So dominant are Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that it is easy to forget New Labour’s forefather — Neil Kinnock, party leader from 1983 to 1992. As South Africa faced its emergency in 1987, Kinnock pulled the British Labour Party back from its own abyss.
It had just lost its third election to Margaret Thatcher and would lose one more to the Tories, in 1992, in an agonisingly close campaign. But Kinnock had laid the foundation for Blair’s reforms.
The son of a Welsh coal miner, Lord Kinnock of Bedwellty, and chairperson of the British Council, he is now firmly part of the establishment. Drinking tea on the stoep of British High Commissioner Paul Boateng’s residence in Cape Town, in scarlet socks, loafers and trademark pale blue shirt, Kinnock looks younger than his 65 years. Perhaps it is the nico-tine habit that maintains his figure, and the distinctive gravelly voice that took on the ultra-left in 1985 and drove them from the Labour Party.
I can still hear his words to the militants of Liverpool City Council: “I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a labour council hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.”
It was a defining moment in British political history, and probably Kinnock’s finest hour.
These days he is engaged in very different persuasion — he must convince us that the British Council is truly independent of British foreign policy, while “working collaboratively within an agreed strategic framework”, to quote the 2005 Carter Report.
So, the father of New Labour must take on its progeny’s Frankenstein adventurism — the British Council meets Iraq. It is the sort of challenge that Kinnock likes. “We recognise,” he begins, “that British policy in Iraq is the object of stern, widespread criticism across much of the world.” But people can distinguish between the government and its policies, and the British Council.
He cites a 2004 poll of youth in the Middle East that found trust for Blair’s government and its policies very low, but gave the council a 70% approval rating. A poll of Palestinian youth last year showed that the council was the most trusted international organisation.
“Few things are more difficult to earn than trust,” he says, referring to the council’s “soft power” public diplomacy role of “increasing understanding and appreciation of the UK abroad and increasing comprehension of the world in the UK”.
Kinnock says the latter objective sets the council apart from its international competitors — such as the Goethe Institute and Culture France. “They’re in the cultural export business; we’re in the export-import business.”
His appointment as British Council chairperson in 2004 raised eyebrows. He is the first professional politician to hold the position. “Council people say it’s helpful to have a chair close to the political process.” Does he mean “close to the prime minister?” He misses a beat, but concedes: “Yes, ministers; the prime minister too.” He points to the broadening of a university scheme designed to attract 125 000 more foreign students to the UK, which the British Council will coordinate with government and the universities. Kinnock claims he got government to buy in far quicker because of his links.
That this is about marketing the UK and British universities is transparent; foreign students are worth £4,6-billion a year to the UK economy, but it is the “invisible export-earner” of “affection and trust” that is worth even more.
Kinnock and Boateng are concerned that younger South Africans will not have the same levels of “affection and trust” for Britain as the exile generation of Thabo Mbeki, Ronnie Kasrils and Kader Asmal. This is the challenge for British public diplomacy in South Africa against the backdrop of Iraq.
“The past should be honoured, but it is a very poor address to live in,” says Kinnock. Coming from the man who was able to move on from the pain of the 1992 election defeat, these are significant words.