Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock is calling on the party to reclaim its humanist principles
The oft-repeated observation that the Labour Party owes “more to Methodism than Marxism” annoys Neil Kinnock, who served as the party’s leader for much of the 1980s and now sits in the House of Lords. “Harold Wilson used it as a way of reassuring the general public that we hadn’t come directly from the work of Soviets, that we were in the British mainstream, and so on,” he says. “And I don’t blame him for doing that at all … But it is a very lazy understanding of where the British Labour Party came from, and crucially the fact that we’ve never been afflicted by religious sectarianism. In the Labour movement we’ve had Marxists and Christian Socialists and liberals and a lot of humanists, right from the beginning.”
Kinnock’s frustration with this historical oversimplification is a perfect starting point for our conversation, which coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Trades Union Congress Conference that led to the formation of today’s Labour Party. And it’s music to my ears. For too long, the story of the Labour movement’s organisational, intellectual and ethical origins has over-emphasised the religious contribution, sidelining a powerful and persistent current of secular, rationalist and humanist thought. And today, when religious propagandists are increasingly putting out the idea that everything in our culture – from democracy to justice to freedom itself – has a Christian origin, that narrative matters.
Of course, Christian and humanist elements often combine, and Kinnock’s own life illustrates this. Growing up in a working-class south Wales community, the chapel was a part of life. “I did quite enjoy going to Sunday school,” he says, recalling a time around the age of 15 when he was “probably more religiously inclined than at any other time in my whole life”, inspired by a “terrific young Methodist minister and his lovely wife, both of whom were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and fully paid-up Christian Socialists”.
But it was precisely at this moment of potential conversion that his rationalism kicked in. “It was at that time, I thought: wait a minute, what the hell is all this about? And can I really accept … the foundations of faith … And I realised, of course, that simply wasn’t possible for me.” His own family, while embodying values of “honesty, care for others, hard work”, was largely secular. His father wasn’t religious. “He dismissed the whole notion, though not in any strident way.” And his mother, though Christian, hardly ever went to chapel. His uncles, all staunch trade unionists and socialists, “totally dismissed any idea of religion or conformity to religious requirements”.
A movement with many tributaries
This personal history reflects the overlooked secular stream in the Labour Party’s story. The early movement was a confluence of many tributaries: the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the Fabian socialists, and the humanist ethical societies. The party drew inspiration from the Welsh political philosopher and reformer Robert Owen and the socialist communities he founded, as well as from the rationalist presses that provided cheap, enlightening literature to a newly literate working class. This was, as Kinnock puts it, a “generous open house on the left”, and its greatest strength was its determinedly “anti-sectarian” character. He recalls with admiration the trade unionists in Northern Ireland who, “in the dark times” of the Troubles, refused to segregate their branches by religion. “They were very gutsy people,” he says, and their principled stand helped preserve the movement’s integrity. This openness prevented the religious divisions that afflicted other European socialist movements and allowed Labour to build a broad coalition based on a shared commitment to improving the human condition in the here and now.
The glib “Methodism not Marxism” line obscures this richer and more complex reality. Of course there were tactical reasons, historically, to peddle this line – and not just in the Cold War. The pages of this magazine played host in the early 20th century to more than one unsuccessful Labour general election candidate writing that they felt the charge against them of “atheism” had been decisive. Kinnock himself acknowledges attending the party conference Sunday service during his time as leader, “in order to reassure people that Christians were welcome in the Labour Party … to show neighbourliness, comradeship, reassurance”.
But there is another reason for this public amnesia: the influence of humanism in the movement has seldom been explicit. The humanist current is best understood not as an abstract philosophy, but through the lives of individual Labour humanists who embodied it. When you survey them, you find they were often those who drove the party’s most transformative achievements.
Take the late Roy Jenkins, whom Kinnock describes as having “a very strong ethical vein, a definite moral compass … both a child of and a prophet of enlightenment”. While Jenkins’s later career took him away from Labour, his period as home secretary in the 1960s was a high-water mark for humanist-inspired reform. He oversaw or secured the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship, the liberalisation of divorce law, and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons. This was a revolution in personal freedom, dismantling a legal framework built on religious dogma and replacing it with one based on compassion, reason and individual autonomy. Jenkins’s contribution, Kinnock reflects, was to understand that a “tide in the affairs of men” was flowing. The “seismic change in national sentiment” wrought by two world wars, the rise of the welfare state, and a growing public appetite for reform created a moment “ripe for change”. But, he adds crucially, “without people like Jenkins … the change wouldn’t have come … not maybe as early as the 1960s without the commitment and courage.”
Labour’s humanist giants
This courage was prefigured by an earlier generation. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, was a humanist and president of the Ethical Union (as Humanists UK then was). And then there was Clement Attlee, the quiet architect of the 1945 government. Kinnock delights in recalling Attlee’s famous sentiment, written in a letter to his devout brother, that he didn’t mind the ethics of Christianity but couldn’t “stand the mumbo jumbo”. It was, he laughs, “such a down-to-earth dismissal of this gigantic edifice of religion”. Attlee’s humanism was expressed not in speeches but in deeds: the creation of the NHS, the establishment of the welfare state, the beginning of decolonisation. His socialism was a practical creed for improving human life, rooted in his experiences as a social worker in London’s East End, not in any scripture.
Attlee’s minister for health, the man who brought the NHS into existence, was the Welsh orator Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – another humanist. He was, in Kinnock’s analysis, part of a generation of “socialist rationalists” whose political convictions were forged in the crucible of post-war disillusionment with old certainties. “The slaughter and stupidity of [the First World War],” he explains, “devastated a generation’s belief in religious engagement.” For Bevan’s generation in the Welsh valleys, which saw congregations collapse in the face of such senseless violence, political action through the Labour movement replaced chapel-going as the primary vehicle for community and social change. His vision for the NHS was a profoundly humanist one: that healthcare should be a universal right, available to all based on need, not wealth. It was a declaration of the intrinsic value of every human life.
Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, was a humanist and a political force in her own right. As Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, she fought to establish The Open University – a project derided by her opponents but one that perfectly encapsulated the humanist belief in the transformative power of education and the importance of lifelong learning for all. And then there was Michael Foot, Bevan’s successor in Ebbw Vale and a future Labour leader. Kinnock, who knew him well, describes Foot’s humanism as deeply intellectual, rooted in a scholarly understanding of “political and social free thinking in Britain from the Revolutionary War”. He was, Kinnock says, “intellectually as well as spiritually totally against religion, but not in any draconian way. He was ‘live and let live’.” It was a liberal tolerance so complete that Kinnock could joke, “Some of his best friends were
Christians.”
This same practical, compassionate and secular outlook was shared by so many others, including the former first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan, who had the first government-sponsored humanist funeral in the UK, and who it turns out was Kinnock’s flatmate in the 1960s. When I asked Morgan, years ago and in a rather chippy manner, what he planned to do about religious influence in Welsh schools, he told me he would simply “let it wither on the vine”. I asked Kinnock why so many Labour politicians, even the keen humanists, have been rather diffident secularists in practice (although they have often achieved significant changes without fanfare). His response was that it’s pragmatism – trusting in social progress rather than confrontation to solve the structural problem of religious privilege. Wales, he points out, is now the least religious nation in the UK. A testament, perhaps, to the quiet success of that approach?
The next generation
This brings us to the future. If the great humanist and socialist achievements of the past were rooted in the living memory of war on the home front, genocide in Europe, mass unemployment and extreme poverty, how do we sustain them now that memory is fading? How do we inspire new generations to extend those freedoms?
Kinnock believes the answer lies in education and civic engagement. He doesn’t lament the loss of chapels as such, but he does believe one “casualty” is the experience of democratic participation that they and the trade unions gave to people. The Nonconformist chapels in particular, he says, “gave people a real rehearsal in representation, organisation, conducting meetings, chairmanship … having honest [financial] accounts and all the things that maybe would have taken much longer to develop if they had initially been political … That made a hell of a contribution.” He worries that this training ground for democracy has vanished. “Where would people get that now?” he asks. He sees today’s young people as having “all the right instincts about sharing and caring and endurance and responsibility”, but feels they have “not got a clue how to organise.” His advice is characteristically direct: “You find somebody who agrees with you, and one of you becomes chair, and the other one becomes secretary. And you get on with it.”
His proposed solution is a robust and properly resourced citizenship education, a cause championed by another great humanist about whom we reminisce: Bernard Crick. Such education, Kinnock argues, is essential for fostering a “discerning society”. He is furious at the austerity-driven scrapping of initiatives intended to foster greater citizenship and engagement, such as projects designed to teach inner-city children to organise politically for change, and the downgrading of the citizenship curriculum in English schools. “It was such stupidity and counter to any kind of economic sense or productiveness or efficiency,” he says, arguing that sustained citizenship education would have “saved a hell of a lot of money” by creating a more engaged and resilient populace. A proper civic education, woven throughout the curriculum, would give citizens a “sense of agency”, countering the powerlessness and apathy that plague our politics.
What about the political and economic challenges facing a future Labour government? Kinnock speaks with deep concern about the “capture of the government by the Treasury” with its “small ‘c’ conservative… conformity”. He worries this mindset will stifle the change the country needs. “I regret to say that our highly intelligent ministers, and they’re all wonderful people, in the Treasury … have accepted the Treasury nostrums,” he says. His solution is radical: split the Treasury into a department of finance focused on fiscal discipline, and a department for economic development and progress, free to think about investment and growth.
Unmoored from history
This leads him to the great, unresolved issue of our time: Brexit. After leaving frontline politics in Westminster, Kinnock served in the European Commission for a decade, including as vice president. Now, he sees Brexit as the primary obstacle to the nation’s prosperity and influence. The great nightmare, he believes, is being trapped in anaemic growth outside the single market, with the one policy that could genuinely lift the economy remaining a political taboo.
His defence of the European project is passionate and rooted in that same historical consciousness he urges on others. He laments how the recent VE Day commemorations, for all their importance, failed to celebrate the “extraordinary miracle” that followed: the creation of institutions that made war between European neighbours impossible. “They did it with Nato, and they did it with the European Union,” he states with force. “In the part of Europe that is in the European Union … War is unthinkable. Unfightable. And that’s great.” I ask if he thinks Britain will ever rejoin. His reply is a mixture of realism and hope. “Not in my lifetime. I’m 83 … but in my children’s lifetime, hopefully and definitely in my grandchildren’s lifetime.”
Ultimately, Kinnock’s humanist message is one of historical consciousness as a spur to future action. He is alarmed by the sense that “we are unmoored in our times from so much of what has occurred before, to give us the conditions in which we live.” The antidote is not the backward-looking nostalgia of the populists (“they’re a bloody waste of time”) but a clear-eyed understanding of how our freedoms were won. “We are the products, not just of the present time, but of the past … and our self-interest and our duty is to be helping to construct the future,” he says. His final call is for a sustained political and cultural effort to help people be “confidently aware of why they’ve got what they’ve got, and how it could be improved, and then improve it, by being good citizens, discerning citizens making rational judgments.”
That, in essence, is the humanist project. It is the thread that connects the rationalist pioneers of the 19th century to Attlee’s welfare state, from Jenkins’s liberalising reforms to the ongoing struggle for a more just, compassionate and reasonable world. As the Labour Party looks to its future, it should remember and reclaim this vital part of its heritage. The conscience of the party has always been, and must continue to be, profoundly humanist, in the most inclusive meaning of the phrase.
This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
