I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.
I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services.
The voice of the people, not the people in here, the people with real needs is louder than all the boos that can be assembled. The people cannot abide posturing. They cannot respect gesturing generals or tendency tacticians.
It seems to me that some of them become latter day public school boys. It seems to them it does not matter if the game is won or lost but how you play the game.
Those games players end isolated and try to blame others - the workers, some of our leadership, trade unions, the people of the city, for not showing sufficient revolutionary consciousness or somebody else.
Who is left in the ring? The casualties are left, not to be found among the leaders or some of their enthusiasts, but among the people whose jobs have been lost, whose services have been destroyed and whose standard of living has been crushed down.
Neil Kinnock, addressing the Labour party conference, 1st October 1985. Kinnock was launching an attack on the activities of Liverpool's Labour council, which was run by far-leftist Militant Tendency.
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