Transcript of Lord Kinnock interview

On Sunday 19th December Andrew Marr interviewed the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

ANDREW MARR:

Right at that point, let's bring in Lord Kinnock, the last Labour Leader elected in the aftermath of defeat and given the job of modernising his party way back of course in the Thatcher years. Lord Kinnock, welcome.

LORD KINNOCK:

Thank you very much.

ANDREW MARR:

Now you were correcting me before we went on air when I was about to say that you said "We've got our party back" when Ed Miliband was elected. You said, "No, no, I didn't actually say that. I acknowledged somebody else who'd said that." But is there a sense that you do feel that Ed Miliband is more the mainstream Labour Party that you knew and modernised way back when?

LORD KINNOCK:

Ed Miliband is a very forward looking Social Democrat and he makes no bones about it. And that doesn't just reflect the ambition and the commitment of the Labour Party. There's a much, much wider audience and degree of support for that - including some people who voted Liberal at the last election. So he's absolutely the right man for the time and the right man to lead us back to democratic power.

ANDREW MARR:

He's getting a bit of a kicking at the moment for not showing enough vision, not explaining where the Labour Party is going and so on, but presumably - and you'll know this from your time - being able to change and to modernise while doing the day to day, week to week job of parliamentary opposition is difficult.

LORD KINNOCK:

It's to Ed's good fortune and the party's good fortune and the country's good fortune that Ed hasn't got to do what I had to do. He starts from a different place …

ANDREW MARR:

Yuh.

LORD KINNOCK:

… with a different party that is much more cohesive and much more committed to getting on with the job and is not introverted and self-indulgent like sections of the party that I led were, which is all to the good. Now that's terrific. The criticism of him after 12 weeks in post is ludicrous because apart from the fact that it would be unnatural, it would be strange, it would be precipitative, it would be superficial - all those things - if he had all his vision intact and his answers absolutely set up after three months. That would be just completely absurd. So what he's doing is very, very deliberately assembling people and policies that will not only appeal to the next year or so, but will stand Labour in good stead at the time of the next election and after it. That is a difficult task and it does mean to an extent that, like all opposition leaders, he's got to keep the ship navigated and heading towards port while undertaking major changes. That he can do with great competence.

ANDREW MARR:

One other difference from your time are the sorts of people who go into politics because although the Labour Party was very riven and huge fights were taking place all over the place, it was also full of very big characters well known to the public who'd had a life before politics and had come in and all the rest of it. These days it's much harder to see the big figures in politics. Maybe that's just age, maybe …

LORD KINNOCK:

Well it reflects a generational change. In the generation immediately before me, it was fairly typical for Labour members of parliament for instance to have a background in universities, journalism or in manual industry of one kind and another.

ANDREW MARR:

They brought real knowledge into the Commons.

LORD KINNOCK:

They brought real knowledge and terrific experience, and that obviously gave a degree of authenticity for the times that they were serving. My generation tended much more to be the first generation out of the working class to have been teachers, university people, people with white collar backgrounds. I myself was an adult teacher and that applied to a great many of my contemporaries and the fewer and fewer number of people from what could be called a manual working class background. And now we've moved to the point where the typical background of many Labour MPs, especially the younger ones, is in research, it's in political services of various kinds. And much the same can be said of course for the changing generation of Conservatives or Liberals; that the background from which they came thirty years ago …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) There is a sort of political class, isn't there?

LORD KINNOCK:

Yeah, but in almost every democracy that is the fact of the matter because people start in politics at a relatively young age. They become very active. And it means, therefore, that since the age at which people are selected and elected is for good reasons and in many ways, in welcome ways going down, then the period that people had in service as it were, in industry or outside parliament or outside politics is shrinking.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah.

LORD KINNOCK:

Now I think the pendulum …

ANDREW MARR:

It's inevitable, you think, yeah.

LORD KINNOCK:

… I think the pendulum will swing the other way in the next generation.

ANDREW MARR:

Well it will be interesting to see.

LORD KINNOCK:

And that's the guess that I make. I think that it'll be supported by a reaction in politics against people who haven't done a lot of things before they get selected.

ANDREW MARR:

You had to cope with among many other things the warm and cordial admiration of Rupert Murdoch, I recall, in the press.

LORD KINNOCK:

Yes, one of my closest friends. (laughs)

ANDREW MARR:

Indeed. And now Ed Miliband is getting again kicked around because he's appointed an ex-Times man to be his new Alistair Campbell and so on. Does that remain one of the great dilemmas for an opposition leader - how you deal with the press, how you keep in with people who are not perhaps your natural allies?

LORD KINNOCK:

Well it shouldn't necessarily be a dilemma because with a free and democratically observant press, then the idea shouldn't exist that they can so dominate political decision making that they can pull the string and have their own way. It's unfortunate that in the last twenty years sections of the press, particularly the Murdoch press, have formed the impression of themselves that they are the great power brokers. And I think the last election, whatever else it proved, proved that not to be the case. They gave slavish support to David Cameron. And whatever else can be said about Mr Cameron, he didn't win and neither did Mr Clegg and we weren't liquidated, which was Murdoch's ambition.

ANDREW MARR:

Alright. For now, Lord Kinnock thank you very much indeed for coming in.

LORD KINNOCK:

Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

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