Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (143 page)

When we speak of collective strength and collective freedom, collectively achieved, we are not fulfilling that nightmare that Mrs. Thatcher trys to paint, and all her predecessors have tried to saddle us with. We’re not talking about uniformity; we’re not talking about regimentation; we’re not talking about
conformity
—that’s their creed. The uniformity of the dole queue; the regimentation of the unemployed young and their compulsory work schemes. The
conformity
of people who will work in conditions, and take orders, and accept pay
because
of mass unemployment that they would laugh at in a free society with full employment.

That kind of freedom for the individual, that kind of liberty, can’t be
secured by most of the people for most of the time if they’re just left to themselves, isolated, stranded, with their whole life chances dependent upon luck! Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because
all
our predecessors were “thick”? Did they lack talent—those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things, with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together? Were those people not university material? Couldn’t they have knocked off all their “A” Levels in an afternoon? But why didn’t they get it? Was it because they were weak—those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings, were they weak? Those people who could stand with their backs and their legs straight and face the great—the people who had control over their lives, the ones that owned their workplaces and tried to own them—and tell them, “No, I won’t take your orders.” Were they weak? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand, no arrangement for their neighbors to subscribe to their welfare, no method by which the communities could translate its desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals. And now, Mrs. Thatcher, by dint of privatization, and means test, and deprivation, and division, wants to nudge us back into the situation where everybody can either stand on their own feet or live on their knees.

That’s what this election is about as she parades her visions and values, and we choose to contest them as people with root in this country, with a future only in this country, with pride in this country. People who know that if we are to have and sustain real individual liberty in this country, it requires the collective effort of the whole community.

Of course, you’ll hear the Tories talking a lot about freedom. You’re going to hear a lot of that over the next month; a lot of talk of freedom from people who have spent much of the last eight years crushing individual freedoms under the weight of unemployment and poverty. Squeezing individual rights with cuts, and with means tests, and with charges. I think of the youngsters I meet. Three, four, five years out of school. Never had a job. And they say to me, “Do you think we’ll ever get a job?” These are young men and women living in a free country, but they don’t feel free.

I think of the fifty-five-year-old woman I meet, waiting months to go into hospital for an operation, her whole existence clouded by pain. She is a citizen of a free country, but she doesn’t feel free.

I think of the young couple, two years married, living in their mam and dad’s front room ’cause they can’t get a home. Seeing their family relationship deteriorate from what was the greatest friendship, and kinship, in their family on their wedding day, to the most bitter contradictions and conflicts within that household. Those young people, they live in a free country, but they don’t feel free.

I think of the old couple. We all know them. The old people, going for months through the winter afraid to turn the heat up. Staying at home, afraid to go out after dark. Old people for whom the need to buy a new pair of shoes is an economic crisis! They live in a free country—indeed they’re of the generation that
fought
for a free country—but they don’t feel free.

How can—how can they, and millions like them, have their individual freedom if there is not collective provision? How can they have
strength
if they haven’t that, just that little bit of support—of care? That helping hand. They can’t have either. They can’t have either strength or care now, because they are locked out of being able to discharge their responsibilities, just as surely as they are locked out of their ability to enjoy rights. And they are fellow citizens. They want to be able to use both rights and responsibilities. They don’t want featherbedding. They want a foothold. They don’t want cosseting, or cotton-wooling, they want a chance to
contribute
. The greatest privilege is to be able to bear responsibility, not discharge rights. Rights are great. They can be plastered on walls, written in bills; but it’s responsibilities that you
can
discharge—that’s when you feel strong, because you’ve got the means, you’ve got the strength, you’ve got the rights. They can’t discharge responsibilities or rights, and they want the freedom to do so. That’s the freedom we want them, as democratic socialists, to have. That’s a freedom that we seek power to get and to spread in our country.

Freedom, with fairness. That’s our aim. And the means that we choose for pursuing that aim, achieving that aim, is investment. Investment in people. Investing in people to cut unemployment by one million in the first two years of the Labour government. Investing in people to build and to repair the homes and the schools and the hospitals and the roads that this country needs. Investing in people to gain new jobs, and new strength in industry; investing in people to provide the teaching, and the healing, and the caring services. Investing in people to pull them out of poverty in our country by paying higher pensions. By freeing them from
pain by making extra commitment to the health service. By giving them the means to flourish by investing in education.

Of course, they’re big bills! Nobody’s offering miracles; that was the preserve of the monetarists. But what we do say is, With the chance, with the tools for the job, with that bit of backing, with that investment, then we can secure the objectives of building strength for the individual and for the whole country. That’s why we say invest in people—and the resources are there. Oh, it isn’t that the resources are not there; the resources are there in Nigel Lawson’s 2p tax cut! The tuppenny tories! They’ve shown us that the resources are there. Spent the way that Nigel Lawson wants to spend it, it’ll cost 2.5 billion pounds, and it will create in this country about eighty thousand jobs. It’ll create a lot more jobs elsewhere, ’cause most of the cash will be spent on imports. If that same 2.5 billion pounds was
targeted
on construction, on manufacturing, on caring, it would produce three hundred thousand jobs. That’s the bargain for Britain!…

There’s certainly a lot to do, ’cause Mrs. Thatcher’s greatest demonstration of patriotism was to remove capital controls and to allow, in the eight years that she’s been prime minister, a net outflow of sixty thousand million pounds in investment from our country that wouldn’t have otherwise gone. Going to finance the technological revolutions of our competitors; going to strengthen
their
industry when our country has been run down and a quarter of our manufacturing industry lost: two million manufacturing jobs lost as a result of policies of a prime minister that is shoveling support to those who are in contention with us in the markets of the world….

They’ve been shutting down, selling off, selling out this country. And everyone in this country, whoever they are, whatever they do, wherever they live, whatever their politics, is going to ask a question in this election that is absolutely central: How do we pay our way if that is the future? How do we pay our way with a future empty of any industrial policy or strategy? How do we pay our way in the world; how do we pay for the necessities; how do we help the needy of the world; how do we influence others in this world if we can’t pay our way? How, too, do we pay our way at home if we’ve not got the source of wealth generation—the way to make a national living? How do we generate the wealth necessary to give employment, to provide education, to finance health care, to pay for decent pensions? Can we do any of that?

The answer is, at home and abroad, if we don’t make the goods, and market the goods, then we don’t pay our way! That’s the future I’m not prepared to accept. It’s a future that I’m not prepared to offer to my children,
or offer to my contemporaries. I want to be able, in twenty years’ time, because we’ve made our commitment to building industrial strength and generating jobs, in twenty years’ time I want to be able to go down any street in Britain and meet a thirty-six-year-old who is sixteen at the moment, or meet a fifty-year-old who is thirty at the moment, and be able to look them in the eye and say, Yes, it was the case, that in the late 1980s ’cause we could see what was happening in the future, and we knew what the needs of our economy were, we were prepared to commit the resources and give us a
strength
of industrial development that Torism could never provide. I want to be one of those people. And this whole generation of the Labour movement wants it, to be able to stand alongside those people of the 1940s who never had to blush when they met us in the 1960s ’cause
they
could say to us, Yes, we built. Yes, we provided. Yes, we tried to make a future. That—that’s the constructive way. That’s the way to make a future for all the people who contribute to doing it—no free rides, no easy options, no miracles, no cheap routes. Planning, and providing, to make that future. Oh, we can do it! This country has the skills and the abilities, knowledge and wisdom, and the commitment to do it. We can do it.

But we can’t do it with the Tories, for they only offer a future of failure, a future of rundown. A future of great prosperity for the few and great insecurity and decline for the many. That’s where we’ve been heading through industrial contraction, and trade loss, and unemployment, ever since Margaret Thatcher went into 10 Downing Street eight years ago.

It is because of that record that we have some of the greatest reasons for seeing that she is put out of 10 Downing Street in a month’s time. And in a few weeks’ time that is what we, and the British people, will do.

As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Henry Kissinger brought an intellectual heft and historical sweep to his writings and speeches on foreign policy. His memoirs are the most meatily readable of any in his generation; his lectures, often laced with a wry humor playing off his own persona, commanded attention long after he left the official corridors of power.

Because he deals with weighty subjects and his delivery is more a university lecturer’s than an orator’s, his speeches require work by both the speaker and the listener. Kissinger uses two tried-and-true techniques of organization to keep audiences following his points. These are (1) numbering the principles or proposals he is making and (2) preceding the sections of a speech with the questions he proposes to answer. Does this system succeed? Is it more effective than the old “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; tell ’em what you told ’em” device used by so many other speakers?

In the following speech about the future of two continents, topical references to arms control have been deleted. Dr. Kissinger was accepting the Karlspreis award in Aachen, West Germany, on May 28, 1987, a decade after he left public office. He begins by acknowledging his sense of place and concludes with a not overly familiar quotation from Bismarck to make the point of the “spiritual unity” of Europe and America.

***

TO BE HONORED
in this country and in this city has a special meaning for me. I grew up in Germany in painful circumstances. Yet, despite the trauma of those years, I have always retained a deep attachment to the land of my youth. As a very young man serving in the armed forces
of the country which had given my family refuge, I saw the ultimate consequences of the hatreds of that period in the ruins of this city. In that desolate physical and moral landscape, it would have seemed inconceivable that a thriving new town could emerge from the rubble. Or that it would find a respected place in a Europe which for the first time in centuries has returned to its original vocation as the repository of the common values and purposes of Western civilization….

All great achievements in our common history were dreams before they became realities—from the cathedrals raised towards the heavens by peasant societies over decades; to the voyages across uncharted oceans by men moved by both faith and greed; to the development, unique in world history, of a concept of natural law which recognized the inherent worth and rights of all human beings.

The conviction that there were transcendent values beyond the power of the state to grant or to modify is the most singular accomplishment of Western history. It was often violated, but it always recurred and in the end triumphed. Four principles characterize this common heritage.

1. The state is not the personal possession of the ruler but reflects a community of citizens—
cives, citoyen, Mitbürger
. All citizens, recognizing that in the classical period there was the blight of slavery, possessed equal rights and were involved in shaping the destiny of their community. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, it saw itself as a city-state governed by free citizens. These rights were in time extended to the entire empire—the first such gesture in history.