fortune. It was operated by passing your thumb over a beam causing it to ignite. Me and my friend Huw (with whom I went in for much late-night theorizing, which he termed ‘perusing the mysteries of Fabianism’, before driving the Mini that my chartered accountant father had bought for me up the A2 for breakfast at the twenty-four-hour services) asked him how he felt about such extravagance when there were better things he could do with his riches (give it away to the poor was our considered alternative).
‘Survival of the fittest, innit?’ he said.
Later that night we discussed how we should have thrown his lighter in the duck pond outside Keynes College but we just sneered at him and sloped off.
He was wealthy, he was privileged and he was convinced that all of it was an entitlement. That only the lazy or stupid couldn’t have it all. It was a popular philosophy that flourished under Thatcher.
The Labour party was committed to offer disadvantaged people the opportunity to progress. It was the following passage from Kinnock’s speech that generated real emotion in the conference hall and for many of the watching millions on television:
I owe this party every life chance I’ve had from the time I was a child. The life chance of a comfortable home with working parents, people who had jobs. A life chance of moving out of a pest- and damp-infested set of rooms in to a decent home built by a Labour council under a Labour government. The life chance of an education that went on for as long as I wanted to take it. Me and millions of others of my generation got all their chances from this movement.
It was a theme he returned to at the Welsh Labour Party Conference in 1987:
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.
This passage of his speech was used throughout the 1987 general election campaign. It’s this quote that was used by Barack Obama’s running mate Senator Joe Biden, leading to accusations of plagiarism (Biden had used the line, without crediting Kinnock, in 1987, and been forced out of an election campaign as a consequence). The renewal of complaints about it caused an awkward moment in an ultimately successful campaign for the White House in 2008. He actually used the line many times and usually credited Kinnock. I expect he changed the name when he used it, because that would give the game away.
In much the same way as I’d bought a Kinks album because Paul Weller said he liked them, so I bought Aneurin Bevan’s In Place of Fear because Neil Kinnock had written the foreword. I didn’t find the time to read it, though; nor did I manage to finish my copy of Marx for Beginners.
Kinnock caught the ear with his punchy eloquence as a young MP, and tried to maintain that spirit through nine difficult years as leader of the opposition, but he was never more passionate or articulate than at that conference in 1985, when everything he said, and the way that he said it, was heartfelt, courageous and inspirational.
1986
Sophocles
By the start of my second year at Kent things were not going well. Not since the dark days of the Minor Public School had I endured so much tutting and eye-rolling. Often we were dismissed as naïve, which seemed a bit of a cheap shot at a room full of teenagers.
In the first year my best experiences had been on courses in other subjects in the humanities faculty we were obliged to take. I loved the philosophy course, found a film studies course incomprehensible and enjoyed a course in contemporary European issues, which sounded unpromising but was very interesting. I wrote a long essay about the crisis in Cyprus. You could have asked me anything about the late Archbishop Makarios in 1985.
Drama in the first year had consisted of a ‘performance’ course on which the students were irked by teachers who were in turn aloof, mocking and overly tactile with the prettier girls. Were they not aware of the no-touching rules? I started to see why it must be a pain in the neck to be the recipient of unsolicited feeling, squeezing and patting. I sympathized with the girls who were irritated by it, and also a little with the paunchy middle-aged teacher who couldn’t resist copping a feel of the occasional bare arm. The students did little but complain about it, and everything else.
After a few weeks I’d had enough and looked into transferring elsewhere. Drama didn’t feel like a subject with enough to sustain it as a single honours degree. I was close to transferring to Middlesex Poly but stuck it out because I wanted to go to a university, not a polytechnic. Feeble reasoning but there was a distinction drawn between the two in those days.
In our second year I was the student representative at drama board meetings. The various lecturers appeared contemptuous of one another. Laughter was out of the question. One of them appealed to me, a grey-haired dishevelled academic, who suggested (apparently not for the first time) that the drama department ought to be studying television, since theatre was an increasingly outmoded form of expression. I liked the idea of a cultural studies approach, with drama a part of the whole, and looked around expectantly. One of the others appeared to hate him and waited until he’d had to leave the meeting early before pushing though a string of decisions he would have queried.
Fortunately, one of the lecturers was to take a sabbatical, leaving us in the hands of Shirley Barlow, the esteemed Master of Eliot College and distinguished classicist, for a term.
Shirley Barlow was the best teacher I had at Kent. Granted, this was a small and heavily handicapped field, but she was engaging and knowledgeable and inspired commitment to her subject, classical drama, from everyone in the group. At each seminar she sat before the dozen or so
second years on the course, without notes or photocopied hand-outs, and began to talk about the plays, by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, we’d had to read that week.
Asking simple questions, she tested our understanding until she had a sense of how thick we were. From then on the conversation was pitched at a level that we could join in and be stretched by. If you hadn’t read that week’s plays you would feel that you had missed out. By running fascinating seminars in her calm, good-natured fashion she generated a desire in the students to do the work required to ensure they could be as engaged the following week. It was a treat and a privilege.
Half my problem, of course, was that once I’d made my conceited mind up that the teachers were crap, I went back to the mode of study I’d perfected at school. That is to say, I did none. No teacher there could say I was anything but a lazy, antagonistic, grown-out adolescent with time-keeping issues. No teacher, that is, apart from Shirley Barlow.
Sophocles’ Philoctetes was my favourite play. I liked the story, about a man banished to the remote island of Lemnos because he has such a bad infection from a serpent bite to the foot that he both smells terribly rancid and wails in agony day and night. He is left by his colleagues with an invincible bow and arrow given to him by Heracles at his death. The arrows never miss. Years later it became clear to the Greeks that Troy would never be taken without this weapon. Odysseus and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, go to Lemnos to try and wrest the bow and arrow, by subterfuge, from the abandoned Philoctetes.
To sympathize with lonely Philoctetes is a requirement of the drama but to empathize with him takes some doing. I was uniquely able to do so, having spent part of the previous four years in preparation, determinedly empathizing with the caged animals, under experimentation, depicted on Animal Aid posters.