‘As Kinnocks we serve the public and strive to make a difference’
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter talks with Aberavon MP Stephen Kinnock about the values he got from his parents – and about allegations that the Kinnocks are a ‘clan’ who have profited from the EU
STEPHEN Kinnock was born on the first day of the 1970s – months before his father, Neil Kinnock, became an MP for the first time.
His mother, Glenys, was also immersed in the Labour Party and later became an MEP.
Asked what it was like growing up in a political family, he said: “It’s funny how politics played itself out in my family because it was never really what you’d describe as politics with a small p.
“There was very little in terms of ‘who’s up, who’s down, who’s manoeuvring against whom?’ – all the kind of stuff you might get used to reading about in the newspapers.
“Dad never really brought any of that home. What was always much stronger was ‘what’s the right thing to do?’
“So what are the right values to have? What are the right things to believe in? What is injustice? What is fairness? What is it that your grandparents fought for?
“My grandfather on my father’s side – my dad’s dad – was a coal miner and died when I was very young.
“My grandfather on my mother’s side was a railway signalman. Their lives and their values and their beliefs came directly to me through my mother and father, but they of course weren’t in representative politics in any way. But they were deeply political, deeply moral people with a very strong set of values.
“It was never that we would sit around the breakfast table going through whatever gossip was on the front pages. It was much more the big issues: what kind of person do you want to be, and what does it mean to be in public service, and what does it mean to be signed up to a cause which is bigger than yourself?”
Neil Kinnock became leader of the Labour Party when Stephen was a teenager. Having been on the soft left of the party, he decided as leader to take on the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite group which he believed had infiltrated it. At the time he was vilified both by militants on the left, as well as by Conservative-supporting papers on the right.
Asked how he felt at the time about the attacks on his father, and their impact on the family, Stephen Kinnock said: “I think the fork in the road was when he became leader of the party. It’s a qualitative leap from being shadow secretary of state for education. To go from that was the category shift. I was 13 at the time. It is a bit tough when you’re a spotty 13-year-old, with already quite high levels of self-consciousness – and then suddenly your father is catapulted into the public eye. He suddenly was on the opening credits of Spitting Image every Sunday evening, falling over on the beach. Certainly that had a big impact on the family. You know him as your dad – you know what he’s really like as a person. Then suddenly this persona develops, and the vilification in the media was really nasty.
“His position [against] devolution made him a number of enemies and his position on rooting out the Militant Tendency made him a number of enemies as well.
“You can’t be a leader without making enemies. As Aneurin Bevan famously said, ‘if you stand in the middle of the road you’ll get run over’. But if you take a position, you will of course make friends as well as enemies. But that’s much better than to equivocate and just please everybody. And that’s just not something that my dad ever did – and I think that’s absolutely right.
“I think it’s very important that you have your position and your point of view and your principles – and people can either vote for you or they can’t. When you speak to most people, whether they’re particularly actively engaged in politics or not, they will say: ‘We pay our politicians to have opinions. We pay our politicians to take a position and to lead us and to take a view. When we need to, we’ll have the robust debate about whether it’s the right or the wrong course of action. But it’s far better than just some wishy-washy fudge in the middle that tries to please everybody. If that’s what you’re into, you can go into politics if you like – but it’s not what real leadership is about.”
Asked about the attacks on the Kinnock family as a “clan” who had profited greatly from the EU, he said: “I’ve never really understood that criticism because my parents and my wife [former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt] have dedicated their entire life to public service. All the way through for them it was about a public service ethos, about a choice that you wanted to do a job that served the public. They could have chosen to be consultants or bankers, or whatever it might be. They chose not to do that – they chose to try to make a difference and do that through public service. When you make that choice, there are then a whole range of different jobs that you can do, and each one of those jobs comes with a salary, like any other job. I don’t know if people think that when you work in public service, you’re supposed to do so for free. I’m sure if that were possible, we’d be happy to do so. But you do have things like a mortgage to pay.”