I think I made my feelings clear underneath Kettle’s original piece. Blunkett is one of the figures whose return (along with Mandelson, Draper, Campbell etc) means that labour are a very hard party to have any regard whatsoever for. Add in the younger bloods like Purnell, Jacqui Smith etc, and the sidelining of apparently decent-ish folk like Hilary Benn, and the airy-fairy talk of moves to the left, caring about people don’t ring true. Can someone outline the redeeming features of any of the aforementioned crew. We know the Bullingdon lot are awful, so please don’t go over that ground, but c’mon, there must be someone with something to say FOR these buggers so high in Labour, or are they as vile as they’d appear?

I don’t think they actually realise how badly they’re perceived with these moves. Saying that, I don’t think they’re that bothered about annoying the lefties… the assumption seems to be that as long as middle England isn’t angry – its fine.

Sunny: “Saying that, I don’t think they’re that bothered about annoying the lefties… the assumption seems to be that as long as middle England isn’t angry – its fine.”

Exactly, they’re not remotely bothered – if the left actively hate an idea, if it means anything to them it’s that it should be referred to a former investment banker for sober policy consideration.

Tony Blair’s great vote-winning slogan was “forward, not back”. What ‘Forward’ meant was more business oriented, right wing, unbending family values. ‘Back’ meant socialist, left wing, woolly liberal values. In other words, New Labour dogma suggests if as time passes you do not become endlessly more business oriented, more right wing, more authoritarian – then you are heading for inevitable obsolescence. You are “trying to stop the rising of the Sun”, in Blair’s own words.

We’ve now, however, reached the point where “moving forward” has brought the Labour Party pretty much to where Michael Howard was a few years ago, perhaps even further to the right. The familiar old formula of moving ever further “forward” is unlikely to help much, even with Middle England. Even they don’t want the Post Office privatised.

Blunkett would probably say that every voter who thinks as we do, there are three or four who are more than happy with mob justice for suspected paedophiles. What’s a mere politico supposed to do in a democracy?

As to his corruption, hasn’t he pretty much admitted that he got carried away with the high life that came with Cabinet office? Not the first Labourite to fall at that hurdle…

I have an enormous amount of respect for David Blunkett, though I disagree with him significantly on a number of major policy and political issues (especially in Home Affairs: ID cards, detention powers, etc), and I think this is frankly a pretty thin caricature. Sunny’s comment about ‘the lefties’ has a little bit of student politics about them. Blunkett is respected by many people (for example, in the unions and on the left of the party, and in other parties) who disagree significantly with him.

- On many issues, I am much more liberal than Blunkett, who is a communitarian and not a liberal. He has a valid principled argument about the basis on which liberties depend. In my view (and this is an empirical, not philosophical, difference) the spectre of Weimar looms rather too large in his thinking. He may perhaps be right that a consumerist society underestimates that foundational point when it discusses liberty.

If the measure is less ‘how much do I agree with X’ but whether Blunkett is, as Kettle argues, a serious thinker, then he is among the, say, dozen MPs (in any party) most seriously engaged with how political thought and ideas relate to political strategy, policy and politics. (I don’t have a list, but David Willetts, Oliver Letwin would be among those on it from the right, for example, as would Charles Clarke for Labour).

And let me point up a couple of issues where Blunkett’s thinking is perhaps more in tune with the centre-of-gravity of thinking on Liberal Conspiracy than mine is, and where this caricature is a barrier to your spotting where there may be unlikely alliances of thought and interest for some of the causes you want to pursue.

1. Blunkett has, from the early 1980s, been the most significant Labour advocate of a politics of empowerment and decentralisation. He wrote at length about this in a Fabian pamphlet ‘Building from the Bottom’ back in 1982, before he came from Sheffiled to Westminster. His analysis of political disengagement and the dangers of a closed political class are similar to that often voiced on LC. He has a sophisticated account of political education and citizenship which is much broader than ‘teaching’ it in schools, and is rooted in citizenship as participation, taking part in decision-making, particularly at a local level.

2. He is a champion of government action for opportunity and mobility. He has been critical of aspects of our work on equality and life chances, particularly around issues of empowerment and responsibility. This is a real debate. While I am suspicious of some of those who want to place too much primacy on cultures of aspiration/low expectations IF this means implying a behavioural rather than structural account, Blunkett does not fall into that trap (he knows both matter). Frankly, his experience of the community he comes from gives a legitimacy to his subjective perceptions and his thinking about this that I don’t have.

So I would like to see him play a public role championing a Labour argument about opportunity, empowerment, mobility and inequality – and why government has to act for substantive opportunity to be available to those who are currently without it.

—
Anyway, lots of people here may not like Blunkett, and with some substantive reasons for that in some cases. But I want to suggest that there is a much more important broader issue here about the “liberal-left”. I am in favour of paying more attention to the hyphen, to trying to bridge that and to get the liberal-left together. That requires Labour to be more democratic, more liberal and more plural. But a winning progressive coalition requires more attention to some of the ‘left” issues too, and sometimes class disadvantage is left out or underplayed .

There are substantive (and not simply political) tensions here on some key issues.

For example, this does require hard thinking about immigration, not for populist tabloid reasons, but because a social democratic approach to immigration ought to combine
(i) liberal and ethical commitments on asylum in particular (where eg our treatment of Zimbabweans who have failed to gain refugee status, but who will not be returned is shameful, as is our treatment of children), along with a broader liberal and social democratic instinct for diversity and pluralism
(ii) a realisation that a social democratic approach to managing migration is needed if we are concerned about the distributional impact of migration. That is about the economic impact of migration on inequality, it is also about managing the social and public policy impacts of migration, and it is about the need to put work into a shared citizenship, not to think it will happen by chance.

The issue of crime is also much harder for liberals if we want to move from what we are against to what we are for. I think it ought to be possible to develop a ‘bleeding wallet liberalism’ which recognises that we are pissing away a lot of money to make bad people worse.

It is clear that Charles Clarke was a more liberal Home Secretary than John Reid across most issues. It may be less obvious that, on some issues – notably prisons – Blunkett was closer to Clarke than Reid. Indeed, he may (with more time as Home Secretary) have been best placed (partly on the Nixon to China principle) to do what is needed: to halve the prison population, so that serious work can be done on rehabilitation and reoffending (and particualrly with drug addicts), while maintaining public confidence that alternatives to prison are relevant and not a soft option or let off.

A tad disingenuous there, Sunder, painting Bliunkett as this deep thinker on political theory, notions of liberty etc. The tabloid writer side of him dictates his occasional, ever-more convoluted attempts to pick’n'mix from ideas of positive and negative liberty willy-nilly in in order to put a sheen of quasi-justification on his authoritarian instincts. Invocation of the freedom of fear from X, Y or Z are nonsense on stilts, given the Govts track record in fostering and engendering fear: it becomes a tool for Govts to exercise control.
He also conflates rights and responsibilities, to create a class for whom rights exist, because they are responsible citizens (what a construct that is for authorities…).Rights and responsibilities do not logically belong to the same family, being quite different creatures:they cannot be set off against one another, for that completely up-ends (deliberately for Blunkett?) the state-citizen relationship, creating a situation where no-one has rights until they’ve earned them by doing whatever the state decrees their responsibility. Responsibilities in this context can only ever be aspirations, something it’s hoped citizens will do, or else we come close to dictatorship, and all liberal thinkers must oppose that. State to serve the citizenry and not vice-versa, please…

(Oh, and the keenness for localisms peaked when he was ‘local’, and diminished when he went central).

“crickets”?

Sunder,

With the greatest respect, at 350 words, this post was never intended to be a detailed and balanced assessment of the complete political thought of D. Blunkett, and if it were, I may have included some of the salient points you make in his defence. Martin Kettle does a fine job arguing why Blunkett’s return to government would be a wise move, but in doing so he glosses over the serious – and in my view completely fair – criticisms people have of his record as a minister. Is ‘contempt’ a little unfair? Possibly, but having spent the bulk of my blogging time this week reading/writing about the government’s asylum policy, I’m afraid I’ve just about exhausted any charity I might’ve shown towards Labour’s successive Home Secretaries. Bah humbug, and all that.

Regarding your own post, I think it’s mistaken to believe that Blunkett’s working-class roots lend legitimacy to his political thinking. I don’t believe that’s true of Blunkett, I don’t believe that’s true of David Davis, and I don’t believe that’s true of myself. The lack of working class representation in cabinet allowed Blunkett to position himself as one of the few ‘authentic’ working class voices, and this gave the Blair government plenty of cover to practice its more socially conservative tendencies.

Finally, I regard the respect with which Blunkett is held amongst members of the Labour left to be damaging for the party, or at least damaging for what I want the party to become. I think Blunkett often used this respect to squeeze support for some of the government’s worst excesses, and it is partly due to this that our country’s political discourse frequently conflates left-wing aims with authoritarian means, as if the two are symbiotic. They’re not and never have been, but it’s a legacy of Blunkettism that they’re frequently regarded as such.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some elements to Blunkett’s politics which can’t be salvaged, even admired, and you won’t find any argument from me against an emphasis on class disadvantage. But in your efforts towards restoring the hyphen between liberal and left, you’d do well to recognise how much he and his successors in the Home Office have done to make the two seem (temporarily, I hope) irreconcilable.

Speaking of David Blunkett, his old mentor Bernard Crick has died: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/19/bernard-crick-dies

RIP