Hello, my name's David Rumserman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today we're taking a brief pause from our series about how to fix democracy to talk about something

that is related to that.

This is a two-part conversation with the historian Robert Saunders as part of our occasional series

with him, commemorating momentous events in British political history.

We are going to be talking about something that happened

40 years ago this week on the 1st of October, 1985, at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth.

One of the most remarkable and one of the most significant speeches ever given by a British politician,

Neil Kinnock talking about militant.

We are going to be exploring the background to that speech, how it happened, why it mattered so

much, and we're going to be explaining how it can make sense of the story of British politics

from then right up to now.

Implausible promises don't win victories.

I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises.

You start with far-fetched resolutions.

They're then pickled into a rigid dogma, a chord.

And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos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 organs. Robert, that is probably the most famous extract from the speech that we're going to be talking

about today, which is one of the most celebrated speeches in modern British political history.

And we're going to be explaining the immediate context for what we've just heard

because not everyone will be familiar with it. Why was Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour Party,

...