I remember a conference at my college many years ago. Over lunch, Barry Bluestone started singing Kinnock's praises ( a number of years afterward, Bluestone suggested that autoworkers guarantee the companies enormous increases in productivity--christ, aren't the social democrats wonderful). Paul Sweezy cut him short with some extremely negative remarks about Kinnock's half-assed politics. Harry Magdoff chimed in. Made my day.
michael yates
Jim heartfield wrote:
> In message <v04011700b33c43e4c78b@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
> <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>
> >when did Kinnock
> >die?
>
> Reports of Neil Kinnock's death are greatly exaggerated. He was recently
> one of the European Commissioners who were forced to resign en masse on
> corruption charges. But as his feisty wife Glenys insisted on BBC's
> Quetion Time last night, he had done no wrong himself, but was only
> accepting collective responsibility.
>
> In Britain he was known as the Welsh Windbag (not a great reflection on
> Ian?) and was famous for losing two elections in a row, until he was so
> firmly associated with defeat that the Labour Party was forced to get
> rid of him. Ironically, he was the one person who did most to turn the
> Labour Party from a party of the trade union bureaucracy to one of the
> 'Third Way'. His first and most dramatic reform was the expulsion of the
> Trotskyist infiltrators of the 'Militant Tendency' (even though a
> younger Kinnock had contributed an article to their paper the Militant).
> To handle the legal side of things he used a newly qualified lawyer, who
> had just been elected into parliament, Tony Blair.
>
> --
> Jim heartfield