Copy Reform and you'll get eaten, Kinnock tells Starmer

Telegraph

06-06-2025

Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader who now sits in the House of Lords, said the Prime Minister had been 'not well advised' on how to tackle the rise of Nigel Farage's party.
He suggested that attempts to ape Reform's language were 'mortally stupid', and advised the party that 'achievement' in Government was the best way to counter the Reform threat.
Lord Kinnock told Prospect Magazine: 'Appeasers get eaten. It's very important to remember that if people are offered two versions of a particular political brand, they will always choose the genuine one.'
He added: 'If a progressive party is trying to use the vocabulary of isolationism or segregation or division, it's the same. It is silly to do that. It isn't evil, but it is very, very silly – maybe mortally stupid.'
The former Labour leader's intervention is the latest development in growing tensions within the Labour Party about how to tackle the rising tide of Reform support.
His remarks came after the Prime Minister announced measures to tackle immigration and a tightening of the system, warning that without such a move the UK risked becoming an 'island of strangers'.
The speech followed Labour 's drubbing in the local elections last month, where Reform won hundreds of council seats and seized the parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby.
The comments were supported by some figures in Red Wall seats, which are under greater threat from the surge in Reform support, but denounced by many Left-wing Labour MPs.
Lord Kinnock said: 'I think there are elements in and around the Labour party encouraging that as a way of responding to Reform, and they are fundamentally, 100 per cent, 22-carat wrong.'
He added: 'I don't fear Reform, but I do think we ought to fight them rather harder and with more purpose.'
The peer told the magazine: 'The playbook is familiar to anybody who studied the 1930s in Europe and or indeed in the United States of America.
'I'm not saying we are in any sense slipping towards some kind of fascist system… But those factors and the way in which they generate division and envy and isolationism – they're unhealthy features of any democracy.'
On how to beat Reform, he said: 'Nothing replaces achievement in government, [concentrating on] what people regard to be the primary issues on the agenda, which is to say: health, decent jobs, affordable costs and wages that can meet those costs.'
Lord Kinnock led the Labour Party before famously losing the 1992 election to Sir John Major despite the polls being in his favour, leading to another five years of Conservative rule.
The pro-Europe politician said that decisions to use phrases such as 'island of strangers' and not to scrap the two-child benefit cap were based on post-Brexit preconceptions of the electorate.
He said: 'Certainly there were elements among the advisory team who had an overreaction to the reason for, and the consequence of, the Brexit referendum vote. I think that overreaction has lasted through till now.
'I don't think that they are reactionary individuals. I don't think they're frightened individuals. I think they have overreacted to a misinterpretation of what happened in 2016.'
The former leader went on to suggest that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, should consider a wealth tax, citing as an example a two per cent levy on assets above £10 million.
'Property taxation in our country, asset taxation, is outdated,' he added, as he urged the party's senior figures to be bolder.
'There's a degree of steadiness from Keir which, on a good day, is very, very reassuring. However, that can translate into a paralytic caution. That means that this government, much as I love them – and they know I do – has got a kind of audacity deficit.'
Lord Kinnock appeared at Sir Keir's victory speech on the morning of July 5, when the Prime Minister led the party to a landslide win.