It is hard to dislike David Blunkett. His life story is an inspiration to Labour supporters. As a kid he was, famously, written off because of his blindness and told he was unfit to do anything more than sew blankets and quietly rot in a state home. His own father died in a horrific workplace accident when David was only ten he fell into a vat of boiling water, and took two agonising months to die. Most people would have crumpled, but Blunkett s extraordinary capacity for hard work and his sharp intellect brought him through all this and all the way to being one of the most powerful men in Britain.
So why, in light of this heroic life story, do so many liberal supporters of the government find Blunkett s policies and statements so deeply disheartening?
Compare Blunkett to the greatest Labour home secretary of the post-war era, Roy Jenkins, and it is easy to see where he is going wrong. Jenkins showed that, in addition to a commitment to reduce economic evils, Labour s core mission must also be to reduce social evils. He was so successful that now, as we look back across the decades, his courageous decisions to end the criminalisation of homosexuality, outlaw racial discrimination and set women free to make choices about their own pregnancies now stand as the most enduring achievements of the Wilson governments.
Where Jenkins stood in solidarity with some of the most persecuted people in Britain, the current Home Office policy sadly seems all to often to be to score cheap points with the tabloids by beating up minority groups. The home secretary dismayed many progressives when he chose to attack Muslim immigrants (who were already experiencing heightened discrimination in light of September 11th) out of the blue for forced marriages a very rare practice which has been illegal in Britain for years.
He even boasted that he saw nothing wrong with using the word swamping about immigrants and would carry on using it despite its long association with Powellite Toryism. The language Labour ministers use helps shape the debate; and this language loads the argument in favour of the hard right. Far from being brave (the word the Daily Mail keeps using about him), this is cheap populism.
Perhaps the most worrying failure on the part of Home Office policy, however, has been the absence of a concerted program to confront homophobia. Much good work was done under Jack Straw not least the equalisation of the age of consent and the battle against Section 28. Blunkett, however, did not vote for an equal age of consent (unlike that well-known leftie, William Hague).
Then, as home secretary, Blunkett marred one of the government s bravest crusades, to abolish Section 28, by insisting that, under the new law, there should be no direct promotion of sexual orientation . This showed that he had completely missed the point that Section 28 was homophobic because the very idea of promoting a sexuality is absurd. How on earth could teachers make a child gay? Yet, by negotiating with the bigots in the Lords and conceding unnecessary chunks of their argument, the home secretary seemed to believe that this misconception was plausible. The new law conspicuously failed to require schools to provide a balanced, non-judgemental syllabus which included information about homosexuality. There is a long Labour tradition of aggressively male politicians who claim to embody common sense on contentious social issues and, in so doing, align themselves with the right. Sadly, Blunkett appears to be perpetuating it.
David Blunkett has many fine qualities and he was an excellent education secretary; but as home secretary, he is wasting a golden opportunity for the government to make proud, progressive social reforms to match those of the last Labour government. Perhaps it is not too late for him to confront his prejudices and change direction; if he does, history and the Labour Party will richly reward him.