Insider NJ Exclusive Interview with Neil Kinnock

Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock, the Welsh member of Parliament and leader of the labor party, jarred the political landscape of the Democratic Party in the lead-up to the 1988 presidential contest. But Kinnock, who served as a member of Parliament from 1970 to 1995 and led the opposition from 1983 to 1992, has mostly if only good memories of Biden, which he shared with InsiderNJ.

Here was the infamous plagiarized graph in question:

Kinnock said in May of 1987:

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand”

Biden, in his first presidential campaign, said in September of 1987:

“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife… is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? …Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

Over 30 years later, Kinnock looked back on the episode with vivid attention to detail. While refusing to comment on the possibility of Biden running for president, calling it not his business now, he did address at some length the incident that contributed to Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign demise as the now former vice president appears poised to join the contest for 2020.

“I had no objections to Joe using my speech and, as I discovered later, he usually did it with attribution,” the 77-year old Labor die-hard told InsiderNJ.

“On the occasion that he didn’t, he and others explained to me, it was because of he was very short of time doing a one minute upsum in a televised debate,” Kinnock said. “I made the speech as an off the cuff break from the speech that I’d written [for my great sins, I wrote all of my own speeches] for a Labour Conference in 1987…the speech – on the real meaning of individual freedom – was going quite well but not, I sensed, really igniting the audience so I got personal and the place erupted. Even the Special Branch police officers were seen to wipe a tear and join the applause.

Kinnock said he did not know Biden at the time the presidential candidate used part of the speech.

“I recall regretting that he’d felt obliged to drop out of the nomination race because – at a distance – I had a good opinion of him,” he said. “When we met in London the following year he expressed his regret at any ’embarrassment’ the incident had caused me. I assured him that there’d been no embarrassment and we struck up a friendly relationship. He’s a good man with a nice sense of humour and no pomposity. I get on with people like that.”

Their contact didn’t end there.

“Some years later, I visited him in the Senate when I was in Washington on an official visit  as Chair of the British Council and he introduced me to his staff as “’my greatest ever speechwriter…’ which raised a hearty laugh from all of us,” Kinnock said. “It was at that meeting in early 2007, incidentally, that he told me that Barack Obama would be next President. I wish I’d put a bet on when I got back to the UK. In 2008, Joe arranged for my wife and I to go to various celebrations around the Inauguration. We had a fine time, of course.”