‘The socialism of freedom’

It’s not often that a speech at a regional party conference has an afterlife of any sort, much less that its butterfly wing effect is still being felt almost forty years later. Yet Neil Kinnock’s 1987 speech to the Welsh Labour Party conference, for that is the speech in question, fits the bill perfectly.

It is remembered – mostly by politics obsessives, granted – for being plagiarised by Joe Biden a few months later in his first tilt at the US presidency. For people who might consider themselves LabourList readers, the copied rhetorical flourish in question – “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” – only needs to be uttered, for us to mentally hear the perfect cadence answer – “It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.” Biden claimed it as his own and his 1988 campaign was sunk. And yet, we see the butterfly wings.

The implicit underpinnings of the call and response in the quote, however, are usually less considered. The reason for that, I think, is that they call into question one of the key foundations of the Labour Party; that it resolutely refused to choose which version of socialism it wanted to pursue. 

READ MORE: Neil Kinnock on his ‘impossible promises’ conference speech, 40 years on

Did it want a co-operative future of working class self-help, all Mechanics’ Institutes, Friendly Societies and mutuals? Did it want a programme of state ownership of key industries? Would it look to the party structure for influence in power or would it look to the electorate first? Did it really owe more to Methodism than Marx? The answer the party chose was emblematic of the compromises that have defined it ever since – essentially the party was like a diner at a restaurant who saw the menu and couldn’t make up their mind: “We’ll try a little bit of everything please”.

And yet Kinnock’s speech didn’t even try to acknowledge that patchwork quilt of socialisms. It resolutely and passionately made the case for just one – the socialism of freedom. A socialism of emancipation, explicitly for the working class and those born without the life chances of those at the top of society. It was the sort of socialism that inspired me as a teenager, and continues to inspire me as I see my fiftieth birthday on horizon.

I know I’m not alone in that.

RH Tawney’s metaphor that “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows” is as true today as it was when he wrote it in 1931.  And just a month ago, Bridget Phillipson described Roy Hattersley’s book “Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism” (also from 1987, as it happens) as “a brilliant articulation from someone who’s seen as being on Labour’s traditional right of how to recapture the politics of freedom for the left.”

This is the perspective that drove me to become an MP in the first place. But there was anger that went with that perspective – anger at how people from my background still weren’t always free to fully reach our potential, often weren’t able to break free from the structural impediments of our upbringings, could rarely find a way to free ourselves from the impositions of a society that teaches us to know our place. 

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And crucially, it was anger at a Tory government of Old Etonians, Wykehamists, Whatevers, that pulled up the ladders of opportunity, and demolished the building blocks that helped us curate our lives. It was anger at Jenrick and Pickles and Gove and Osborne and all the rest. At how they’d taken money from our communities to such an extent that my old childhood library now lies demolished, the local youth centre gone and Sure Start in tatters. It was anger at the nightly COVID TV press conferences at which second-rate politicians made life-changing decisions seemingly on a whim, while whole swathes of the country were shut out of the conversations being had about them.

It was, fundamentally, anger that a government could so carelessly and callously dismantle the platforms on which we’d stood.

And so to today. On the most difficult terrain for the country in many decades, our Labour government is doing great work. The Pride in Place programme, the modern industrial strategy, the changes to the Treasury Green Book, the focus on technical and vocational training, the commitment to grow the economy in our regions across the country rather than merely rely on the south east and London – these are all hugely positive changes.

They all have one thing in common, too – whether consciously or not, they all have the effect of increasing freedom for those who need it most; they are all interventions that slowly, painstakingly, rebuild those platforms Lord Kinnock mentioned. This, for me, points the way to the one question government ministers should be asking of themselves when considering future policy – “Does this increase freedom for those who need it most?”

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In a world where headwinds come thick and fast, the strongest signpost to be guided by is this socialism of freedom. We could do a lot worse than that as an overriding principle for the government I’m incredibly proud to support. 

Maybe Kinnock’s speech to the Welsh Labour Party might even develop an unexpected second flap of its butterfly wings in its influence on where the party goes next.

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