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