The 'golden age of politics' is a myth

Politics has never been popular, and has always changed and adapted. Nostalgia for a rose-tinted past is feeding cynicism in the here and now.

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When Labour people from the centre to the soft left gather and booze is taken, it is almost inevitable that the speech above will, at some point, be quoted. There’s barely one among us who does not know parts of it by heart. The words “The grotesque chaos of a Labour Council - a Labour Council! - hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers” are repeated (usually with a terrible approximation of Kinnock’s gloriously mellifluous Welsh accent) to remind each other of why we think power is important. Why elections matter. Why Labour politics is not and can never be about “playing politics with people’s jobs and people’s services.”

I love that speech. I was just 10 when he first gave it. As I grew up in a very Labour household, it’s perfectly possible that I first heard it live on the telly. I certainly knew huge parts of it by heart long before YouTube existed, though how I am not wholly sure.

That speech about pragmatic socialism encapsulates everything that I believe about the vital importance of having a Labour Party that can talk to the hearts and minds of the country and not just my heart and those of other Labour activists.

However, I am willing to bet you all the money I have (admittedly, not very much, please buy me a coffee…) that Kinnock would have joyfully traded all his reputation for eloquence for a day in office making a difference.

As a writer, I love good and soaring rhetoric. It’s easy to say now that we miss rhetoricians like Kinnock. His was a once-in-a-lifetime voice. Few could deliver a speech like him.

And that’s my point: few ever did.