Sailing Close to the Wind: Reminiscences

by Dennis Skinner

(Quercus, £20)

THE unassuming title of Dennis Skinner’s autobiography perfectly reflects the man with its straight-talking, no-nonsense directness.

As he admits in his foreword, writing this book has been a reluctant undertaking. Skinner feels more at home on the platform of a local Labour Party rally or on a strike picket but not with the pen or computer. 

He probably also feels writing about himself smacks too much of the sort of vanity publishing in which so many so-called celebrities indulge.

Skinner is one of those extremely rare politicians who is working class and proud of it, remaining true to his principles throughout a lifetime in politics. 

He’s rejected the allure of playing courtier at the throne of the party leader, has had little ambition for high office for its own sake and has remained rooted in the small Derbyshire mining community where he grew up.

The son of a miner and trade union activist who was blacklisted for many years, he recalls those decades of harshness and poverty without sentimentality or bitterness. 

His childhood was a happy one, he says. Despite being bright and passing the 11-plus he didn’t go on to university, which he could easily have done. Instead, he followed his dad down the pit to bring in some cash for the family.

“I am a socialist from experience,” he writes. “My politics are homespun rather than from the adoption of a creed and are based on what I saw from an early age … I’ve also retained a belief and faith in the power of extra-parliamentary action, particularly through trade unions … I’ve heard more truth, honesty and sanity from people outside Parliament than some of those inside.” 

There’s a deep conviction in those words.

Skinner gives a graphic, moving and modest account of his life as a miner and local councillor in a small Derbyshire village and as the long-time MP for Bolsover. It is tragic that successive Labour governments were unable or unwilling to make better use of his undoubted skills and knowledge of working-class life and experience. 

Yet, while admiring his steadfastness and impeccable loyalty to the Labour Party, one can’t help wondering how he has been able to retain that loyalty to a party that has mutated from being a genuine social democratic one, with a strong left-wing tradition and working-class component, to become today’s career party of the middle class, its leadership emasculated of principles and goals of real social justice.

While clearly intelligent and sharp-witted, Skinner is no intellectual and makes no claim to be and these reminiscences demonstrate no deep reflection about politics and the battle of ideas.

While he is certainly not the “dinosaur” his enemies claim him to be, there’s the sense he is one of a dying breed and has allowed himself to be trapped in amber — a “national treasure” for the ruling elite in the Tory Party and his own Labour Party to be flaunted as evidence of their tolerance and the “broad-church” democratic credentials of our system.

Even so, it is a bounty for us all that friends and family managed in the end to persuade him to write these reminiscences that are a valuable addition to our history of the working-class movement. Highly recommended. 

John Green