77. David Blunkett: Tony Blair, growing up blind, and where Margaret Thatcher went wrong (Part 1)

0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics.

0:38The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation. Hi, it's Alistair here, and you're about to listen to the first part of a two-part interview that we recorded just before Rishi Sunak announced the general election with David Blunkett. Absolute giant, wonderful man, and I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as Rory and I enjoyed talking to him.

1:21Part one, now.

1:29Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And I'm pleased to say I'm sitting opposite one of my closest friends from politics. It won't stop me giving him a hard time from time to time. Never did. But this is Lord David Blunkett, who was one of the major figures of the new Labour years and a long time before that as well. David, incredible life really. born blind, went to a boarding school that I'm sure he'll tell us about, was pretty rough at times, had a horrific childhood experience when his father had a terrible industrial accident which killed him, became the youngest ever councillor in the country, aged 22, became a council leader not that much later eventually became an MP and a key part of the Labour Party first in opposition and then in government several pretty important jobs education home secretary work and pensions probably most defined by his role as education secretary given that was education education education our number one priority and now in the House of Lords and still batting away did a recent report for Keir Starmer on skills and doubtless will be contributing in all sorts of ways should there be a Labour government.

2:53So David, welcome and thank you. Very pleased to be with you both. Thank you so much for joining us. Give me a sense, I suppose, of your childhood. What was it like growing up? Give us a glimpse of what that experience was like. I think we've all discovered over the years that children just take what they're given and make the most of it. So you don't think oh god I can't see you know that doesn't hit you at all you just adapt and it took them a little while to discover that I couldn't see I was about three months when they they thought well his eyes are not following his mom and dad you know that these things aren't quite working and they thought at first because this was prevalent at the time that I'd got a tumor and that they were going to have to I mean it sounds horrendous didn't they were going to have to take my eyes out which is what they did and lots of the children who were at the boarding school that Alistair's referred to actually had artificial eyes and made great play of popping them out at the most inappropriate moments.

3:49And thank goodness they discovered I hadn't got a tumor. It was just a genetic fluke, one in a million, and my optic nerve hadn't developed. And I describe it, I've described it to my grandchildren and now to my wife's grandchildren like um a light bulb that's there but the wiring's not fixed and therefore the you press the button but the light doesn't come on and have you never ever been able to see no i can see light and dark literally when it's light and you get it wrong i mean i've come into a room and said the sun's shining through the window my wife margaret would say no it's actually the lights on you know you can get it you can get it but it does help it helps to focus but i i i I told you a while back that whenever I book into a hotel and I get irritated by can't find the air conditioning, turn it off, can't work out the shower, you know, can't work out how to sort of work the electrics and all that, it must be horrific to you going to a strange place.

4:49Well, it's particularly because nothing is consistent, not even bathrooms. And this is a bit of a fetish of mine. I hate going to public loos. I mean, it helps with having a guide dog because at least I don't walk up to the back of people and they don't know I can't see. But it is messy. And, you know, where the wash basins are, where the stand-up part of the loo is, I mean, it's something I try and avoid as much as I can, including on long-distance flights. So, yes, it's a problem, but it's a problem. It's a minor problem compared with what many people have to put up with. And many of the things that I've had to do to adapt are again very trivial compared with the disasters that have hit other people and I try to get this across when I still go into schools that you know not being able to see is very very inconvenient but I've been able to overcome it.

5:46What sort of background did you come from? Just tell us what your dad did and your mum and what sort of house you lived in, what sort of place you lived in? My dad was what in those days they called a foreman at the gas works. It was a gas works. It was publicly owned at the time. And he was involved in the production of gas from coal. And the residue came out as coke. And the gas was pumped into what were known as gasometers. and he worked shifts every hour that God sent. And unfortunately for all of us, the great nationalized industry was extremely uncaring when it came to people who had accidents.

6:32And so when I was 12, he inadvertently stood backwards when a truck was approaching and someone had failed to cover the container with this scalding water in it and he hit it. and he was in agony and in hospital for a month. And as you can see from my dominion, and those listening can't, it still rests with me now because I went to see him. And in that month, I just thought, I'm going to lose him, and of course we did. And he was over 65 because I didn't come along until my mum was 43 and he was 50, just over 54 when I was born. He'd stayed on to train other people and because, you know, he got a son.

7:18And, you know, the pension wasn't going to crack it. And we had my grandfather, my mum's dad, living with us as well, who was quite a character, but not always understanding of small boys. So it was an interesting upbringing. Because I was at school a great chunk of the time, because I went aged four. To a boarding school? To a boarding school. In Sheffield? I wouldn't do it to anybody. Yeah, it was in Sheffield. It's long closed. There were two sides to this boarding school. One was it really did toughen you up. You either swam or sank. And you learned to ride two-wheeler bikes around the grounds, which was horrendous.

7:57You can imagine you had to count the pedal strokes before you hit the sand pit and head over tip. I learned to roller skate, which put me in the local children's hospital several times. This was for fun or the school was encouraging you to do these things? No, they didn't discourage us. I mean, these days, because I'm very strongly in favour of health and safety, why wouldn't I be with what happened to my dad? But I think we get the wrong end of it sometimes. And kids have to experiment and they have to explore the boundaries. And especially if they've got a major challenge, which I had. So they at least let us do things.

8:31We played cricket with a bell in the ball. Were all the children blind? Yes. I mean, some of them could see quite a bit. They'd be virtually partially sighted. And many of us couldn't see at all. And obviously the ones I described earlier couldn't see even light and dark. What did you learn about the world from your father? When was he born? He must have seen the end of the First World War. He was born in 1892 in Agam in Surrey. And at the age of three, his father, who was a farm labourer, upped and went to Lincolnshire. Now, this is like crossing the continent now would be because there was no telephones or anything.

9:06How he knew that there was a job, how the sort of non-internet got it across at the end of the 19th century that there were jobs going in Lincolnshire, I do not know. But my dad ended up at a little village between Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire. And that's where a great many of my family were. And we used to go on holidays to Skegness, but the holidays were really much about getting on country buses and going to see the family. And he did all sorts. He went on trawlers from Grimsby for a year. He did odd jobs. And then he decided he'd move to Sheffield and he'd get a job, a long-term job, which is what he did.

9:47And he did that for 45 years until he was killed. Did he serve in the First and Second World Wars or he was exempt, sir? He was exempt in the First World War because he didn't have a sight loss like me, but he didn't have great sight. And in any case, he was in a protected job. It was before nationalization, so it was a municipal gas company. It was run by the city of Sheffield. And I found a book the other day that actually named him as one of a team of people who'd volunteered to go and stop a leak in the gas holder when it had been hit by, I presume, a Zeppelin, because there wasn't the kind of bombing we had in the Second World War.

10:31and they'd spelt his name wrong. They spelt it Plunkett. And I tested it all out. There was no Plunkett working for them. Just finally, if I hand back to us, what did he tell you about work, about union politics? What were his political beliefs? How did he view the world? He didn't tell me anything except about the world. He would talk to me about global issues without having had anything like a proper education. But he was self-taught in terms of geography. He knew where capital cities were. He would sit me on my knee when I was seven or eight and get me to recite them so I knew where they were.

11:13I mean, you wouldn't get a 14-year-old to know where they are now. And he would talk to me about what was going on in the world and what had happened to him. It was my grandfather living with us who was interested in politics. He took the Daily Herald. he would read me chunks of it even if I didn't want it and and he would talk to me about the time between the wars when he traversed the country trying to get a job and that that was a lesson which I absorbed and then of course I absorbed what happened to my dad and I was really angry and then my grandfather two years later because my mum was seriously ill I mean this does sound, I'm sorry to the listeners, please forgive me, but it is true.

11:55My mum had breast cancer when breast cancer was almost always fatal and a surgeon saved her life. And in those days, they were experimenting with radiotherapy, which was horrendous for her, but she lived another 27 years, which was brilliant for me. But my grandfather was very frail and none of my mum's siblings were prepared to take him on, as you used to say. So he went into what was then, frankly, a workhouse. It was at the bottom of the Northern General Hospital. And one of the things I swore to myself, I was 14, if I ever get the chance to do something about the conditions that my grandfather died in, I will.

12:40And years later, I became chair of the social services in Sheffield before becoming leader and with the agreement of colleagues and the health service we closed that facility and we opened brand new residential homes and we developed the first really big cohort of home helps who were free by the way i mean when you think back we're very rich as a nation now despite what's happened over the last few years and we're arguing about the cost of social care that we provided a free service i've talked to you lots about this thing particularly in relation to your dad, which I think still hurts and still fires you up.

13:17And would you say that your politics was driven by that experience and then the experience of your grandfather as well? Is that where it came from? My desire to change the world came from that. My politics was affected as well, because nothing is ever simple, by what I think I would have described, if I'd known about it properly at the time, as an old-fashioned communist who was my history teacher. at the blind school at the blind school and he taught me that history not only mattered but was fascinating and I really started to read and to listen the radio is my educator as well as school actually I probably learned as much from listening to the radio as I did from anything else the braille books were very old and out of date so actually listening to the radio was quite a relief and just suddenly sparking and thinking, yeah, I'm really interested in current affairs.

14:14I really want to know what's going on in the world. You know, I can remember when I was 16. I can remember Kennedy's death on the 22nd of November, 63. I can remember where I was at the time. And, you know, how many 16-year-olds would remember anything like that now? So radio was something going on many, many hours a day. I mean, in some ways you were formed by the BBC? I mean, was it that a lot of the information you were taking in was coming from BBC presenters and programmes? Yes, people would call it heavyweight now, wouldn't they? I had a portable radio. It was my lifeline. I carried it around with me.

14:53And once when a youngster inadvertently knocked it out of my hand, we sellotaped it back together again, because of course there was no money to buy a new one. My mum was struggling for 18 months before we got even minimal compensation. I mean, it's a sad story, but I'm going to tell it because sometimes things in your life make a difference to how you see the world as well in personal terms. She gave me some pocket money to take. I hadn't realized just how she'd scraped it together. Why would you at the age of 12? And then she sent me the same money again two weeks later with a note saying, I forgot to give you your pocket money.

15:34And I got one of the staff to help me send it back. And I found out later, she told me, that she actually, that was all she got in the house. And if I hadn't sent it back, and I'd found out later, God knows how I'd have coped with that. So it was deeply emotional. And I really started to understand the struggle that other people were going through. David you and I both I sport Burnley you sport Sheffield Wednesday we've been to quite a few games together yes and I will never forget a game where we had a free kick just outside the box and it went very very quiet just before I think he was caught I think it was Chris McCann stood up and hit the ball and as he hit it you said what a shot I'll never ever forget that and as it happened it hit the bar so what are you seeing in quotes when you're watching the football much how are you following it well these days there's a commentary inside the ground when there wasn't so what there's an ear you have an earpiece yeah it's it's frankly a bit hit and miss but so is radio five and talk sport um because they forget that the people out there can't see what they can see so they talk to each other rather than telling you what's going on on the pitch that's not true of all commentaries i go to a lot of away games and some of them are very good but actually I've ruined my wife Margaret's life over the last 18 years by getting a completely fanatical on football which she never was and vaguely interested in politics which she never was and we go all the time but my sons used to and still on occasions do because there wasn't a commentary when I went to the last game of the season they would commentate Sunderland and my oldest son Alistair was where they were with two of the grandchildren and Margaret said over to you Alistair you can commentate but it's the atmosphere you can sometimes as you described when it goes quiet you can hear the kick you can hear the boot hitting the ball and you can tell from that the power behind it and I would have been able to hear the ball hit the bar as well when I went with my dad from the age of four I mean he didn't have you know some weekends he was working because he worked like the shift system but when he wasn't we'd go down and he would sit me on the wall behind the goal at the cop end you could do that safely in those days and I could hear the goalie swearing and I could hear what people were saying to the goalie as well and you know that's from the age of four you absorb it and the atmosphere makes all the difference in the world We had a torrid time this last season, and we had to win games at the end of the season.

18:22In fact, we won the last three. And the third game from the end was at Blackburn. And Blackburn, God bless them, who were also struggling. You're not allowed to bless Blackburn. They were struggling, but they gave us 7 ,500 tickets for away supporters, which is very, very unusual. and it made such a difference to the atmosphere. So it isn't just listening to it on the radio, it's being there that matters. All right, David, Rory, let's take a quick break. Lemu, Lemu and I always tell you to customise your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music, Lemu.

19:03Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save, we say That may have been too much feeling Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings vary, underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates, excludes Massachusetts

19:27On to you getting into local government, becoming a councillor So you'd been formed by this very left-wing history teacher As you say, you can now see was a bit of a communist And you came into Sheffield politics and you were perceived in those days as being pretty much from the left through the 70s and 80s when you were a leader of Sheffield Council. Talk to us about your politics and where the Labour Party was there. How did you relate to it? What were the struggles within the party? It's quite difficult to sort of reconnect. But what was the party like before the days that most listeners will focus on, which is the kind of Alistair Campbell New Labour days?

20:01there was a whole period, presumably leading right the way up from Wilson through to Michael Foot. Tell us about that politics, those struggles. Well, if I was having a transcendental moment, I would describe myself as an enigma because when I was at university, when I first got on the council, I mean, lots of young people now enter local government and are active in politics, but it was unusual. It was a sort of national story at the time, wasn't it? Yes, it was. Youngest council in 22. Andy couldn't see. So, you know, that melded with it. But I was at university. I got a place at York to study sociology.

20:38But then I discovered that there was a new course in political theory and institutions at the University of Sheffield. And I'd been away from home. So I was living with my mum and I applied and got on to that course. So I was both a new counsellor and an undergraduate at the same time. How the hell I managed, I don't know, because the reading alone for the university course was a challenge because I had to get fellow students to form a reading circle because there was no internet, couldn't download anything. And they were brilliant, but they also got something out of it, by the way. I'm a great believer in mutuality and reciprocity.

21:14I go on about it all the time because they helped me. but I also got out of the tutors which chapters which books absolutely should be read you know and which bits of journals or what have you and of course I was able to pass it on to them so we all got something out of it but I was studying at the university and I was practicing in the council and at that moment Rory I was seen by my fellow students as being centre because I was a member of the Labour Party. And at that time, right at the end of the 60s, being a member of the Labour Party was, oh, blimey, you're a right winger. And then... Remind the lesson, sorry, what other parties were around at the time that more radical students were involved in?

22:01Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which were funded by the CIA. Why was the Revolutionary Communist Party signed by the CIA? To discredit them? Or to control them? No, no. so that they could cause havoc and particularly to the left. Right. So there's all that going on. So you could have been further left wing. And why were you never tempted towards the kind of more, I don't know, Trotskyite, Stalinist fringes? Well, the Trots, I found deeply unpleasant anyway. They never, you know, when later I was a member of the national executive of the Labour Party and played, I think, some part, Alastair, did I not, in the expulsion of the militant tendency.

22:45I had a rule of thumb. When it wasn't absolutely clear whether this person was an infiltrated organiser and therefore really dangerous, I would try and crack a joke while we were interviewing them. And you could tell straight away, if they didn't even get the joke, never mind laugh, that they were serious trots. I'm pulling your leg a bit, but it is a bit like that. They were deeply unpleasant and they weren't interested in making progress by steps. They were interested in and believed deeply in the fact that you had to create havoc in order to facilitate a revolution. And I thought this was a load of rubbish.

23:28Just quickly on that, what is it that convinced you that that was a load of rubbish? Why were you not tempted by a Trotskyite vision? Why did you believe that you have to take practical steps and that you believe in evolution rather than revolution? One of the things that was very good about the chance I had to read and think and argue at university was I knew about Rousseau as well as Marx. I knew about David Hume as well as Hobbes. We had a whole section in the university department then about Hobbes. And I read some of the stuff from the Fabians and from R.H. Tawny and was able to see where things had progressed.

24:09and where they hadn't. And why was I at university? Why was I able to get there? What was happening around me was because of other people who'd made progress in the past and they hadn't done so by pulling the house down and pretending you could rebuild it. And in any case, I was also deeply affected by what was going on in the Soviet Union. Just talk us through the, we went through the Neil Kinnock's leadership, John Smith, and then into Tony Blair. Just talk us through your perceptions of all three, but also your political journey through that as well, where you were, how you were kind of deciding your future.

24:46I had been seen as the left leader of Sheffield. Rory's right about that. Although, actually, the contestant against me for the leadership of Sheffield was further to the left and became a member when he got into parliament, became a member of the campaign group, Bill Mickey. But we all got on and we were facing Margaret Thatcher. And I'll just say this for a moment. The tipping point for me was when I realised that there was a different way from old labour and the welfarist approach of top-down paternalism from the aftermath of the Second World War, understandable at the time but completely irrelevant in the 1980s, and Margaret Thatcher's adherence to free market economics and Milton Friedman and what was happening under Reagan.

25:31so there was to be what later was dubbed the third way and we were trying to do it in our own small way i mean the idea that municipal socialism could change the world seems risible but we actually were beginning to light a candle and to inspire people that there might be a different way of doing things of engaging what was the difference between what you were doing and what derrick hatton was trying to do in liverpool and how did that shape that stage of the Labour Party's development? Firstly, it was about participative politics. It wasn't about telling people what was good for them and then whatever you had to do to manipulate them to force it through, which is what they did, the militant tendency did in Liverpool, or lie to them.

26:16It was to engage them. It was to look at how things like cooperative development could help to, in a small way, to counterweight the enormous job losses in steel and engineering. and later, because we were affected with the closure of pits around Sheffield, the mining industry. So we were in the throes of a major industrial upheaval where former heavy industry on which the whole country, as well as our area, had relied was in flux. And that there needed to be a complete rethink that, yes, we needed time to do it, which the government of the day was not allowing. but we weren't going to put up with what I had to deal with with the miners' headquarters in Sheffield when I was leader of the council, which was Arthur Scargill.

27:04And Scargill threatened to sue me in all kinds of things because we could see that there was something rotten going on and the miners' terrific bravery and courage was being exploited. So all of that was happening at the same time. Everything was happening. We were taking on central government because they were removing the power to raise the local rate, the local council tax as it is now, and they were deregulating the bus service, which was our pride and joy. We had a virtually free bus service before Ken Livingstone and the GLC even thought about it, and it worked. We were increasing ridership when everywhere else it was falling away, and the deregulation and the capping of the local income killed that.

27:49And so we were taking on central government. We were trying to deal with industrial change. And we were looking at the horrors of the world outside. I mean, it was an in joke that we were the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. We used to produce badges. It was a joke against ourselves. But the BBC decided that they'd come and make the film Threads back in 84, all those years ago, 40 years ago, which was about the impact of a nuclear war. and we just had Brezhnev and Andropov as leaders of the Soviet Union and Reagan was president of the United States. This was a year or 18 months before Gorbachev came in and there started to be change and negotiation over the level of nuclear warheads.

28:36All of this was happening at the same time and we were in our own way in the middle of it. So that affected me greatly and I thought, there's got to be another way. There's got to be something that isn't entrenched in the past with nostalgia. We've got to have something that is about tomorrow and how to cope with rapid change, how to facilitate it so that people weren't victims, which they were being at that particular time. And I carried that with me through helping Neil Kinnock in my own way as a member of the National Executive from the left, elected from the constituency parties, to say there's something different here and to get rid of the militant tendency from the party and to expose what was happening with them.

29:20And David, this whole story about Thatcher, the 1980s and the collapse of traditional industry really defines everything in British politics, doesn't it? It's all so much of what we're living with comes out of the way we understand that and react to that. Looking back on it, what do you think now about what was happening in the 70s and 80s and what you believe would have been a better approach to dealing with those industries? I think firstly, if the left had understood that simply atrifying and defending everything was not the way to save jobs and to save industry, that actually just saying we are going to stick with where we are and fight to the barricades against change was ridiculous.

30:05us the acceleration of globalization which we talk a lot about now the acceleration of globalization meant there was a massive impact on industry in britain and what was happening it was happening elsewhere at the same time and the political right were exposing the patronage and and welfarism that i've described where people were becoming more affluent they wanted to say in what was happening around them. They wanted to be able to spend their money in the way they wanted to spend it rather than relying entirely on the state to do it for them. And finding a way through that was, well, it affected me certainly and the people around me because we were a team.