Neil Kinnock warned you about the Tories 40 years ago – and now he’s warning you again
Neil Kinnock was sitting in the back of the family Ford Sierra, a clipboard balanced on his knees.
In the driving seat was his wife, Glenys. The M4 flashed past as the couple headed to Bridgend in South Wales for the penultimate day of the 1983 general election campaign.
With two days to go, Mr Kinnock, the then Shadow Education Secretary, had done over 90 meetings in 21 days.
“I was bloody desperate,” he says. “Punch-drunk by that point.
“I was losing my voice and would lose it altogether on election day. It never fully recovered.”
As the car motored on, the 41-year-old Labour MP started writing a speech to be given in front of a packed crowd in Bridgend that night and broadcast live on ITV News at Ten.
“If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday,” he wrote.
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“I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
This year is the 40th anniversary of that famous speech – perhaps his most powerful – just as the country reaches the exact moment it foretold.
“I warned you,” Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty, as he is now known, says, looking over the text as he re-reads it exclusively for the Mirror.
“It’s all there. The appalling thing about the speech is that it’s become so close to reality.
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“There’s even a section about them taking away the right to protest. That has come true.
Baron Kinnock, now 80, adds: “The warnings about the NHS, pensioner poverty, the cold, fuel charges, transport, the crime rate – all of it.
“We’ve got a government now that’s waging economic warfare against its own people.
“And the only other government doing that is Putin’s government.”
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In 1983, Margaret Thatcher had already been Prime Minister for four years, but the most bitterly painful time for communities like Islwyn, where Baron Kinnock was MP, were yet to come.
Two days after the speech, the Iron Lady won by a landslide.
A month later, Kinnock was lucky to escape the Ford Sierra with his life following a high-speed crash on the M4.
Weeks later, in October 1983, he was elected leader of the Labour Party with 72% of the vote.
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If the famous “I warn you” speech often seemed prophetic during the 1980s, now it reads like reportage. “When Margaret Thatcher was in power, she had all the council house sales, and the sell-off of BT, electricity, gas, water, the North Sea oil bonanza all went to the Treasury,” Baron Kinnock says. “It masked a lot of the damage.”
Her pale imitators David Cameron and George Osborne had no such flow of easy revenue.
“They used the banking crisis to get away with the underfunding of public services including the NHS and local government,” Baron Kinnock says.
“Taken cumulatively, that was ruinous. Neglect is hugely costly. What’s happening now has been accumulating for 13 years.
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“The Labour Party’s election slogan for the 1964 general election was ‘13 wasted years’ under successive Conservative administrations. By next year we will have had 14 fruitless years under the Tories. Worse than that, the areas of biggest need have seen the biggest cuts.
Other shocks – Brexit, which Baron Kinnock opposed, the pandemic and the Truss and Kwarteng economic bin fire among them – have turbo-charged the damage done by austerity.
“I mean, what was that?” Baron Kinnock asks, reflecting on Liz Truss ’ premiership. “It will take the families and the economy years and years to recover from those few weeks.”
The 1983 speech was long enough ago that after he wrote it on a piece of paper attached to the clipboard, he then phoned it through to his secretary who typed it up and faxed it to him at the school in Bridgend so he could hand it to the Press Association.
But as we go through the speech line by line, four decades fall away.
“I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip, and benefits are whittled away,” reads one section. Another says: “I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.”
Perhaps most ominous is the line: “I warn you that you will be quiet.” It comes as the right to strike is being attacked in the Commons and rights to protest have already been restricted.
“The only thing I didn’t talk about was inequality,” Baron Kinnock says.
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“If you look at the FT’s figures, the proportion of total wealth owned by the 1% in Britain is the same now as 1913. We have stepped back a century.”
It is the broken rubble of the NHS most commentators are referring to when they think of Bridgend in 1983 – and the line “I warn you not to fall ill”. It was Baron Kinnock’s father Gordon who took him to hear the local MP Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, who would go on to found the NHS.
Gordon was treated by the Tredegar Medical Aid Society – the model for the NHS – when he suffered from a skin condition that meant he had to give up work in the mines.
Baron Kinnock says: “The Tredegar Medical Aid Society worked so well that my father saw the best dermatologist in the world, paid for by the scheme. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and he ended up in the steelworks, heartbroken to leave mining.
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“In the end the dust in the steelworks turned out to be even worse for his skin. He called this ‘nature’s little joke’.” But it’s his mum Mary who Baron Kinnock says would be most shocked by the state of her beloved health service.
“My mother was a district nurse for nearly 40 years and a staunch member of the Royal College of Nurses,” he says.
“She was a socialist and a trade unionist, but she always said that nurses don’t go on strike.
“When I asked why, she said because of the patients, and because you don’t become a nurse unless you have a sense of duty. I know she would be on strike now.”
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He adds laughing: “Britain is the only place where you find people on picket lines saying, ‘we’re right but we’re also very sorry’. You wouldn’t hear workers on a picket line in France or Germany apologising.”
All the while US healthcare giants – like those Rishi Sunak met in California in December – are circling the NHS like sharks.
Baron Kinnock says: “We are talking gigantic vested interests and unlimited resources dedicated to privatisation.” He adds: “The Tories want to turn nurses and doctors and ambulance drivers and train drivers into gig economy jobs.”
The Labour Party has inherited a broken country before, most dramatically in 1945. Should Keir Starmer ’s party be returned to power, it will also have to gather up the pieces.
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“We face a gigantic post-war-sized challenge in a country that hasn’t been used to the privations and regulations of war,” Baron Kinnock says.
“At the time of Atlee’s government people were used to conforming to wartime conditions. When peace came, they were willing to keep calm and carry on. Now, we’re not coming out of a war, but we have to face up to the reality of damage on the scale of warfare.
“This time when we fix it, we’ve got to let people know that progress is the result of applied Labour values and policies so that they don’t think that advances simply arrived by accident.”
In the four decades since writing the speech, Neil Kinnock did grow older, if never ordinary.
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His five grandchildren are young. His beloved wife, Glenys, has fallen ill with Alzheimer’s, something he has recently spoken movingly about.
But that is the point of the speech. We are – or will be – all of those things he listed in the back of the Ford Sierra.
That’s why Bevan and his Labour heirs built the welfare state. And that’s why 40 years later Neil Kinnock’s hoarse and urgent speech at Bridgend reminds us all to defend it.