He is now 83. Asthma winds him a little as he makes his way to sit down and recover his breath. But once Neil Kinnock starts talking, his voice resonates as if he were still Labour leader, addressing a rally in south Wales 40 years ago. The words roll out in perfectly formed sentences, none more so than when asked what he makes of the widely held feeling that Keir Starmer is trying to take the sting out of Reform by fighting the party on its own ground.
“I think there are elements in and around the Labour party encouraging that as a way of responding to Reform, and they are fundamentally, 100 per cent, 22-carat wrong,” he proclaims without a moment’s hesitation.
“Appeasers get eaten,” he adds. “It’s very important to remember that if people are offered two versions of a particular political brand, they will always choose the genuine one.” He notes Roosevelt’s views on conservatism. “If people are offered two conservative parties, they will choose a genuine one. If a progressive party is trying to use the vocabulary of isolationism or segregation or division, it’s the same. It is silly to do that. It isn’t evil, but it is very, very silly—maybe mortally stupid.”
Kinnock is sitting at my kitchen table in Kentish Town, north London, looking relaxed in a tweed jacket and blue chinos. He speaks with affection and respect for Labour’s current leader. He, of all people, knows the difficulty of keeping the tribe united. He chooses his words carefully, but it’s impossible to miss his frustration at the ways in which the government is responding to the insurgent threat from Nigel Farage.
Populist parties are against things much more than they’re for anything
“Reform is obviously an opportunist, populist party that tries to find lowest common denominators and tries to build support from there,” he says. “It really represents a particular class of pretty well-heeled establishment figures, mainly with public school backgrounds and business careers of various kinds. The idea that it is the common man’s or common woman’s party that is bent upon advancing their interests and wellbeing is, of course, nonsense, but it won’t be the first time in history… that people have accepted the glibness of very easy promises in order to be able to assert a protest against the established order.”
It is clear to Kinnock that Reform is following a “certain playbook”, whether “consciously or unconsciously”, and he would like to see this “exposed” more than it is. “First of all, as a populist party, you have to discover and exploit grievance, alienation, resentment. Populist parties are against things much more than they’re for anything… Secondly, they must find someone to blame. It can be a group or an ethnic minority or an institution, any unit or person, or collection of people, that is held responsible for causing the source of grievance and resentment.”
“And then the third thing is to offer very simplistic responses—never answers—to very complex questions with a kind of superficiality that most of the time is confined to about quarter past 10 in the four-ale bar of your average pub.” That is when such a party can “replace history with nostalgia—to give the impression that there once was a halcyon age in which your country was strong and proud and that has been undermined by years of neglect, complacency, conspiracy”.
This is nothing new, notes Kinnock. “The playbook is familiar to anybody who studied the 1930s in Europe and or indeed in the United States of America. I’m not saying we are in any sense slipping towards some kind of fascist system… But those factors and the way in which they generate division and envy and isolationism—they’re unhealthy features of any democracy. And so, I don’t fear Reform, but I do think we ought to fight them rather harder and with more purpose.”
Kinnock believes that the media—as well as Labour itself—has yet to challenge Farage rigorously enough. “I will celebrate the day I see Nigel Farage treated by the BBC as they would… rightly treat a minister in government, by using quotations from the past and arguments that anybody active in politics should be able to deal with,” he says.
He has only seen this done once on TV in the past year, and that was by Sky’s Beth Rigby. What did she do? “Simply treat Farage like a normal politician. The result was he came to a sticky end, which was very interesting—and it means that I’m the international chairman of the Beth Rigby Fan Club.”
Instead of fighting Reform on its own turf, Kinnock would prefer the government to get on with its own priorities. In other words, “accomplishment” is the best way to beat the populist right. “Nothing replaces achievement in government, [concentrating on] what people regard to be the primary issues on the agenda, which is to say: health, decent jobs, affordable costs and wages that can meet those costs.”
But how to combat Reform’s single-minded focus on immigration? “I start from the basis, as I always have, that all countries have got to have effective control of their borders. But beyond that simple maxim, there are other factors: they include the needs of the economy, the realities of demography, the state of the world.”
Kinnock sees the UK’s demographic challenges clearly. “We have a rapidly ageing population,” he says, “which means that if we want to see them properly served, properly paid for by a thriving economy, we’re going to have to extend the welcome to people with the willingness to work, to pay their taxes, to contribute to the wellbeing of the economy and society. Ignoring that is just foolish, myopic and potentially disastrous. Given the realities of the relationship between growth and the vitality of the population, then immigration becomes not an extension of charity of some kind, but a necessity on economic and social grounds.”
Something that needs to change is the way the government compiles its net migration figures. “The idea that we include students of all kinds as immigrants is a bit tough, really, because the vast majority of them will return either to where they came from or go somewhere else to work. So, the idea of lumping in—what is it?—260,000-odd university students with the rest of immigrants, and thereby making the figure seem fearful, is, I think, pretty incompetent as well as misleading.”
What did Kinnock make of Starmer’s recent speech, which seems doomed to be remembered for one phrase: “an island of strangers”?
“Keir is a gutsy, highly intelligent, natural-in-his-bone-marrow progressive who views the world through rational eyes on every issue—maybe with the exception of Arsenal. But I think that he is not well advised on this, and he should engage his instincts more—his innate sense of mature judgement more—when he’s receiving this information,” says Kinnock, who traces the roots of Labour’s current approach to the Brexit referendum.
“Back in 2016, certainly there were elements among the advisory team who had an overreaction to the reason for, and the consequence of, the Brexit referendum vote. I think that overreaction has lasted through till now, and it would tend to explain why they submit phrases to Keir like ‘an island of strangers’, and why they have advised that the two-child benefit cap should remain or that the winter fuel heating allowance should be very radically reduced. I don’t think that they are reactionary individuals. I don’t think they’re frightened individuals. I think they have overreacted to a misinterpretation of what happened in 2016.” And nine years later, Kinnock says, the overreaction is “still there”.
The truth about the referendum, he says, is that rather than despair, “most of the people voted in hope” of changing their lives. “They were absolutely brassed off with the fact that their wages had stagnated; their living conditions were not advancing; their public services were being eroded; their communities were being neglected. And here was a great opportunity to say to the establishment, in the shape of a quite disliked prime minister and chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘Go to hell!’ There’s no better way of doing that and poking people in the eye with a very sharp stick than a referendum.”
He continues: “So, [the populists] soften up opinion for 40 years, then come along with a lot of glib promises about how much better things could be if we didn’t have to endure the appalling efforts of the European Union to become a super-state, which, of course, is utter rubbish. And you then give an opportunity to drop a hand grenade into the established order. Boom! You pull the pin. That’s what happens.”
Kinnock does have praise for some of the government’s achievements. He lists rail nationalisation, Great British Energy, a significant investment in the NHS along with money to Scotland, Wales and local government. And he praises Starmer’s grip on foreign affairs at a time when we have “a maniac in Washington and a fascist dictator in Moscow”.
The former Labour leader describes Donald Trump as “a superhuman narcissist. I’ve met many narcissists in my life, but he exceeds—by wild degrees—my worst experience… Keir has gone about developing a relationship in absolutely the right way—all the more commendable in some ways, because [Trump] is such the polar opposite of Keir Starmer. I mean, there’s no guy that I know with a lower propensity for self-regard” than Starmer, he says.
‘This government, much as I love them, has got an audacity deficit’
Trump, meanwhile, “could crush the world… by his policies and his—what I can only call his ‘coquettishness’. This is a man of such galactic self-indulgence that can literally change the policy of the world’s biggest economy and most powerful military in the course of an hour. And the world can take a lot of punishment, but not utter inconsistency in policy decision-making.” Kinnock hopes “it will not take some kind of crash to make large numbers of people conscious of [Trump’s] extreme inadequacies and his potential for evil”.
In such circumstances, Starmer is a comfort, though he could be more daring. “There’s a degree of steadiness from Keir which, on a good day, is very, very reassuring. However, that can translate into a paralytic caution. That means that this government, much as I love them—and they know I do—has got a kind of audacity deficit,” he says.
“They appear not to realise that, while it’s true that their majority is 50 miles wide and one inch deep, they still are the government of the United Kingdom with powers of discretion and determination that I don’t think they’re using yet. So, lots of good things are going on, but they could afford democratically to exert their power of government more than they are.”
Would he be bolder on building bridges with Europe? “I recognise the reason that they feel daunted about making the kind of commitment I would like. I would want a strategy that concluded—maybe in 10 years’ time, maybe slightly less—with us participating again in the single market and the customs union.”
“It would be a changed European Union—we will never get the concessions and good fortune that we enjoyed before we left—but it would be a restoration of normality. If any country in Europe has contributed to the stability, peace and prosperity of Europe it is the United Kingdom, not least in two world wars, and in many other ways—cultural, scientific, academic, in terms of development, of manufacturing, God knows what else. So, we are a European country, we will always be a European country, unless there’s a new Ice Age. Consequently, I want the restoration of normality, which means being in the European Union.”
On 19th May this year, Starmer convened an EU–UK summit, the first such meeting since Brexit. “I’m led to understand that what happened recently when they all met together in London, was a first step, a beginning,” says Kinnock. “And I would like to see a series of comparable further steps. It would be demonstrating—on both sides—trust and understanding, and that trust, extraordinarily, has got to be rebuilt.”
He has regrets over the turn that Labour took under Jeremy Corbyn—as well as an acknowledgement that he was himself misguided in his youthful support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “Jeremy made up his mind when he met Tony Benn in his twenties or early thirties and has maintained that set of attitudes. And it’s an awful shame. I mean, I had great admiration for Tony. He was bright, he was a humorous, charismatic figure… A wonderful speaker, and genuinely nice. But he had discovered radicalism in his fifties. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except most of the people who come to terms with it adopt modified forms of it.”
Corbyn was part of a “generation… who literally sat at Tony’s feet,” he says. “Tony was a very bright guy: he imparted in his disciples this sort of absolutism of right and wrong. And Tony also wanted power in the Labour movement more than he wanted power for the Labour movement.”
This was ill-advised, in political terms: “I understand why it happens but it’s a big mistake, because in the end you’ve got to convince the bus queue, and the bus queue doesn’t take very easily to being told that the tax system has got to be radically changed; or we’ve got to come out of the European Community; or that trade unions should be exempt from legal obligations; or that nationalisation à la Ernie Bevin is the answer to all our problems; and that only the war against Nazism was ever justifiable as a military conflict. People don’t swallow that in the bus queue.”
There are other things that might not work in the bus queue, such as raising income tax, which Kinnock warns Rachel Reeves against. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. We are talking about extra taxation on people whose incomes in real terms have barely changed in the last 20 years. To guarantee that will turn in the foreseeable future into a transformation of public services, the conquest of child poverty? That’s a tough ask.”
But Kinnock would like to see Reeves be bolder in taxing assets, in other words, a wealth tax. “The bond markets probably wouldn’t like it all that much, but I don’t think we’re going to wreck the economy on a policy which would recognise the immense increase in asset values over the last 20 years, while earned incomes have pretty much stagnated in real terms. A 2 per cent tax on assets above £10m—which means hardly anybody’s house—for instance, would raise in excess of £12bn a year, every year, and it would be a rational way of doing it, because property taxation in our country, asset taxation, is outdated.”
I consider we’ve been in an undeclared war for some years, and it’s being waged by Russia
He is also in favour of defence bonds, which could “finance the essential increase in defence expenditure”. These “contributed substantially towards financing the First World War, Second World War and the Korean War. I consider we’ve been in an undeclared war for some years. It’s a technological and propaganda war, and it’s being waged by Russia—and to a fairly considerable extent by China—and it means that if we are not resisting that onslaught, and I use the word advisedly, they could take us for granted. I think that defence bonds rather than development aid cuts would be a better way of doing it.”
Kinnock references a recent New Statesman article which argued that George Osborne was essentially still running the British economy.
“Osborne embraced the crowding out theory—the idea that if you use public money for capital investment, you crowd out private investment. The -evidence completely contradicts that. You only have to look at France or Germany or the Netherlands or the Nordic countries to know that public investment magnetises private investment.”
“Now, the reason that Osborne ‘still rules’ is that his prejudices, his ideology, were consistent with the body of beliefs that guides the Treasury. When, actually, by disabling parts of the economy and society, Osborne made more individuals dependent on the state—as austerity always does, certainly in a country that has any pretence of having a welfare state. So, they are continuing to rule the Treasury and to influence Reeves—a very bright woman and genuinely an effective economist in her own right, as she showed in her 2024 Mais Lecture.”
Kinnock, who “said to friends of mine after that lecture ‘John Maynard Keynes is alive and well in the 21st century’,” was expecting something else from Reeves, “for whom I have a lot of respect and affection. But somehow the Treasury managed to impress upon her that a form of austerity was necessary. That she could undertake a significant capital investment problem—and otherwise everything else had to be scrimping and saving with little investment in initiatives which, while costing relatively modest sums at the outset, would actually result in savings.”
We’ve talked for nearly an hour and a half, sustained by a solitary cup of coffee. Sarah, the photographer, has arrived and he greets her like a long-lost friend, though they have met only once. If he met Starmer on the streets of Tufnell Park, north London—he is now one of the prime minister’s constituents—what urgent message would he convey?
“You know, I’ve got abiding confidence in his high intelligence, his gifts of perception, his capability as an advocate and the fact that he shares my democratic socialist principles.”
If only the prime minister would be truer to himself. “I just wish that he would manifest Keir Starmer, what he stands for, what made him, what he wants to do for our country, with our country, more clearly and assertively than he’s been able. I think it would help him and the understanding of the country a lot if, Superman style,” he took off his shirt, revealing “a big ‘K for Keir’ on his vest.”
