This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website and compass-hyphen

Europe.com or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date.

I hope you enjoy this conversation.

My guest is Neil Kinnock. Lord Kinnock was leader of the British Labour Party and leader of the opposition from 1983 to 1992.

From 1995 to 2004, he served two terms in the European Commission, first of all as Commission for Transport and then as Vice President.

He entered the House of Lords in 2005

and, of course, has done many, many other things apart from that. Neil, as you know, we could talk about

so many different things. We only have about 25 minutes, so to give some kind of structure and not

to be too sidetracked by many other issues. Let's talk about Europe, the European Union, the

journey of the Labour Party since the early 80 Europe, the European Union, the journey of the

Labour Party since the early 80s, should we say, and Neil Kinnock's journey on Europe in that same

period. I mean, it's no secret, not exactly a scoop, that in the early 80s, the Labour Party

wasn't the most ardent supporter of the EEC as it then was. when would you track the kind of the start of the

evolution of a kind of warming by the Labour Party towards what the EEC and OSEs was trying to,

what it was about and trying to achieve?

In my case, and I suspect that of many others, the warming, as you put it,

began in the immediate wake of the 1975 referendum.

In the period before then, the conventional, even traditional,

resistance to the community, the common market, came from those who had huge affection and affiliation with the Commonwealth,

with those who thought of the European community as a, quote, quote,

...