Sunder Katwala: Thanks to the Institute of Education for hosting us once again tonight. Thank you to the Guardian for their support of the event. All I want to do is welcome Fabian members and thank you for your support of the society. Welcome to the 60 or more who have joined the society at tonight's event.

I just want to say one thing about Neil Kinnock. Neil, we're very grateful to you for doing this event tonight. I think for people of my age and my generation coming into politics, Neil Kinnock was one of the reasons we got involved in politics. He wasn't the only reason: I think we had Margaret Thatcher …[laughter]…as what we didn't want to see, and then you had Neil Kinnock, standing for something better. But I was 11 or 12 years old when he was making some of those famous speeches at the Labour Party conference to turn round the party. So it was only later on, as you think more about politics and decide where you stand, that you come to realise just how important those battles were.

Certainly, we remember Labour not getting into power in 1992 but I also absolutely know that there would never have been another Labour government without Neil Kinnock [applause]. And it may well have been that he was the only person who could have saved the Labour Party at that time and make it possible for it to be in government. And that's one of the reasons, Neil, why those of us who didn't have to fight all the battles you fought recognise that – we may well hear tonight about what you think about everything that has happened since. But none of it, good and bad, would have happened without you and we are very grateful for that. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Michael White of The Guardian.

Michael White: This man has a very solid fan base, despite the vicissitudes of life. I have a couple of points to make, one of which is that I was a student at UCL a long time ago, round about the time that Neil was at the University College in Cardiff. I've done what journalists call some research tonight, i.e. I've opened a book – Martin Westlake's biography which some of you will know. When I was a student I lived at an address, number 14 Bedford Way, WC1 which is roughly where we are. A dilapidated but good looking Georgian building for which I paid for a room to the university £3 a week. And I knew then that I would never have as good an address as I had when I was 19 years old, 14 Bedford Way, WC1, just off Russell Square, Bloomsbury, not bad, is it. About 100 feet from us I've done things in the dead of night in this building, most of them involving late essays. So as they say, nice to be back. And nice to be back with Neil whom I've known on and off for a long time when he was a carefree Labour back bencher. Both of us had hair then. I came out first but, ever a man to spot a trend, he quickly followed me. [laughter] And look at us now – not a day over 40.

I found doing the research either things I didn't know or I'd forgotten about Neil Kinnock. One is that when he moved to Brussels with Glenys – he going as a commissioner and she going as an MP – that they bought a house previously occupied by a thrusting young journalist called Boris Johnson. Two is that, as Sunder just did, Neil is routinely referred to as Gorbachev or John the Baptist to New Labour, we'll come to that. Three is that he once played one of those officers in R.C. Sherriff's extraordinary play Journey's End. But that's only half of it because another future leader of the Labour Party also did…which one were you?

Neil Kinnock: I was Osborne. He played the youngster.

MW: And do you know who the other one was, it was Tony Blair.

The other really interesting thing which leads me into my first question is that Neil, as a student in 1961/62, he had a car. Now, I didn't know that. And I mentioned it to my colleague Kevin Maguire from the Mirror an hour or so ago who grew up rough in Sunderland and he said, 'the bugger had a car. Middle class.' I provided him with all the biographical details of Gordon Kinnock being a place worker and getting dermatitis and having to leave the pit and do manual work. But nonetheless it occurred to me rereading it that although you are not a baby boomer and neither am I, you were lucky enough to be at the beginning of the post-war boom. You got into university, both your parents worked, an only child, first of the grandchildren. And reading Westlake's book it sounds as if you were much loved as a child, you were a lucky boy. Does that sort of childhood…is that a necessary precondition to be an optimistic traveller in politics I wonder?

NK: I don't think so because there are lots who have at least travelled well, if not optimistically, whose family backgrounds have been devastatingly bad. You only have to go right back to Keir Hardy and Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald grew up in desperate poverty and achieved more in his first 21 years and certainly his first 30 years, by which time he was first general secretary of the Labour Party, than I've ever had to undertake or aspire to. Nye Bevan had a loving home, very supportive but appallingly poor. He left school at the age of 13. He certainly travelled optimistically. You can contrast him if you like with Michael Foot, from what would be called a privileged background, bibliophiles, inspiring figures. I don't think that there are preconditions, it's basically what you make of it. You are lucky if you've got people who from your first breathing moment will do their damnest to see that you get the best chances.

MW: Bibliophiles, for the younger people present, means they drank a lot. [laughter]

NK: Michael's old man didn't.

MW: I've just read Michael's book…not short of a glass of sherry.

NK: There's non-alcoholic sherry, everybody knows that.

MW: You get the impression reading the book that the driving force is really your mother…

NK: In a sense, yes, but some of it was rather romantic. She used to say, I probably think only half-joking, that she wanted a second Kinnock to be Viceroy of India because there had been previously another Kinnock called Archibald, my grandfather's name, but whose name was spelt properly – Kynoch – and she thought it would be nice…if there was a second one whose old man was a coal miner. She thought the sky was the limit.

MW: But she didn't see your mercurial rise…

NK: She saw me elected to Parliament which I think was probably the greatest achievement, because there really aren't many achievements, certainly accolades, that begin to compare with being elected as a Member of Parliament for any constituency, particularly mine, at the age of 28. She died two years later but I was delighted that they'd seen one branch and seen me pass an exam for about the first time in my life.

MW: 1983, if I can fast forward, most people here know roughly what happened in the intervening period. Michael Foot, your great friend and mentor, MP for Ebbw Vale, you're in the neighbouring seat of Bedwellty, Michael is leader of the party. It all goes pear-shaped, the SDP split, a serious hammering, and you're thrust into the leadership. I remember Clive Jenkins announcing it on The World at One before a single vote had been cast – they knew how to do things properly in those days. [laughter] Did it all come too soon?

NK: I don't know, maybe, by some reckoning I came to Parliament too soon and the leadership challenge arrived when I was 41 years of age. It was nothing to do but meet it. It wasn't a matter of fate, it was a matter of necessity and I think that anybody who was politically active at the time will recognise what I mean by that. I also had this certain personal feeling. I thought that Michael had been betrayed, certainly badly let down, by some of the people who had been most active in pressing him to take this poisoned chalice.

MW: Can you name any names?

NK: There were people on the left of the Labour Party who were enthusiastic about him going for the leadership, there were people in the trade unions. There's no point in me naming names, people can look at the record and match what they did in the subsequent four years with the continued entreaties which eventually persuaded Michael that his duty required him to run for and become the leader of the Labour Party. Although at the time that he was running I didn't think he should, I counselled him with a set of figures demonstrating conclusively that he couldn't win against Denis Healey and…damn it the bugger went and won. [laughter]

I think some of them voted for Michael, maybe not enough to make a difference. There were one or two, if you like, semi-attached Trotskyites in the SDP who believed in revolutionary pessimism and thought they could inflict terminal wounds on the Labour Party by ensuring that Michael Foot became leader. But on all the best reckonings that I and my now unfortunately dead friend Philip Whitehead, he from the right of the party, me from the left, we did our calculations together, our figures worked out more or less the same, his were slightly more in favour of Michael than mine were. We spent ages in subsequent years trying to figure out which of the eventual defectors voted for Michael; we settled upon a figure of three which wasn't in the end enough to make a difference.

MW: I can remember saying to you when Jim Callaghan was still Prime Minister, 'well, you know, if you're going to go on to great things maybe you should get a bit of ministerial office under your belt to make your CV burnish. And can you remember the answer you gave me, because you'll tell the story better.

NK: Well, I know what the answer was, whether it was the one I told you [laughter]. Although a fully paid up and dear and beloved friend and comrade, you're still a journalist, so a slightly different version.

MW: Callaghan offered you a job, as I remember the story, when Bob Cryer died, no when he resigned..

NK: No, it was before that. When Bob Cryer was appointed, the day after I refused the first offer Jim was kind enough to give me, I said 'oh I know what you wanted, you wanted a ginger haired member of the [tripping group] and you didn't give a damn which one it was. And poor Bob was killed in a car crash later on.

MW: I recall the story, he said to you, 'Come on now Neil, we need you. You've had your issues with me but I had my issues with Clem when I joined the Government as a junior minister in 1948/49, and you said, 'my differences are more substantial' and he said 'no they're not' and you said 'but I've read your speeches Jim' and at that point he said 'oh well'. [laughter]

NK: Jim, faithful to the fact pretty much, sought to give the impression that he'd been a restless, potentially rebellious, Bevanite in the period from the election in July 1945 and then turned in about '47/48 and became an undersecretary of state in the War Ministry as it then was. And the point is that there's good reason to see Jim as a class warrior of kinds and certainly a supporter of Bevan and close enough to Nye to have counselled him strongly as a younger member of parliament not to resign in 1951. So people who say that without Callaghan they wouldn't have had Bevanite credentials are talking to the back of a wall.

MW: You were only 10 years old at the time, but had you been older and wiser would you have said 'Nye, don't do it.'

NK: In exactly the circumstances I probably wouldn't have but it would have been wise counsel…

MW: Right, talking about coming in from the left as a rebellious young man, Jim Callaghan…1983 election, that terrible election. Labour was against the European Union as it then was, it's unilateralist in its nuclear intentions. By 1987 it's come to terms with the EU….And by '92 you're adopting a multilateralist stance…Your socialism as I sensed it at the time and have heard you speak often enough is essentially pragmatic rather than theoretical, 'it's about helping our people' would be the kind of phrase you used to use on platforms. It's no use being pure unless we win and help our people. But I notice Westlake says that by the late 80s you thought the ideological roller coaster of Thatcher was such that what people wanted were the little quieter more regular life, and he uses the phrase 'smooth managerialism', that's slightly surprising….

NK: Well this is the conclusion that Martin obviously reached.

MW: It reminds me of somebody of course but we'll come back to that…

NK: Although what anybody who knows me would I guess affirm that I've always thought that institutions and people get much more respect and earn much more trust by running things well than by running them on surges of enthusiasm or emotion. Now I don't make the categoric difference, and I certainly don't turn the managerial task and challenge into some kind of secular religion that maybe Martin was thinking of at that time. But nevertheless, you've got to run things properly. The source of that in some ways is partly my parents and the background against which I was brought up, for instance people respected Nye Bevan, and not because he only was a great orator and a ferocious leader from a very young age, but because he was elected head of the miner's lodge on top of the pit when he was 19 out of respect for his dedication and his capability, they knew that if they elected Nye he would run it properly. And then subsequently, when he was chairman of the Council of Action during the General Strike, they ran that town on a basis of justice which meant the kids did get shoes because they shared them out, people did get fed even if it was in soup kitchens, the police were on the streets doing the job that they were paid to do, and people respected Bevan for those reasons and three years later elected him. There's a dramatic line in his biography, As It Happened – a pretty unfortunate title for a Prime Ministerial biography – Atlee says in very very direct terms, the Labour Party will command support if people will respect it as a respectable, well-managed, representative force. That seemed to me to be a way of recommending ourselves as the enemies of chaos which I have always charged the Tories with being. Laissez-faire, in its purest ideological application is chaos and chaos hurts people, appallingly and in many cases irreversibly.

MW: We said we'd bring in members of the audience who I hope will ask the awkward and topical questions that journalists always want asked so I won't have to ask them myself. There's a second reason for doing it. There was a small but unkind item in the London Evening Standard the other night which said that my questions are so long-winded and Neil's answers are so long-winded that the members of the audience won't…

NK: Talk among yourselves…[laughter]

MW: …that the audience won't get a chance to ask questions. So obviously we have to prove Mr Paul Dacre's minions wrong. So let's take a couple of questions. My practice, if it's ok, is to take a couple at a time because that way more people can get in. And if you can say who you are…

Question from the floor: My name is Emma Burnell and I'd just like to comment, I've found quite often that people on the left will fight people on the right when they have to but they'd much rather fight other people on the left. What is the space between being divisive and being discursive and how do we do that better?

Question from the floor: I just wanted to ask Mr Kinnock, who I greatly admire, when you talk about institutions acting on surges of enthusiasm, it kind of reminded me of Labour's march to war, and I wondered if you thought that breaking international law signalled a loss of rationality in the West so the West has become as irrational as the terrorists it's fighting.

MW: Right, two ambitious questions there. Atavistic fighting on the left and an abandonment of international law implying a flight from rationality in the West. Ok, answer them then. [laughter]

NK: If I can take the second one first. I think you'd be mistaken if you tried to equate your patently deep reservations about the conduct of parts of the West, say since 2001, with the conduct of the terrorists. I think that the motivations and the impulses are entirely different, the responsibilities are entirely different. I would say that one is reactive and the other one is deliberately incendiary without any real individual cause for ignition.

So I wouldn't make the equation. I would however advocate a change in international law. And this isn't post-hoc, I've argued for a very very very long time that unfortunately the United Nations Charter was drawn up - understandably - in circumstances in which the major confrontations because one country invaded another and perfectly in order of course for that prohibition on incursion into somebody else's territory to remain. But I think that for decades past, during which time the most lethal threats, or certainly many of the lethal threats, to human life and liberty, as well as to national, regional order, have come from institutions other than states, the law should have moved to accommodate that reality so that effectively we could take international collective action against genocide as well as having a much more effective and multi-faceted set of initiatives against those who employ terror for political or religious ends.

So I would argue for a change in the law. And I don't think, whatever reservations I have about the conduct of affairs in recent years, I don't think that we can draw any equation between the activity of states with democratic governments and the activity of those, sometimes by suicide but often by other means, who inflict appalling harm both on people in their communities and obviously on stability. It's a nice academic argument that can be had. I think in real terms, in raw terms, there is more to the equation than between the two.

On the first question, I'm reminded of a joke George Orwell, who other people here will remember, wrote in one of his essays in The Road to Wigan Pier, that there are sections of the Left who enjoy themselves most when shouting 'fie, fie, fo fum, I smell the blood of a right wing deviationist'. And Orwell, being away in service in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, was reflecting at one end on the catastrophic and vicious doctrinaire campaign which killed lots of people, conducted by agents of the Soviet Union, in the name of socialism, and at the other end this stupidity of branch level wrangles inside the Labour Party, or between the ILP and the Labour Party, concluding that the Left was often its greatest enemy because it weakened and disabled the force of progress on which we are pretty much all agreed, more than any attacks from outside ever could.

Now I continue to take that view. If we want to update thoroughly, the reason why Jacques Chirac has remained the president of France is a direct result of the self-indulgence of the French left. That's just one very dramatic demonstration of the plague that affects the left not only in this country but elsewhere. The SDP suffered from it in Germany under the leadership of Schroeder and then the reason why Angela Merkel is the leader of a coalition government is because of fragmentation in the left. The same thing has happened in the Netherlands. In this country we may have a better developed appetite for each other's bone marrow than they do in other countries. We managed to get something pretty close to universal self-discipline by 1992 which is the only kind of discipline that counts and should motivate forces of radicalism – the left – at all times, unfortunately doesn't. In the years since, a mixture of amnesia and myopia – both killer diseases in politics – has probably induced elements on the left – and on the right of the left, as it were – to think more in terms of short term headlines and the impression they're making on an external audience than about the well being of the Labour Party. I hope that if this kind of attitude has got a life span, it is quickly coming to its conclusion, and that the fresh challenge is from the Conservative Party and in the terminal months of the leadership of Tony Blair I hope that the opportunity for a "fresh start" will be eagerly seized and fully exploited and that its characteristics will be a degree of unity which is first of all authentic and secondly which has appeared to be frayed at the edges, not to say at the core, in some recent years…much to my shame.

MW: The discipline of the late Kinnock era has held up much better than many people would have expected with John Major's backbenchers who reminded many people of what it was like…

NK: The capacity in politics for people to use selective and short memories is scarcely equalled in any other sphere of human activity and I just wish there was something we could put in the water, or in the wine [laughter], to…

MW: There is an academic at Nottingham University called Phil Cowley, whose name some of you will know, and unlike when you were [a lad], you're sitting there if there's a tight vote – it'll happen again over Trident on Wednesday – you get an e-mail from Phil Cowley who says 'if more than 44 Labour MPs with red hair vote against the Government tonight it'll be the worst vote on a nuclear motion…on a wet Wednesday since 1948'. He says that actually these young ones– the Blair's babes, the poodles – have actually been much more willing to vote against the Government, perhaps in a more coherent and visible way, and they had huge majorities anyway until recently, than they ever get the credit for. And the number of rebellions has increased over the Parliament. I heard him say on the radio yesterday morning about Trident, once you've rebelled once it's so much like…once you've been out and lost your rebel virginity you'll…do it again.

NK: No, I think that actually most of the people who rebel in parliament at just about any time – there are exceptions, the so-called usual suspects – think about it and take it very very seriously. Which is why the rebellions that count are the ones on the big issues. They don't waste their sustenance on riotous living at 10 O'clock at night when it's voting against the prayer or some minor order like that. There are people who when they are serious about it keep it for the big ones. I noticed one of the woman backbenchers end of last week said, 'If they didn't want us to vote against them, they shouldn't have given us the bloody vote.'

The thing is, on the Trident vote this week, it is a fact that the Government has not exhausted the argument and it hasn't responded in a convincing way to several absolutely legitimate questions which have been raised about the prospect of spending a trillion, gillion, zillion on a weapons system that in today's setting is much more short of justification than it has been at any time in the nuclear age. So they can expect to get hit.

MW: Am I right in thinking we caught a flash there of the old Kinnock unilateralist? It sounded that you would be voting either for postponement or total cancellation of Trident. Before you answer I should warn you that Roy Hattersley, who gave you a great deal of trouble in the 80s as a multilateralist, has gone unilateralist.

NK: As I told Roy last week when I bumped into him in the House of Lords. He was swearing in simply so that he would vote the right way on when we have a vote on Wednesday night in the House of Lords, God bless him. [singing] 'There is more rejoicing in heaven over one lamb that repenteth', [laughter] or words to that effect.

There is a huge difference between people in parliament exercising their judgement on the basis of the known facts and being propelled by principle, absolutely essential that that ingredient is there…a huge difference between that and an appetite for internecine war fare on half baked doctrinaire grounds that inflict appalling wounds and take years to recover from. People, even if they disagree, can respect an intelligently argued alternative point of view which concludes with Members of Parliament casting their votes in a lobby other than the one that the party leadership would prefer. And that has to be part of the appetite for democracy and the reality of democracy. That's different from a constant, repetitive effort to either spark or continue civil war.

MW: We didn't quite catch which way you would be voting…

NK: I wouldn't be voting for the Government line.

MW: On doing it now? Would you be voting for postponement or for chucking the…

NK: I think postponement makes more sense than either an effort to secure complete nuclear disarmament - I don't think that that's going to happen and I think it's a difficult political stance to defend as I counselled the party back in the 1980s, I still take that view - but I simply don't think that the case has been made on defence grounds, on industrial and technological grounds, on public expenditure grounds, or in assessment of what the realities of the current and immediate future threat are likely to be to security of the United Kingdom. I don't think the argument has been made. And that means that I wish the Government would listen to the arguments for taking indications but not coming to a conclusion and wanting to sign on the dotted line at this juncture for the renewal, or to use a more precise phrase, the increase in power of Trident against the background of a 40-year old Non Proliferation Treaty to which the United Kingdom has adhered and should continue to do so.

MW: I think you've crossed all the ts there. Let's get two from this side.

Question from the floor:

Neil, I am Malcolm Horne, general secretary of the Socialist Education Association. What is your view of the fact that after 10 years a Labour government has still not completed the comprehensive revolution in England, despite our colleagues and comrades in Scotland and Wales having done so.

Question from floor

My name's Richard Darlington. Was it The Sun wot won it?

MW: I thought it was you Richard but my sight is getting so bad. I once gave the microphone to somebody and said 'bald man at the back' and he said 'thanks Dad'. [laughter].

NK: On the question about the comprehensive revolution, I've always thought of it much more as an evolution, a growth away from the stupidities of the segregated education and its embrace by a country that really wants to do its best for the current generation in order that the country can get its best from that generation upon whom it will economically, intellectually and culturally depend. So that has always been the argument I've used for comprehensive education, non-selective education, which by definition has to have installed in it not the concept but the practice of equity in treatment between children of all backgrounds and both genders regardless of their economic circumstances or the interest or lack of it from their parents.

Now that's part of my definition – comprehensive. The other part of the definition relates to the quality of provision that has been made for all children, not just in secondary education of course, but all children going through the education system. And I've argued that we should always use the understanding of the word 'comprehensive' that we do when it's applied to insurance. That the challenge to the education system, as to the insurance system, is to try to make provision against all potential risks with a reasonable investment in security against those risks. Now I'm not over interpreting words, I simply think that unless and until we make comprehensive again into an understood adjective to describe the scope and quality of education then we will always be stuck with the abbreviation 'comp' prefixed by terms like 'bog standard' and the consequence is that no matter what the quality of output from those schools, they will always be deemed by certain section of opinion formers and indeed potential users of the system, to somehow be inadequate and second rate. So I think, if there is to be a revolution, it's a little tiny revolution of getting a word to mean what it says.

And I also happen to think, as I've argued for instance with the Prime Minister – but I haven't won that argument I have to confess - that if it's real education reform we want, and we've been told repeatedly that we must pursue the holy grail of reform if we're going to get the quality of outcomes that we need from education, then there are two that have been thus far almost entirely overlooked, although things happily are really beginning to change now.

First of all I think that the essence of reform should have been the objective of smaller and continually smaller class sizes in schools serving children of all ages. Great strides have been made in primary schools, not enough yet, but there is a transformation by comparison with the conditions pre-1997, hugely to the credit of the Government and unprecedented investment in education. The second change, which is about to be made, should have come earlier and that is to transform the curriculum for 11 to 14 year olds so that children in large numbers are not left with conditions in which they come out of primary education pretty bright eyed and bushy tailed, are thrushed into a non-selective system – tick tick – but then have to wait for three years in relatively large classes before the keel is restored, if you like, to their lives of commencing an examinable curriculum which then dictates absolutely everything and excludes from lots of schooling all the things that attracted me into going to school, like sport and drama and music and all the things that you learn all the time but have a hell of a lot of fun and contribute to the development of your scholastic abilities.

Now, the one reduction in class sizes has only been partially reached and I'm certain could be much more advanced than it is, particularly in secondary schooling, and secondly the change that should have occurred with those kids in the crucial and difficult adolescent years, with every other kind of pressure coming onto them – commercial, meretricious, demanding pressures of image and attitude, unprecedented in their scale and insistence, those kids should have had an education system much more tailored to the needs for rigour and stability and enjoyment than has been the case in 10 years where lots of other changes have been made, some immensely beneficial, some of them ridiculously irrelevant, and if there had been a real concentration on that I think by now we would have seen a change in the quality of outcomes, the standards of confidence in kids in late adolescence, the attitude towards teachers and teaching and the attitudes towards schooling and its comprehensive provision and quality. So I would make arguments for changes that are only just commencing to be very urgently accelerated, then I think we'll see the quality coming through.

Can I say one last thing. One thing that's astounded me about a genuine education revolution that's taking place and that's the one in Ireland since the late 1970s, is the extraordinary speed at which the results have arrived. For me, and I think most people who are interested in, let alone professionally engaged in education, which I have been for a very very long time, the assumption is that if you inaugurate a real, substantial and beneficial change it's going to be 15 or 20 years, maybe 25 years, before you see the recognisable result of that shift of gear that's made an enormous difference to the education system. In the case of Ireland, where by common political agreement, an enormous shift in the prioritising of investment, the governance of schools, the emphasis on learning was made in the 1970s, the results came through not in 15, 20 years, they came through demonstrably in 10, 12 years. And they're the single biggest cause for Ireland being the Celtic tiger that it is. Tax regimes and other things have assisted, the European Development regional assistance was certainly important, but nothing compared in terms of Ireland's high and sustainable growth rate, and transformation of living conditions for a huge mass of people, nothing compares with what was done in education.

And I think on a bigger scale in the ten years of Labour Government we would be further towards achieving that kind of accomplishment if the changes that had been pursued had more to do with smaller class sizes, alterations to the curriculum, instead of a preoccupation, a repeated preoccupation, with trying to introduce some kind of market system, as if education was a replica of car sales and could be governed by much the same market principles. [applause].

MW: You intervened publicly to say some of those things during the debate on the academies bill, whereas for most of your time as…

NK: Trusts

MW: As dowager leader of the party you've followed the example of your friend Michael Foot and kept your mouth shut whatever you thought. Is that right?

NK: I have to say it hasn't tortured me being fortunate in having my opportunity to vent my views to current ministers at all levels who've been generous with their time and their understanding. So in some respects I've persuaded myself, I think with some justification, there have been occasions where I've had the immense privilege of being able to intervene and sometimes getting something done as a lot of other people haven't got. So I wouldn't have been justified to blurt and blast over things.

Now I'll give you the example in any case, academies. I was out of the country and it would have been daft for me to try to have intervened publicly while I was a European commissioner on British schooling. By the time they came up with the trust delusion I was back in this country, there was a reasonable case to be put, I didn't want this development of the market system to go any further, I thought it would disadvantage children and parents enough and indeed the country. So in those circumstances I made two interventions which were measured, I deliberately avoided going wall to wall which I thought it would have been unjustified and in some respects [ ]

MW: Richard's question

NK: Well, The Sun said they won it. Lord McAlpine, the former treasurer of the Conservative Party, said they won it. I never conceded that. I just make the observation on the basis of poll results, some of which are reported by the Standard, that something like 6 to 10% of voters in Britain will acknowledge that their vote is directly influenced by the newspaper that they read. Now that says a great deal for the 90% and I think maybe it's a reality that there are bedrock dedicated supporters of the main political parties and that the decision about which party forms the government really does relate to the moving 6 to 10% and if those people are capable of being influenced, in their own acknowledgement, by the newspapers that they read, that's always going to give the Tories something of a majority.

As far as The Sun is concerned, well I could go at length about that but I'd rather nurse my grievances and wait for the day when Rupert Murdoch, in his anxiety to follow the money, as he always does, trips over. [applause].

MW: Or gets pushed. A friend of mine said 'ask Neil what he thinks about breaking up the Murdoch monopoly as it affects four national newspapers, one major television network and the free sheet in the capital of this country.'

NK: Well I'm told by people from within the Murdoch empire that Rupert really took against me following a speech I made to a print union annual conference in Scarborough at which I said what a very good idea it would be for us to implement United States law on newspaper and media ownership. Because for decades since the 1950s there has been a law in the USA which strictly limits the amount of overlapping ownership there can be between any form of news outlet. That barely affected television when the law was first introduced in Congress but obviously the balance has changed in the years since. I said how fortuitous it would be if we wouldn't even have to spend a long time drafting this law because it already existed and it was the reason why Mr Murdoch had actually changed his nationality from Australian to USA because one of the most basic restrictions on the ownership in the States related to the fact that it was conditional upon being a US citizen. Now, said I, he may well want, in the event of us introducing this law, to change his nationality, and of course he's entitled to apply for British naturalization. All I can say is that his application forms will gather inches of dust in the pending tray of any Labour home secretary. Apparently, they tell me, Rupert really took against me after that. [laughter]

MW: I can't understand it.

Question from floor: I come from Northern Ireland and I'm interested in your comments about schooling over there. I'd like to give my profound thanks to Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson for what they did over there. I know in Stormont how much they revered Peter Mandelson

MW: It's not a sentence you hear a lot, is it? [laughter]

Questioner: What I want to talk about is the National Health Service. I was brought up on Nye Bevan. Can you imagine how I feel now because you once said something like 'don't get old and don't get sick.' I did that recently, very stupidly, and I was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital with a major psychotic breakdown. I've been kicked out of the Royal Free Hospital because they have a policy….my GP said they won't take people once they're in their 60s…I want to know, what do you think about this ageist policy of New Labour and who do you think is responsible and what do you think they should do about it?

Question from the floor: My name's Peter Campbell. I just want to know what your feelings were on the Lords and how you're going to be voting in the coming weeks, if you're going to be following the Commons?

NK: Is there any connection with the alleged ageist policy? [laughter]

The first question first. I'm glad we introduced Northern Ireland because I think that the accomplishments of Tony Blair and the succession of Northern Ireland secretaries over the last 10 years have been quite extraordinary. Not many activities in politics really deserve the description 'monumental' but I think that these achievements really are monumental. Tony would pay tribute to people of enormous courage on all sides of the sectarian divide and some who have never been part of the sectarian divide for the way in which, in the most terrifying circumstances, they've persisted with the argument for a conclusive and durable normalisation of this part of the United Kingdom. But the fact is that without the imagination and determination over year after year after year we wouldn't be where we are now with Ian Paisley having to take responsibility for the first time in his whole life. And he's got to do it because in the end the only people who voted for the permanence of division were people who voted for the DUP, and substantial though that vote was it certainly could not have been - and wasn't - the great majority of the people of Northern Ireland from all communities. And eventually democracy, including the democracy of the Democratic Unionist Party, must respond to that.

One other word I'd say is this. That there's a lot of talk about the Blair legacy at the moment. One of the most profound misunderstandings – or bits of mischief – is the suggestion that Blair's obsessed with his legacy. Frankly that's not part of his make up. He does concentrate, he can become as he needs to become as Prime Minister, obsessed about objectives. The size of his page in the history book isn't something that motivates him. I view as a tragedy the fact that there are monumental accomplishments and among them is what's come to pass and been secured in Northern Ireland and that will be almost obscured by shorter term conditions that will have little permanence in the life or conduct or faith of the British people, certainly not to compare with the resolution of the centuries old division of northern Ireland. So I just hope that in a couple of month's time, when the stories are written, there will be proper and full acknowledgment of that genuinely historic part he's played.

Now on the National Health Service, I list among other accomplishments the gigantic improvement in investment in the National Health Service and the way in which it's manifested in shortened waiting lists, radically shortened waiting lists, a huge increase in the recruitment of qualified nurses and doctors – 30,000 additional doctors – and I grieve at the way in which, despite these accomplishments and what they've meant in terms of the prevention of pain, or at least the reduction of pain, of cure, of treatment, of the saving of lives – which is a matter of analytical record – the Conservatives…this is the symptom, this isn't the main problem by any means – have actually got a small lead in opinion polls as the party that could be more trusted with the National Health Service. I think that is a fantastic inversion of reality and I hope that over the period of the next year or so Labour can restore understanding of the fact that the evidence for investment, advance and change is not imaginary, that it's real and it's made a massive beneficial difference to the lives of countless thousands, indeed millions, of people in this country.

Now one area that is still in need of the most urgent attention, as it always has been, maybe reduced at the margin but nevertheless substantial, is that of psychiatric illness, whatever its origins. We saw horrific evidence only this morning of the way in which misunderstanding and then neglect conspired to achieve the death of people who, if they had been sentient people, would not have died, certainly not in those circumstances because they would have argued their case, they would have been comprehended, there would have been attention given and their lives probably saved. And what government's got to do is to get full understanding of the fresh priority that has to be given to the treatment of mental illness of various kinds so that neither the people who work in that sphere, nor the people and their families who need that treatment, are any longer thought of as an add on, an addition, a component of the health service. That because it can't make its argument with the force of broken legs and heart attacks and outbreaks of cancer, is not neglected but rarely except in tragedy reaches the front of people's attention, despite the vast extent of families effected directly or indirectly in this country by the incidences of psychiatric illness.

Now the other thing is this, there is no ageist policy of the Labour Government because when you look at the scale of fresh investment in trying to deal with the afflictions of age, perhaps one of the best measures comes from the fact that for obvious reasons the preponderant expenditure of the health service, for decades, has been on people my age and above, 65 and above. The reasons for that are obvious, but you couldn't count the score of treatment and cure and restoration to normal activity by sick people in the way that we can now unless there had been major efforts to deal with people whose route of illness is the fact that they're getting on in years. So there's not an ageist policy but there is a deficiency still, partly repaired but not as much as it should be, in the treatment of psychiatric illness.

If I can just move on to the Lords. A part of me says, if we're going to have a legislature, any kind of legislature, it has got to be elected. What I know is that because of a variety of political considerations, some of them sentimental, some of them quite realistic, we are not going to arrive at that condition. And therefore the very intelligent proposals put in what I think of as Robin Cook's 2003 draft reform bill, form a substantially elected Lords – the figure that they used at the time was 75% - and the accommodation of independent, non-political cross benchers and the bishops, would be a way to ensure that we do get an accountable and much more transparent political system for the whole of our legislature instead of trying to sustain the idea that it is only by having one non-democratic house that we can guarantee the primacy of the elected house. I don't believe that that's sustainable on any grounds of logic. I put my mind into pragmatic gear and believe that the massive advance that can be secured if we go for what, for the sake of argument, an 80% elected Lords and the accommodation of a non-elected element, appointed by transparent means, to guarantee that it can still describe itself as a house of wisdom as well as being accountable to the electorate. We're not going to get any significant further reform of the House of Lords without embracing that hybridity.

MW: I want to put in a quick question here in case nobody else does. The leadership issue. I got the impression a few years ago you thought Gordon Brown was being a bit importunate in pressing his case. In recent years I've got the feeling that you think T Blair's time has run out, possibly should have gone already. We read in the papers you told Charles Clarke not to press his case…not to launch his website, it's like launching a battle ship…

NK: It's a damn sight cheaper.

MW: HMS Milburn. And I'm not quite clear on whether or not you think there ought to be a real contest and what young Miliband ought to do. Have I summed it up roughly correctly?

NK: David has been very wise – he's not going to run. That's it, end of story.

MW: What about the issue of the contest? '76, six brilliant candidates, love them or hate them.

NK: Well permit me this very quick reflection. If you look in '76 as you did Michael…that's when we met wasn't it?

MW: It probably was, but the young people will be frightened…

NK: It's 30 years ago, God help me. There were in the Labour Party then, apart from the Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, Tony Benn, Shirley Williams, Denis Healey…Tony Crossland and others. I've paused to reflect in the years since that if Tony [Benn] hadn't gone in the direction that he did, Denis just got older, not dimmer but certainly older, Shirley buggered off and joined the SDP and poor Tony Crossland died. And it was this chapter of accidents that meant that I had no alternative really but to run in '83, because in '76 these fearsome figures of massive potential and great accomplishment and the idea that a few years later they'd be scratching around for a 41 year old backbencher would have been ludicrous. One of the interesting things, but one of the terrifying things, about politics is how fast things can change and change by 180 degrees, quite extraordinary.

Now as far as these years are concerned, the continuous reality that's concerned me is that groupings around Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, what I've called triblets of retainers, have taken it upon themselves to conduct vendettas, generally speaking via anonymous statements to the newspapers, and the consequence of that has been to give an impression of rivalry, instability, even internecine warfare between the principles that in my view didn't reflect reality and could and should have been sat upon at an earlier stage and periodically was sat upon with beneficial effects on the Labour Party. And the number of times that I've quoted Clem Atlee in his acerbic note, 'a period of silence doesn't [go far] but it would be greatly appreciated', I wished they'd heed that kind of advice, we'd have had a lot less of the incipient instability that's afflicted us.

Now, Tony made his statement just over two years ago. I bitterly regretted that, mainly because I believed that he had in a period of introversion and uncharacteristic depression – I don't mean classical depression with a capital D, after all he's not a Celt – but just…well…demoralisation – and he wouldn't be human if he didn't periodically suffer that and I'm glad we've got a Prime Minister who's human enough to do that – he made his statement, I thought that he'd surrendered any degree of control over his own fate in the circumstances which I regard to be tragic in personal terms. And in his effort to close down the speculation that he correctly believed would be damaging if it continued, has simply inaugurated a new basis for speculation. That too has got its tragic elements.

All that having been said, as far as I'm concerned, the person most fit to be Tony Blair's successor, without any reservation or shadow of a doubt, is Gordon Brown and I also happen to believe that in his own interests, in order that great accomplishments and real contribution to sustained progress will not be obscured by the clouds hanging over the process of succession, Tony should be categoric about the date as quickly as he possibly can so that at least one element of destabilization, and one easy means of targeting the Labour Party, is taken away as rapidly as possible. I don't actually care very much when the date is, it is the speculation over the date, in the absence of an even more explicit statement by the Prime Minister than those he's given so far that really is the source of avoidable grief for himself and for the party.

Question from the floor: My name's Michael Bond. I want to ask a question about the Middle East. Tony Blair has said that this is one of the things he wants to focus on in the last few months but I don't actually see in what way he's focusing or how he's going to get around it. That's the sort of broad question, just your views on that. A more detailed question: you've already paid tribute to Mr Blair's accomplishments in Northern Ireland which I share and imagine most people do. Why the difference in sitting down in Northern Ireland with terrorists and terrorist organisations and gently nudging and nurturing and working together with them over 10 years, and why the refusal in Israel-Palestine to do the same with Hamas and again another terrorist organisation which has shown signs of change?

Question from the floor: How do you envisage the next 50 years of the European Union, with lots of problems about the single currency, enlargement and so forth.

MW: If Blair wants to play a role in the Middle East after he retires, you can worry about that if you want to. [laughter]

NK: There is one categoric difference obviously, which I know you will already recognise, between Northern Ireland and the Middle East, and that is the fact that Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom, of which Tony Blair is the Prime Minister, and the Middle East most definitely is not.

The other categoric difference is that whatever reluctance exists among parties in Northern Ireland to come to terms with each other, neither of them have the standing or the rooted view taken by the government of Israel, particularly in the last 18 years or so but I think it probably predates that. It's patently the case that whatever third party discussions could be undertaken with Palestinian elements or their representatives from elsewhere, or through the Arab League, or by some other mechanism, in the margins of the UN, whatever else is done, unless a government of Israel was to come to the table and acknowledge their desire to be part of that process, there would be very very little in the way of advance. We've got a precedent for a chance of change and of course that emanated from Oslo when there was a sufficient degree of willingness from both sides, particularly entailed by younger people – younger Palestinians and younger Israelis – the force opinion from the world more generally and with the Nordics particularly willing to act as facilitators, for great hope to come out of it. Remember Clinton with that very dramatic photograph in the Rose Garden of the White House? We didn't think it was over but against the background of the collapse of Communism, against the background of Nelson Mandela walking out of prison, everybody could have been forgiven for thinking anything is possible as long as you've got the ingredients and the ingredients now seem to be there.

It would have required in my view a huge and almost super human generous act by Israel to facilitate a continuation, and simultaneously it would have required a definite adjustment in the stances taken by organisations in the Palestinian territories in order to have shifted things on to a new level. And in Israel there have been a series of governments that have won enough votes in elections for that not to take place, although many people choose to forget that the votes for the alternative to the path that's been taken in the democracy of Israel has continually been very substantial. One wonders if they didn't have the particular form of PR that they've got in Israel whether history over the last 10 to 15 years may have been different. But that's a speculation that I can use to delight myself when I'm feeling particularly bleak. We are left with the reality that there will always be a blocking force in Israel that will induce governments not to be adventurous in their efforts to re-establish a meaningful process. And as long as that exists, partly for genuine reasons, partly for opportunistic reasons, forces among the Palestinians – people who've got the guns – will use the reluctance of Israeli leadership to foster any kind of substantial accord as a reason for not doing it themselves. And of course there can be appallingly destructive outbursts, as we saw last year again, with awful consequences, not just in Israel but in neighbouring countries as well.

There is a factor of course that one would have hoped could have changed, I don't know if it's the physics or the chemistry, and that is external pressure, particularly from the United States whose relationship with Israel is unique and whose responsibility at times for sustaining Israel has been very evident. One would have wished that some American politicians who have shown with some courage their willingness to try to inspire a different course when they've been out of government could have been manifest when they were in government, but there were very few instances of that. And now we've got the fearsome reality of very well organised Christian fundamentalist right who've associated themselves with some of the most extreme, recalcitrant elements in Israel through some interpretation of the Old Testament, God knows where they get it from.

MW: He does [laughter]

NK: In that case he's got a hell of a lot to answer for. I think I'm defending God when I say I don't believe in him, I think that means he gets away with a hell of a lot more than he would have otherwise. When that grouping now exerts more influence than the so-called Jewish lobby ever did in the politics of the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s in the United States of America, I really do fear for the prospect of an intelligent and productive intervention by the USA or those associated with it. I have no doubt that Tony Blair, in office or outside office, would put himself forward for anyone to pick as a facilitator and he would make sacrifices of reputation, of convenience or even security in order to try and facilitate that. The problem is getting any form of invitation to that particular party and all sides as far as I'm concerned are much too focused on the manoeuvrings in their own particular struggle to want to look elsewhere to try and find an answer. No answer can be imposed from the outside, answers could be facilitated. There's a reluctance in the one power that could with diligence and repeatedly year in year out start to secure a shift to undertake that kind of activity. I just grieve over it and wring my hands [sighs] and I acknowledge there's next to damn all to be done unless and until enough people in the region want it to be done.

MW: Right, Europe in 30 seconds

NK: That's less than a second a year. I think the most fundamental challenge now for the European Union is to acknowledge the need for pragmatism in order to restore comprehension amongst the much bigger population that are now European citizens and to identify the areas where people acknowledge that Europe is an absolutely crucial implement for progress and to focus, not exclusively, but predominantly on those areas.

[The issues raised ] over many many years in polls taken in every member state, including the new member states, are the environment, migration, no…a civilised form of migration management, the economy and efforts to impede, prevent the further internationalisation of crime. Now those are identified not by politicians in speeches, though that happens as well, but by people, almost without getting prompted, whenever they're asked 'what do you think the European Union should be doing?' And those in large majorities who identify that action list include those who are hostile to the Union as well as those who are more friendly towards the Union. And so consequently if political leadership in the Union would concentrate on those items and their derivatives, obviously they don't stand alone, then I'm certain there would be much clearer comprehension of the fact that the Union is and will be part of the answer and very rarely, if ever, part of the problem.

MW: Thank you Neil. I wonder, at 65, chairman of the British Council, member of the Lordships House, what have you done lately which has given you real pleasure and satisfaction, it may be books, it may be a film, it may be the grandchildren. Reflex action?

NK: Well you've hit it with the third one. Reflex action is my grandchildren, nothing compares. In fact grandchildren, I say to those of you without them, make you wonder why bothered to have kids, because grandchildren are so superior [laughter and applause].

[Ends]

Neil Kinnock was in conversation with Michael White on Monday, 12th March. The Fabian Society thanks our hosts, the Institute of Education, and our media partner The Guardian for their support for this event.