Neil Kinnock Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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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.
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