An authentic voice: Pulling poetry from the speeches of Neil Kinnock
In the first of a new series of collaborations between the Western Mail and Wales Arts Review, Jonathan Edwards explores the impact of Welshness and language on Neil Kinnock’s political career and the unlikely influence it had on Edwards’ own award-winnin
To start, though, with perhaps the most important part of Kinnock, the part that was represented most in all those TV hours – his ability as a speechmaker.
Kinnock’s speeches recently came back into public focus on the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency. This caused the world to revisit an incident from 1987 when Biden plagiarised one of Kinnock’s speeches. What interests me about this is that Biden’s team chose to use one of Kinnock’s most personal speeches, which uses family experience to make a political point.
Kinnock’s speech was delivered at Llandudno in May 1987. In it he refers to his own personal history at length, presenting his story and that of his wife Glenys as one of “the first Kinnocks in a thousand generations to be able to get to university” and asking “was it because all our predecessors were ‘thick’?”
His rhetoric hammers home the point – did her ancestors “lack talent?” he asks. He notes their talent in making “wonderful, beautiful things with their hands” and being able to “dream dreams, see visions” and “sing, and play, and recite and write poetry”, yet they were not “university material”.
Here, Kinnock contemplates why women did not have a place in academia, not because they were “weak” or because they “didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment”, but because the institutions did not provide a “platform”. This inequality was because “there was no platform upon which they could stand, no arrangement for their neighbours to subscribe to their welfare, no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals”.
Naming Margaret Thatcher, Kinnock calls out against the “privatisation”, “means test and deprivation” which further entrenched these societal divides in which individuals, such as the previous generations who had not had access to university, were not able to reach their potentials and dreams.
Given the nature of the speech, it’s not surprising it was plagiarised. It strikes me as one of the great articulations of working-class experience and there’s a fair bit going on with language which helps Kinnock generate his impacts.
Of course, the speech is big on questions which allow the audience not to be told its ideas but to share its process of reasoning, making its thinking our thinking, its conclusions our conclusions. The speech leads to some formal language and big ideas, but starts in informality, with words like “thick” and “knocked off” that we can all buy into.
Kinnock sets up arguments that are easy to rubbish – that generations of people were stupid or weak – but the fact that those arguments are
there gives him something to argue emotively against. One of the impacts of the speech is that, as listeners, we become increasingly angry at the positions the speech begins by setting up – even though they’ve only been set up in order to be knocked down.
One of the most emotive factors of the speech is the way it draws on history, expressing a gap between what our ancestors deserved and what they got. Kinnock says “all our predecessors” – and there really is a sense that he’s talking of our predecessors, people we knew and loved or people way back when who were versions of us.
These lives he speaks of are over, gone and there’s nothing that can be done with the gap between what was deserved and what happened, other than fill it with emotion. While these people are historical, they are not remote, because the speech dwells on bodily realities.
All this is impactful enough, but there’s something else here that impresses. One of the definitions of poetry is the ability to make the personal and intimate public and general – we can say what’s true for everyone by saying what’s most true for us.
In another life, Kinnock could have been a poet. He starts with his own experience and, within a few paragraphs, he’s reached the divisions in Thatcher’s society. It takes something to do this, to make huge national issues as small and emotive as the living room.
Faced with this sort of thing, it seems extraordinary that Kinnock never became Prime Minister and looking back at the 1980s and early 1990s now, at those fuzzy and anachronistic television images I actually lived through, one feels there must be some mistake – things surely can’t have been how the history books tell us they were.
Faced with a pretty straightforward choice between a south Wales accent which spoke of community and the best ways of helping the needy and an upper-class English accent which once said, “Who is society? There is no such thing!” the electorate chose Thatcher. They even chose Major, when Thatcher had become so unpopular that the Conservative Party removed her. How on Earth could this happen?
One of my prevailing memories of politics from when I was young is the image of Michael Heseltine – ironically, given his own background – mimicking Kinnock’s accent at a Conservative Party press conference in the run-up to the election in 1992. Rubbishing Kinnock on the basis of nationality and accent was common. On the last day of Kinnock’s election campaign that year, a plane followed his convoy all the way from Blackpool to Accrington, carrying a 100ft banner which said, “Get stuffed boyo”.
I wouldn’t have known, in 1992, or been able to articulate, why I hated the Conservative politicians who mocked Kinnock’s accent. Kinnock was great and people tried to make him small and to make him small for no reason other than the fact he was Welsh. And this was considered okay.
It is, of course, simplistic to say that Kinnock’s unignorable Welshness, which was there every time he opened his mouth, made him unelectable and a proper analysis of his election defeats is miles beyond the scope of this article. Good places to start looking for that are in Martin Westlake’s Kinnock: The Biography and in Kinnock’s volume of speeches, Thorns & Roses.
It is true, though, that no-one who speaks with an accent like Kinnock’s has come close to being Prime Minister since his resignation as leader of the Labour Party. This is in part, of course, thank goodness, due to the rise of the Senedd and the fact that passionate Welsh political voices now don’t necessarily need to pursue a career in Westminster. The significant Westminster politicians these days, presented to us only through the media, seem as remote from south Wales as any soap opera character.
Kinnock was different and I’m proud to have grown up in the area he came from. He spoke for community and justice, in speeches so good the future leader of the free world would steal them.
And he walked down my street, on a day in April 1992 when he was, as he has been on every other day of his life, flesh and bone. When I think of him that day, he was smiling, because he knew that this time tomorrow he would be in a position to really do something. The sun was shining as he spotted a man in overalls, polishing a car that didn’t need it.
There must have been places Kinnock needed to get to that day, votes he could win. But the car did look like something and he had a few minutes and he stepped then towards my father, opening his mouth to say something to him, and when he did it came out in that sonorous, intelligent, articulate, beautiful voice.
Kinnock was different and I’m proud to have grown up in the area he came from. He spoke for community and justice, in speeches so good the future leader of the free world would steal them
■ Jonathan Edwards is a poet and critic from Newport and recent recipient of the Troubadour Poetry Prize in 2022. His first collection, My Family And Other Superheroes (Seren), won the Costa Poetry Award in 2014
This article is the first in a new series of collaborations between the Western Mail and Wales Arts Review which will appear in Weekend magazine twice a month.
You can also read these new features plus more articles, reviews and interviews with Wales’ artists by subscribing to Wales Arts Review’s new e-newsletter available through www.walesartsreview.org