Welcome to our collection of quotes by Neil Kinnock. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Neil Kinnock
Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock (born 28 March 1942) is a Welsh politician. As a member of the Labour Party, he served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995, first for Bedwellty and then for Islwyn. He was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1983 until 1992, and Vice-President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.
Born and raised in South Wales, Kinnock was first elected to the House of Commons in the 1970 general election. He became the Labour Party’s shadow education minister after the Conservatives won power in the 1979 general election. After the party under Michael Foot suffered a landslide defeat to Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 election, Kinnock was elected Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. During his tenure as leader, Kinnock proceeded to fight the party's left wing, especially Militant tendency, and he opposed NUM leader Arthur Scargill's methods in the 1984–85 miners' strike. He led the party during most of the Thatcher administration, which included its third successive election defeat when Thatcher won the 1987 general election. Although Thatcher had won another landslide, Labour regained sufficient seats for Kinnock to remain Leader of the Opposition following the election.
Kinnock led the Labour Party to a surprise fourth consecutive defeat at the 1992 general election, despite the party being ahead of John Major’s Conservative government in most opinion polls, which had predicted either a narrow Labour victory or a hung parliament. Shortly afterwards, he resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, being succeeded in the ensuing leadership election by John Smith. He left the House of Commons in 1995 to become a European Commissioner. He went on to become the Vice-President of the European Commission under Romano Prodi from 1999–2004, before being elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Kinnock in 2005. Until the summer of 2009, he was also Chairman of the British Council and President of Cardiff University.
I want to retire at 50. I want to play cricket in the summer and geriatric football in the winter, and sing in the choir.
I must emphasise that there is nothing in the Labour Party constituion that could, or should prevent people from holding opinions which favour Leninist-Trotskyism. Certainly Marxism has, and will continue to have an important function in the Labour Party.
Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.
Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.
Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.
American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.
They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.
I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride.
Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.
Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.
The trouble with the Socialist Workers Party is that they live in an historical thermos-flask.
I am the first male member of my family for about three generations who can have reasonable confidence in expecting that I will leave this earth with more or less the same number of fingers, hands, legs, toes and eyes as I had when I was born.
Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, I have no desire to make my own toxins.
We must not look for some kind of Messiah.
Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest.
The House of Lords must go -- not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished.
I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life.
That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.
Compassion is not a sloppy sentimental feeling for people who are underprivileged or sick... it is an absolutely practical belief that regardless of a person's background, ability or ability to pay, he should be provided with the best that society has to offer.
New!Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
I'd like to be remembered as somebody who tried to promote justice.
There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.
If we are going to have a bicameral parliament, I think there should always be a reserved place for people whose background and experience are critical to the welfare of the nation.
My first real experience of ambition was as party leader. It was my ambition for Labour to win, in which event I would be prime minister.
Newspapers are tutors as well as informers.
The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.
I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.
I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me.
Do something that makes a difference -- because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.
I'm the guy everybody wanted to live next door. They just didn't want me to be prime minister.
No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.
The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
Is Tony Blair of the Labour party? The answer to that is profoundly 'yes', but that is not how, sentimentally, he is regarded in the Labour movement generally.
Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.
You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.
People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.
Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.
In the U.K. the far Right is a stain on society and there is a cultural resistance to it.
I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day.
The unforgivable political sin is vanity; the killer diet is sour grapes.
I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.