Excerpts from Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, with corrected audio.
Full transcript: www.britishpoli...
Video courtesy of BBC/MailOnline/Getty Images/ITN Archive but with secondary audio channel removed for clarity of speech. For education purposes only - no copyright infringement intended.
"We want to honour our undertakings in full in every area of policy. We want to say what we mean and mean what we say. We want to keep our promises, and because we want to do that it is essential that we don’t make false promises.
I want to respond to many of those calls, in practice - not in words, but in actions. But there is of course a pre-condition to honouring those or any other undertaking that we give. That pre-condition is unavoidable, total and insurmountable, and it is a pre-condition that in this movement we do not want to surmount. It is the pre-condition that we win a general election.
There are some in our movement who, when I say that we must reach out in that fashion, accuse me of an obsession with electoral politics;
I say to them and I say to everybody else, and I mean it from the depths of my soul: there is no need to compromise values, there is no need in this task to surrender our socialism, there is no need to abandon or even try to hide any of our principles, but there is an implacable need to win and there is an equal need for us to understand that we address an electorate which is sceptical, an electorate which needs convincing, a British public who want to know that our idealism is not lunacy, our realism is not timidity, our eagerness is not extremism, a British public who want to know that our carefulness too is not nervousness.
I remind you, every one of you, of something that every single one of you said in the desperate days before June 9, 1983. You said to each other on the streets, you said to each other in the cars rushing round, you said to each other in the committee rooms: elections are not won in weeks, they are won in years. (Applause) That is what you said to each other. That is what you have got to remember: not in future weeks or future years; this year, this week, this Conference, now - this is where we start winning elections, not waiting until the returning officer is ready.
Fourthly, I shall tell you again what you know. Because you are from the people, because you are of the people, because you live with the same realities as everybody else lives with, implausible promises don’t win victories. 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, out-dated, mis-placed, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. (Applause)
I am telling you, no matter how entertaining, how fulfilling to short-term egos - (Continuing applause) - you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services or with their homes. (Applause and some boos)
Comrades, the voice of the people - not the people here; the voice of the real people with real needs - is louder than all the boos that can be assembled. Understand that, please, comrades. In your socialism, in your commitment to those people, understand it. The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency-tacticians.
Comrades, it seems to me lately that some of our number become like latter-day public school-boys. It seems it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game. (Applause) We cannot take that inspiration from Rudyard Kipling. (Continuing applause)
I say to you in complete honesty, because this is the movement that I belong to, that I owe this party everything I have got - not the job, not being leader of the Labour Party, but every life chance that I have had since the time I was a child: (Applause) the life chance of a comfortable home, with working parents, people who had jobs; the life chance of moving out of a pest and damp-infested set of rooms into 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. (Applause)
We have got to win, not for our sakes, but really, truly to deliver the British people from evil. Let’s do it. (Standing ovation)"
15 окт 2024
