Blunkett: “A new type of politics”

June 30, 2009
Peter Campbell

Born in a poor area of Sheffield, blind from birth, and with the death of his father at just 12, the chances for David Blunkett in life seemed slim. Now, at 62, he can look back on a career which saw him in the roles of Education, Work and Pensions, and Home Secretary.

He now spends his time looking at the ways to change the Labour Party and to re-engage people in politics. “I want to offer a slightly better perspective than MPs’ allowances and about the 30th row about Iraq in the last six years…the interest in politics outside of Parliament has never been more vigorous, and we have to build on that.”

Blunkett, who says that he will stand for at least another term in Parliament, ponders the result of the next election, which he says will almost certainly be next year. “It has been so bad lately that a hung Parliament feels like Mecca. For the Conservatives to have a shoe in they need to be 20% ahead now. That is the position they were in in 1968 when they just scrapped in in 1970. It was the position in 1978 when they won by 33 seats when we had just had the meltdown of the winter of discontent.”

What is even more surprising is what he thinks Labour should do following the election, if a hung Parliament results. “We would effectively have to concede that we had lost the overall majority and we would have to concede that the two opposition parties should be given the chance to form a coalition government.”

For a man who describes himself as uncompromising, it is unsurprising that Blunkett’s career has been fraught with colourful episodes, including two resignations from Cabinet. Despite being described as the leader of the ‘loony left’ while a councillor in Sheffield in the 1970s, his stringent social conservatism made him an instant hit with Blair and a simultaneous headache to the liberal side of the Labour party.

“[A] great advantage I had in Cabinet was that I could never see the fury on John Prescott’s face when I said things that he disagreed with.” Despite the occasional joke from Blunkett himself, little attention tends to be drawn either to his blindness or to his dog, Sadie. One comical moment did occur when he recalls being mauled by a cow two weeks ago, an incident that left him with two broken ribs. “I was trying to save the dog from the rampaging beast”, he jokes.

Blunkett talks scathingly about his opponents, such as fellow Sheffield MP Nick Clegg. “I know Nick very well, and I like him very much, but he hasn’t the first idea what a policy is. He changed his mind so many times over the policies that he espoused when he got the leadership that it is impossible to know what he stands for anymore.”

“Every time they announce something they have renounced it a month later. They were going to cut income tax by 4p in the pound a year ago. Now they’re back to saying that it will be necessary to increase taxes. They were strongly in favour of Trident, and he denounced Chris Hume as being unpatriotic, but last weekend he changed his mind; I can’t keep up.”

One area that Blunkett despises, probably because of current expenses fiasco, is the media. “We seem to have a Freudian pact with them; they abuse us and we hate them. We then play the game, we answer questions in a roundabout way in order to avoid a headline, we don’t answer straight, we have set answers. People used to be paged with the answer to give. I couldn’t read the blasted thing anyway.”

One thing that Blunkett’s time in office will be remembered for was his support for the introduction of ID cards, an idea that he has now rejected in favour of biometric passports. “I changed my mind because the whole objective had become confused. When the scheme was started six years ago the idea was to have a system where people couldn’t steal your identity, when you could know who was in the country. On that basis you could provide the free health service, permission to work, and an embarkation procedure. You can’t do any of those unless you have an identifying scheme, and without that we’re stuffed.”

His proposals encompass making the current passports compulsory and using biometric information stored on them, which he says is a far more secure database. “The British passport ownership is at 80%. The equivalent figure is 14% in the US, which I think volumes as to why they elected George W Bush. I was in Washington in March and was talking to a young man who didn’t realise that the recession was happening outside of America!”

The main concern, however, still lies with regenerating an interest in politics. “There was a study here at York some years ago that concluded that we are the least politically literate nation in the developed world, and I regret to say that I think we still are.”

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