Newcastle University

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Experience of the UN Millennium Development Goals programme, established in 2000 for fulfilment in 2015, shows successes as well as failures and omissions. It is providing lessons that must be learned to stimulate and further steer more effective global efforts to confront and combat poverty and the multiple injustices, insecurities and inefficiencies that poverty inflicts on over a billion people in the world.

Undertaking that challenge in continually changing economic, political and climatic conditions requires fresh thinking and new approaches. In her Inaugural Jubilee Lecture Glenys Kinnock assesses the progress so far, and offers policy proposals to strengthen action to defeat want.  

Baroness Glenys Kinnock was born in 1944 to Betty, and Cyril Parry, a railway signalman. She was head girl at Holyhead Comprehensive School and graduated in history and education from University College, Cardiff, where she was Secretary of the NUS and met her husband, future Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. In a 28-year career, she taught in grammar, comprehensive, and special and primary schools, where she specialised in reading development. Elected in 1994, 1999 and 2004 to the European Parliament as a Labour Member for Wales, she sat on the Development Committee and was inter alia rapporteur on the Millennium Development Goals programme and elected Co-President of the EU-Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific Joint Parliamentary Assembly. 

On her retirement from the European Parliament in 2009, Baroness Kinnock was appointed Minister of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and made a member of the House of Lords. She is currently Patron of the Jubilee Campaign and Womankind, Board Member of the Burma Campaign UK and the European Centre for Development, a Member of the Advisory Board of Global Witness and the Council of the Overseas Development Institute.

Baroness Kinnock has two children and five grandchildren; she speaks Welsh, has published several books, and enjoys cooking, reading and the theatre