Kinnock’s “greatest” speech condemned councillors who refused to make cuts
A letter in today’s Guardian:
Those of us who worked for Liverpool city council in the 1980s will be dumbfounded to learn that Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech was “one of the greatest political speeches of the postwar period” (Miliband steps up war of words with Unite, 6 July).
Liverpool’s workforce is now a fraction of what it was in the 1980s, yet this Labour leader reserved his venom not for those who implemented real mass local authority redundancies where people lost their livelihoods (the current round of cuts is dispensing with one-third of local authority workers nationally) but for councillors who refused to cut local services and jobs, and used ‘redundancy notices’ as an accounting device to do so.
Not one worker was made redundant in Liverpool from 1983 to 1987. As for rhetoric, who on earth would an employer hand out redundancy notices to, other than “its own workers”?
