I'm warning you again

Ex-Labour leader’s 1983 speech predicted NHS crisis, pensioner poverty, high fuel costs & rising crime under Tory rule... now it’s become reality

- ROS WYNNE-JONES

40YRS ON, KINNOCK'S PROPHECY OF TORY DOOM IS COMING TRUE

NEIL Kinnock was sitting in the back of the family Ford Sierra, a clipboard balanced on his knees.

In the driving seat was his wife, Glenys. The M4 flashed past as the couple headed to Bridgend in South Wales for the penultimate day of the 1983 general election campaign.

Mr Kinnock, the then Shadow Education Secretary, had done more than 90 meetings in 21 days.

“I was desperate,” he says. “Punchdrunk by that point. I was losing my voice and would lose it altogether on election day. It never fully recovered.”

As the car motored on, the 41-year-old Labour MP started writing a speech to be given in front of a packed crowd in Bridgend that night and broadcast live on ITV News at Ten.

He wrote: “If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”

This year is the 40th anniversary of that famous speech – perhaps his most powerful – just as the country reaches the exact moment it foretold.

While looking over the text as he re-reads it exclusively for the Mirror, Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty, as he is now known, says: “I warned you.

“It’s all there. The appalling thing about the speech is that it’s become so close to reality.”

Lord Kinnock, 80, adds: “There’s even a section about them taking away the right to protest. That has come true.