Biography

Leader of the British Labour Party 1983 - 1992.

He was frequently mocked by The Sun newspaper during his tenure as Labour leader. They ran headlines such as "Why I'm backing Kinnock, by Stalin" and, on the day of the 1992 general election, "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?".

He was widely condemned by the Left for failing to support the miner's strike in 1984-85.

Despite calling for the House of Lords to be abolished, he controversially accepted a peerage in 2005.

Mentioned in the song "Prologue to History" by Manic Street Preachers.

Ken Livingstone has only ever belonged to one party - the Ken Livingstone party.

The fundamental thing that went wrong was electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader. He is an unreconstructed Bennite. What we've seen is what would have happened to Labour if Tony Benn had taken over, even though he was a man of much greater intelligence and capability than Corbyn.

[in 1985] 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 They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

[on the miners' strike] The strike was ruined the minute it was politicized and in the mind of Arthur Scargill it was always a political struggle ... He fed himself the political illusion that as long as the miners were united they had the right to destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected government.

[on Arthur Scargill] He gave himself the credit for the success of the 1974 strike but that was much exaggerated. He had the illusion that if the workers were united, they could destabilize, even overthrow a democratically elected government. That was the falsehood of Scargill's conclusion, and that is why I have always condemned him. The miners deserved something much better.