Neil Kinnock has said he is “convinced” that Labour will win the next election, although the former party leader said the race could not be compared to 1992 or 1997.
Kinnock has previously blamed a moment of complacency ahead of the 1992 general election, when he was Labour leader, for costing the party victory over John Major’s Conservatives, who won an unexpected 21-seat majority.
Taking to the stage at a huge rally in Sheffield a week before the election, Kinnock appeared to respond to the crowd by shouting: “We’re all right!” three times – although he subsequently said the yell had actually been: “Well, all right!”, to acknowledge the applause.
Asked whether the next election was shaping up to be more like 1992 or 1997, Kinnock told Sky’s Sunday with Trevor Philips programme it would be “neither ’92 or ’97, or ’45 or ’83 – it’s going to be ’24, because every single election is different.”
He went on: “Even when we had two elections in one year in 1974, between 28 February and the October election, there were two different elections and the same factors were at play, but the way in which it evolved, the way in which it turned out, was different.
“So I don’t think people can examine the archaeology of ’97 and ’92, and ’87 and whatever else. But then there are parallels.”
Asked if he was confident about Labour’s chances, Kinnock replied: “I’m convinced now that we’re not going to lose.”
Pressed on this, he said: “I will go no further than that.” He cited the way the first-past-the-post electoral system could expand small differences in vote shares into very different numbers of MPs, saying that the difference between a Conservative and Labour majority was 1,240 votes, which was the total of the 11 smallest Tory majorities.
“In a first past the post system, you’re going to get the narrowest of shifts – busloads of people, carloads of people – determining who’s going to be the member of parliament,” he said. “So I a long time ago gave up trying to guess by how much anybody could win or lose.”
But later in the interview, when asked if he expected to see Keir Starmer in No 10, Kinnock replied: “Yes, and I look forward to that very much because I think he would be a mature, dependable leader of a party, and by God, we all need that now.”
However caveated his views, Kinnock’s confidence in a Labour win is likely to prompt some unease among Starmer’s team because of wider worries within the party about complacency.
This concern has heightened after Labour easily won byelections last week in two previously safe Conservative seats, Wellingborough and Kingswood. The former saw the Tories’ largest drop in vote share in a byelection since 1945.
