78. David Blunkett: Education, policing immigration, and the future of the Labour Party (Part 2)

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1:19Welcome back to The Rest is Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And David, we're now getting on to you entering government and cabinet. And I'd love to get a sense of that first week in office. You arrive, you're Secretary of State for Education, you've got your new department, and you're suddenly managing this enormous government department. Give us a sense of what it's like. And actually, also for me, as a former cabinet minister, give us also a sense of what it's like as somebody who's blind to read your initial briefing, to make it through your red boxes, to have your civil servants lay out their vision.

1:56I was fortunate because there were only two posts that Tony had pronounced on as definite, two individuals, Gordon Brown and myself. So I knew if we won, I'd be in education employment. So I'd been able to think about it, to read around it, to do the preparation, which we'd done anyway over the previous two years. Again, Gordon had done a lot of preparation and we had, which helped to be able to move very quickly indeed. I'd like to tell you I was really exhilarated and I was dancing on that 2nd of May morning. I was really, really chuffed. And this was leavened by a feeling of how serious it was and how daunting it was going to be.

2:44Because this wasn't campaigning. This wasn't eulogizing. This wasn't oratory anymore. This was the reality of trying to get things changed. and going into the department and being clapped. I mean, it was very funny because they all clapped and then they introduced themselves. And I said, and who is my secretary? And as one, they all said, we're all your secretary. I just doubled up with laughter. I said, well, you know, I'm sure you're all doing a fantastic job, but there will have to be someone who actually looks out for me. Yeah. What was your, because I, funny, on that day, I didn't enjoy it at all, partly because I felt, God, I'm absolutely exhausted.

3:29Yes. I've now got to go and start a new job. Did you feel confident that the things that you'd been promising in opposition could now be delivered? And did you feel that the government machine was there to help you? I felt the government machine was warming to help us. I was blessed by the fact, and he's still my friend, that Michael Bishard, now Lord Bishard, was the head of the department and was very open for me to bring people in. I mean, again, staggering for the listeners, but there was no one in the higher echelons of the department who'd ever been near a school in recent years. In terms of their professional life.

4:10Yes, yeah. There were no head teachers. There were no teachers. There were one or two people who a long time ago had been directors of education at local authority level, as it was in those days. And so we said straight away, we'll bring Michael Barber, Sir Michael Barber, in as head of a standards unit. And we appointed him on the first day with Tony's absolute support. The civil service generally were really uneasy about this. I don't want to be disparaging because I still work alongside some of them in the House of Lords. but they were very, very sceptical about what we were doing. And we set up the unit, and we got 20-odd people in very quickly who were well-known as being reformers, people who had got something to offer, and above all, recent experience.

4:59And we got that off the ground. We got Michael in on the second day. We got the team up and running. Tony was very generous in making sure that I got people who I could work with, which mattered. special advisors who are often, aren't they, Alistair, rubbished when they shouldn't be. I was blessed with mine, but that was partly... Connor Ryan. Well, some of the people I've worked with. Connor Ryan, Rory, Alistair remembers because he was my media guru, who used to say to me, David, I don't think you should say that. Or when I came off a platform, would tell me off for not having said the crucial sentence.

5:42And I learned in the end to write the damn crucial sentence down in Braille because I didn't read my speeches. I used to make notes because it's foolish not to. But once I got going, I got going. And sometimes I missed the crucial press release sentence. So I used to have to learn to write them down. But really, really crucial people. Sophie Linden, who, as we're recording is the deputy mayor for policing in in london nick pierce who became head of the ippr and worked for gordon as head of policy and now is a professor of politics at bath university hugh evans later who became head of the abi the association of british insurers and he's now at kpmg and many more kath hinton who actually in the end married les hinton you're now doing that thing that gordon used to do in speeches where he feels he has to have to mention everything I am.

6:33I'm putting my hands up because I plead guilty. I thought, if I miss anybody, they'll kill me because they've all stayed friends. We'll take the blame for interrupting you before you've named them all. Well done, Rory. That was very good. But David, tell us a little bit about this problem of the civil service being a bit sceptical. Civil service resistance. What's it about? Is there something a little odd about the system? Because obviously the public's perception is that it's pretty difficult to get things done. The public thinks the whole thing is a bit. And they're not quite sure, you know, when's it the politicians fault, when's it civil servants fault, whether the systems fault.

7:11Give us a sense of resistance in government and actually how managing a civil service department might be a little different to being the CEO of a company. I think later... Also, David, before you do that, is it fair to say that when you got to the Home Office, it was even worse? Well, I mean, everybody knows historically that the Home Office has been a basket case. And the problem is, the more difficulty they get into, and I had the justice functions in the Home Office as well before they were split, the more you rubbish it, the more people say, why would I want to go and work there? Or why would I want to stick it out when I can have a damn sight easier job and be thought to be brilliant going into the Treasury?

7:53Or a job like being in the Foreign Office where you occasionally get blamed for bad advice, but you don't get blamed for non-delivery. And so the Home Office has been a challenge all the way down the last 200 years with occasional very bright people working out how to avoid it, like Roy Jenkins, who's virtually all the things that people remember about Roy Jenkins as being a great Liberal Home Secretary were private members bills, which he gave support to, but actually came at it from a different angle. They weren't invented within the Home Office or delivered in the Home Office. And Rory's point, do you think this is what Gove and Cummings meant by the blob?

8:35They do, but the more you insult people, the more they go into their shell. And talking of a shell, there are two bits of the civil service. There's a deep commitment, I'm absolutely certain, to service and to neutrality. And there's an egg in which it all operates, where people know each other. They share advice before they give it to the cabinet minister or ministers, which I eventually found out and said, well, you know, in that case, it's very important that I take outside advice so that I'm breaking the hegemony, as Gramsci would have called it, of the civil service. They're all agreeing with each other.

9:17And basically, they're pre-cooking the solution. So what you wanted, presumably, was to be presented with two competing ideas or two alternatives that you could get your head around, instead of which you tended to be presented with a conventional wisdom. What I tried to do, and I learned this from Michael Heseltine, who has severe dyslexia, and because I couldn't see, I would, of course, spend weekends and nights and not being in the tea room or the bars, which actually probably was a good thing in the end, reading, reading, reading. that was all put onto old-fashioned cassette for me. But actually, what I really enjoyed doing and what he did was to get people around a table and persuade the permanent secretary that I would hear the objections and the interchange that had taken place before the paper was written.

10:02And that way, you could get people to start relaxing and to be honest about what the real challenges were and the options. I mean, you've got to know what it is you want to do. Tony Blair said in his last conference speech as prime minister, the worst ministers are those who will never make a decision. We all know them. And you've got to have an idea of what you want to do. And you've got to be able to make a decision, even if it's a difficult one, even if you get it wrong and people argue with you. And I made internal decisions. and then a couple of the advisors would come into the room and I could tell what was going to happen because they'd sit right across the other side of the room and say, David, we know you don't want to hear this, but would you rethink the decision you took yesterday because of this, this, this and this?

10:52And sometimes, sometimes I'd change my mind. You said earlier that you had two of the five pledges. So that, I guess, was politically for you an advantage. You've got the prime minister saying education, education, education. It's the number one priority and that helps you. But give listeners a feel for how you then operate in trying to make sure you get the right resources out of the Treasury, make sure that you've got the right space in the legislative programme. This podcast is called Leading and you have to take on your own leadership role. I had several things going for me. I had the support of the Prime Minister on the whole agenda of reform.

11:29I had previously had time to work it through to think about it. I had, as I said, really excellent special advisors and a great ministerial team. And we started to work as a team. And I had, at least to begin with, a civil service open to change and actually welcoming the energy, the drive, the beginning of something that they could relate to. And I used to go around the various sites across the UK and talk to the civil servants, address them in meetings as well as going around their desks and talking to them and trying to say it doesn't, you know, whatever your job, you're part of this. You're part of this change, this making a difference.

12:13Even the people who have the dreadful job of dealing with the correspondence these days, of course, it's even worse with email and saying, let's work through what the answers to the regular questions are. And by the way, let us know when you get an avalanche, because that will indicate what's going on out there, what people are thinking and feeling. How did I deal with the difficult ones? again that touch of arrogance has to be there because you've got to believe you're right when you're pushing through something that people are pushing against whether it was in education and teacher and reform of the schools or whether it was in the home office and reforming policing I'll never forget having 13 ,000 uniformed police officers some of whom should have actually been doing the job at the Palace of Westminster, frightening my colleagues to death in terms of lobbying them.

13:08But the education unions were difficult. And I chose, and with me Estelle Morris, who was my number two, to actually go to their conferences. Nobody does that anymore. And it was suicidal, but it was also calculated. Two things. One, it gave me an enormous platform because they got covered in those days. I mean, we might come to this, but education is not now top of the political agenda. And it's hard to get across to people that it was. So the teachers' conferences were widely covered on top-line news television when 10, 15 million people used to watch the evening news. And when I was heckled, barracked and abused, I could say, but parents out there know that I'm on their side and the side of their children.

14:02And so it was a calculated risk. Dave, what were they abusing you about? What didn't they like about the reforms? What were you doing that made them uncomfortable? Well, they didn't even like when I was actually offering them more money because they didn't want the more money at the price of evaluating their performance. We had a threshold. and you got onto the higher grades if you went through the threshold, but you had to demonstrate that you were still a good teacher. It seemed to me to be a no-brainer. As a trained teacher, by the way, we've not touched on this, but I do have a postgraduate certificate in teaching, albeit for adults.

14:39We can't cover every aspect if you like. No, no, no, but I do, and it was really important sometimes to say, I've been there, I've been in a group. Actually, Brick Layers 2 comes back to mind, like a Tom Sharp book where the kids didn't want to be taught. They were 17, 18. They didn't want to be there. They want to be out laying bricks. And if you can come through that, you do know a little bit about the real sharp end of teaching. Because in those days, I was teaching politics, but I was also enjoined to teach liberal studies. God help us. David, can I keep developing this? Because it's a continual theme though, isn't it?

15:16In all public service reform, doesn't matter whether we're talking about education or health, which is that the people at the front line, the nurse, the doctor, the teacher, feels that there is a interfering secretary of state who is unsympathetic to what it's really like at the front line, imposing unrealistic standards and expectations, never understanding the context properly and measuring them on the wrong things. Yes. And you have to bear in mind that sometimes they might be right. I did a bad cop, good cop with Estelle Morris, who is also formerly a teacher. And I would do the tough bit and then Estelle would go out and do the smoothing a bit.

15:59Later, she had to do the tough bits as well. But the challenge was to say to people, yes, we've got a literacy and numeracy strategy, and you might not like being told that you've got to teach phonics for literacy. But actually, we've got such an appalling level of success at the age of 11 when they transfer to secondary that they're having to do the job all over again and we're not going to put up with it. And of course, we're still in that struggle today. There's always a building on what came before, putting another brick in the wall. But in those days, it was saying, we are asking you to do this.

16:37Reflecting back, and I've talked to members of the team and to civil servants about this since. We probably overdid it because we were in a hurry. We didn't let another cohort of youngsters go through rubbish education. And therefore, it was a continuing reform agenda. And Alistair, you'll remember it very well, because the months before the 2001 general election, when I knew I'd done four years, I'd probably done my time, but I was still looking, how could we move from the Sure Start programme and early years we'd introduced, the reforms to primary, which were beginning to really work, into secondary.

17:17And we had to break the cycle of schools that were absolute rubbish. And at this point, I'm being phoned to say, be very careful what it is that you're saying. Your special advisor is calling you out. Absolutely. And I was just about to remember when we produced a policy paper, They used to call them green papers. And it was about introducing academies and really shifting the education agenda at secondary level. And Alistair, you came out with a famous phrase, bog standard comprehension. I know. I apologize to you, Dave. The havoc it caused me was nobody's business. Well, I had a little look this morning, David.

18:02I went through my diaries and looking up all the blanket entries. I've got a few to put to you later, by the way. But that was a bad episode, especially as you know, I'm one of the biggest defenders of comprehensive education. And I was trying to make a pro-comprehensive point. And wait till he got home. Oh, I know. Well, you know, Fiona Miller, his partner, would have given him absolute hell. She still does, as you just did. Listen, can I ask you something about two things, really? Why has education gone down the agenda? And, you know, because we did put it there. We put it there in opposition at the top of the agenda.

18:36And to be sort of fair, I guess, David Cameron gave quite a lot of space to Michael Gove to make it a very big bit of what we were talking about 2010-2014. Gove had a lot of space. And when Michael Gove wanted to embarrass me, he used to say in the House that he was following my agenda. And my second point is, given your experience of having gone into government in 1997, and some of the experience you've had with the civil service, which has now been hollowed out to some extent as well, what advice would you give to Labour politicians if they win the next election, most of whom have not been ministers, as to what they should do in those first few months?

19:13First question, why is education down the agenda? I think people have lost the understanding that in this rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence, of robotics, of enormous technological change, we're going to need people who are firstly well -educated in the sense that they know how to work in teams. they're open to ideas they can think laterally they understand the digital era which I don't but they need to and they need the opportunities post-16 right through life so they'll come back into learning whether it's in further education or whether it's online or whether it's at university This is an agenda of economic change as well as equality and opportunity for the individual.

20:06And they all go together. So you can't do net zero or mass house building or social care reform if you don't skill people. And I still don't hear even my own side, who I get on very well and talk to. Maybe I won't after this podcast. I still don't hear all of them saying this enough. And so it's getting it up in lights and making the delivery of your wider program dependent on getting this aspect right. Now, I am a fanatic. I know that. My policy love is still education. I do other things, of course, but it still is. And I think if we could understand the enormity of what we've got to do. people talk about closing our borders completely and all the rest of it and this anti-immigration moment we're in you can't do that and not educate and continue educating the people you expect to take those jobs now second question advice advice i'm very careful how i give advice now because i'm not going to hector anybody and they they switch off if if you do it's but they should You don't have to listen to people, are you?

21:23Well, only to say we did make mistakes, so you've got to learn from where we got things wrong. For instance, on one of my pledges, which was lower class sizes for five, six, seven-year-olds, we ended up spending a lot more money than we ever thought it was going to cost. And so the corollary of doing away with what were vouchers for private education didn't pay for it. And secondly, we had to build onto schools in the most leafy areas to make the pledge doable. And so we spent more money in the affluent areas than we did in the most deprived to achieve the commitment. So be very careful, not just what you wish for or what you say, because they're being cautious.

22:04So I can't advise them to be more cautious than they already are. Do you think they're being too cautious? I think on one of two things, yes. I get it. I understand entirely why, but we can't be tracking the government on things through the general election, because otherwise they'll put us in an impossible spot. So know what it is that is your bottom line. This and no further will we be pushed is the first piece of advice. Secondly, be very clear what you want to achieve and have to achieve in the first six months because you'll get six months leeway and then things will start closing down and the reactive agenda will kick in and all the energy will start to sap away.

22:47Be clear what you've got to do in the first six months. And thirdly, have really good advice around you and be prepared to take advice from outside. And fourthly, occasionally call the oldies in and say, what do you think? Alistair David, let's take a quick break.

23:12Moving forward then into your next role, which was as Home Secretary. I'm really enjoying this and I am coming through this with an enormous amount of admiration for you. But I felt, without knowing you very well, that you were slightly too right wing for me as a Home Secretary. And I was always a little bit troubled by what you did after 9-11 in terms of dealing with foreign nationals. When I went into what became the Department of Justice, I struggled a lot with your IPP sentences, which is an indefinite detention for criminals. But it's a bit of your personality I don't quite understand. You're such a thoughtful, learned, reflexive person.

23:51But there were bits of that time in Home Secretary where I thought, wow, goodness gracious me, this man's really kind of playing a pretty kind of Daily Mail right wing card here and appealing to bits of my party that I don't like at all. I used to know that I was being seen as right wing when I met lovely old ladies who said they were entirely on board with my agenda, then told me they were lifelong Tories. And I used to get this all the time. I'll tell you, there were two elements to this. Firstly, my constituency. I learned a lot by holding those advice surgeries, as you must have done. I learnt a lot by going to community meetings where people would say, is anybody listening to us?

24:32Is anybody taking any notice? What's the point in voting if all you all take notice of is the dinner tables you sit round back in London? And they wanted the crime and antisocial behaviour sorting. They wanted me to put right what was happening in their lives, not in my life, but in their lives. And they wanted me to be able to show them not just on policing and crime, which is why we increased the policing service dramatically and introduced community support officers and the like, but they wanted me on something as difficult as immigration to actually show that I understood that we had to have secure borders.

25:18Now, 9-11, the attack on the World Trade Center was interesting because the second bit of my time as Home Secretary was having to deal with security of the nation and international security in a way that hadn't been the case since the Second World War. so this was home it wasn't a war somewhere else and I had to in three months from September to Christmas work out how we were to legislate what was proportionate in terms of protecting the nation and holding on to our civil liberties and I may have occasionally got it wrong but I had to do it and it was very interesting in my last Prime Minister's questions in 2015 when I was standing down, David Cameron, actually had the decency to say thank you for being there and securing the well-being of the nation, which I thought was pretty decent of him.

26:12Now, I got imprisonment for public protection wrong, and I've spent the last number of years, including at this moment, trying to put it right, trying to get out of prison and off license. Those who have been in prison or on license for years and years and years. Why is it so hard, David? People find this so hard to understand why it's so hard to sort out what everybody seems to realize was a mistake. It's called Big P and the Worst Bit of Politics. Ken Clarke, who I get on with really well, and again in the Lords, has actually been very kind to me and said, back in 2012, when he was Justice Secretary and was attempting to abolish this and they theoretically abolished the that part of the act which gave indeterminate sentences and meant that the parole board for your listeners the parole board had to be sure that someone was not a risk before letting them out david can i just just for listeners just so they understand what we're talking about this legislation brought in by david blanket meant that you could commit a pretty minor crime, which traditionally would have only involved you being in prison for a very short period.

27:28But under this new sentence, you could be detained almost indefinitely. And when you were released, if you broke your license conditions, you could then be recalled back to prison so that we have well over 2000 people, 2000 people still in prison today, who were sentenced under this thing that hasn't existed since 2010. And the suicide rates are correspondingly very, very high, the pressure very high. And even though these sentences can no longer be imposed, the people who were sentenced under the old staff brought in by David Blanket are still there. And that's what we're talking about, struggling to try to change.

28:05Yes. And I'd realised by 2008-9 that this was going wrong. It was supposed to be part of a menu and it was supposed to be applied to those who were serious offenders, but hadn't committed murder or rape and were seriously dangerous and that menu turned from for some judges into an imperative that they thought they had to deliver in fact in early May of this year a case with a prisoner called Leighton Williams has been let out by the court of appeal on the grounds that the original judge had misunderstood the act and that he didn't have to apply it so we're dealing with in a really difficult set of areas.

28:50In 2012, I sat with Ken Clark and he said, I want to be able to wipe the slate clean, but the cabinet won't let me for straight political reasons because it would be seen as being absolutely soft on what were potentially some serious risk prisoners. What was the original thinking behind the IPC? The original thinking was that we had indeterminate sentences. I'm trying to help a prisoner who's probably now too late to help, who's been in 34 years, by the way, on a previous sentence. The thinking was, we will put therapies and courses on and we will change the behavior. We will rehabilitate these prisoners and then the parole board will be able to nod them through and they'll come out.