Neil Kinnock Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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What about the problem that the left-of-center parties have these days with the fact that there are such great budget constraints, a real lack of resources to do the kinds of things policy and principle might dictate?
They are two things that have to be done. One is to take the sum available and organize its collection and distribution better, so that the bills for the society are not higher, that the society gets better advantage out of what's spent. In the United Kingdom, it's probably easier because we've got an entirely different system of budgeting, and a much more developed welfare state of government intervention. Even though that's been cut back radically in the last fifteen years, it's still stronger and more substantial than it is in the USA.
I'll give an instance. The kind of thing that I'm promoting now from my place on the back bench is a change in the taxation system that would mean no rise in the taxation burdens on the country, or even levels of taxation for the huge majority of people. But because it would be specifically targeted to the financing of health and community care services, it would guarantee an income to the national health service that is not guaranteed at the present time, and there then could be not only a better supply of resources to that vital service, but also a much better link in the public mind between what they're paying in their taxes and what they're getting from this fundamental service.
So changing the system within those global limits is one of the answers; but the second one is to make the case, and it's an arduous case to make, but it nevertheless has got to be made, that nothing is for nothing. That if a society demands higher quality, better security, more opportunity, stronger standards of care, and that's not available under current budgets, there's going to be a time when on an equitable basis, on a fair system of taxation, some people are going to have to pay more. I recommend that argument, not because anybody wants to tax for its own purposes, but because the alternatives to raising the sources for universally necessary services, universally and on a fair basis, is to drive people into buying it across the counter, and the result is that those who can afford it will afford it, although they'll pay much higher prices, and those who can't afford it get left out. And then you have a crisis of division in a society which produces its own dangers and its own injustices. So for the health of the whole society, you have to make the argument that at some stage and in some respects for some services, the society as a whole has to pay a higher price on a fair basis. I don't think that any rational person, let alone one on the left of politics, can afford to evade that reality.
That's a hard problem of articulation, isn't it? Because as the traditional bases of the left-of-center parties become more prosperous in some parts, they are an easy target for conservative parties -- that was the experience here. Tell me about that challenge. How do you move people in the way you could when you were worried about a more narrow constituency?
I had an experience in the last couple of days in New York, an exchange with a very prosperous businessman, a man who considered himself to be liberally minded. He was reporting just how well the American recovery was going ahead, and how very satisfied he was with that, and nobody would describe him as being on the left of politics, he was just a man without hang-ups -- which is always very welcome. And then he went on to say that the problem is that all of this great movement forward is limited to, yes, a majority, but not an overwhelming majority of our society. "I sometimes wonder," he said, "how high we can build the walls." Now, when someone from that stratum in American society is beginning to understand the costs of division, of under-provision, under-performance, and the creation and expansion of an underclass -- what those costs are for the whole of society -- then we're moving into a new era of politics. Not a return to the Keynes consensus, but a new era in which interdependence, which is fundamental to my beliefs, is understood, and that a point comes for a society where you cannot have the creation of corrals, of rings of wagons that protect the prosperous against the effects of the outside society. That the people who have been prosperous must take a wider social responsibility or else live in virtual incarceration, protected and paying huge bills for that security in a variety of forms, which is a very unhappy and unproductive existence.
In a variety of ways, that's the argument that I make: what is the most practical course for society? Is it to pretend that societies, the world indeed, is not interdependent, or to acknowledge the reality and follow the course of economic and political policies, constitutional policies, human rights policies, world trade policies that arise from that understanding of interdependence. I think a lot more people are gradually beginning to understand that there is only one thing more expensive than making provision and that's not making provision.
You are addressing the problem that all political parties have now, and especially parties of the left of center, which is defining that new agenda and moving people in that direction and getting a majority in a democracy. Your experience as the leader of your party involves a lot of heavy work in trying to reform your own party and change an agenda. What are some of the problems that a political leader confronts in that regard? Obviously, you have a vision and you have an ability to articulate it, but let's get to nitty gritty now. Drawing on your experience, what are the other difficulties and frustrations that one encounters in establishing a new agenda?
Well, the main difficulty is vanity, self-indulgence, out of which even amongst those people who would describe themselves as great radicals, comes a great conservatism. They're stuck where they are, they hang up "do not disturb" notices on their minds, and it's rattling them out of that inertia, self-satisfied inertia, that's the main task.
In my case, what I have to do in the British Labour Party is to keep on in a variety of ways saying to these people, "What are you in politics for? If you're not in politics to secure power, to translate your ideas in ways that will be of benefit to the society in general, but specifically to those that you most want to help -- the wretched, the vulnerable, the young, the old, the sick, in our society -- if you're not in politics to secure power, why don't you do something useful like take up fly-fishing or shark-hunting, because that would do a lot more and you'd get out of the way." Eventually, over the years, with some rhetoric, some nagging, some arm twisting, some would say some arm breaking, you eventually get them to face up to a reality. And when they do, they quite enjoy it, of course, because what it does is to make them realistic without diminishing the basic idealism that gives them the energy, the impetus to be politically engaged on the left. And what they'd been afraid of up till then is taking off their garb of purity. A number of times I have to say that to be pure is to be barren. You've got to get your hands dirty if you're going to be of any help at all to your fellow human beings. When they adjusted to that, they were quite happy with it at the end. Took a long time!
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