David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, (born 6 June 1947) is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Education and Employment from 1997 to 2001, Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004 and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in 2005. A member of the Labour Party, he served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough (formerly Sheffield Brightside) from 1987 to 2015 and was appointed to the House of Lords as a life peer in 2015.
Following the 2001 general election, he was promoted to home secretary, a position he held until 2004, when he resigned following publicity about his personal life. Following the 2005 general election he was appointed secretary of state for work and pensions, though he resigned from that role later that year following media coverage relating to external business interests in the period when he did not hold a cabinet post. The Cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell, in a letter of 25 November 2005, exonerated him from any wrongdoing.
On 20 June 2014, Blunkett announced to his constituency party that he would be standing down from the House of Commons at the next general election in May 2015. In August 2015, he was awarded a peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours. He was created Baron Blunkett, of Brightside and Hillsborough in the City of Sheffield, on 28 September.
Early life Blunkett was born on 6 June 1947 at Jessop Hospital, Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, with improperly developed optic nerves due to a rare genetic disorder.Blunkett and MacCormick (2002). pp. 17–18. He grew up in an underprivileged family; in 1959 he endured a family tragedy when his father was gravely injured in an industrial accident: he fell into a vat of boiling water while at work as a foreman for the East Midlands Gas Board, dying a month later. This left the surviving family in poverty, especially since the board refused to pay compensation for two years because his father worked past the retirement age, dying at the age of 67.
Blunkett was educated at schools for the blind in Sheffield and Shrewsbury. He attended the Royal National College for the Blind. He was apparently told at school that one of his few options in life was to become a lathe operator. Nevertheless, he won a place at the University of Sheffield, where he gained a BA honours degree in Political Theory and Institutions; one of his lecturers was Bernard Crick. He entered local politics on graduation, whilst gaining a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Huddersfield Holly Bank College of Education (now part of the University of Huddersfield).Debrett's People of Today, 2011. He spent a total of six years going to evening classes and day-release classes to get the qualifications needed to go to university.David Blunkett, On A Clear Day He worked as a clerk typist between 1967 and 1969 and as a lecturer in industrial relations and politics between 1973 and 1981.
By 1970, Blunkett was a Methodist local preacher based at Southey church in the Sheffield (North) Methodist circuit. He told the Methodist Recorder: "My politics come directly from my religion. As a Christian I see myself as a Socialist; not exactly a Donald Soper, but that way inclined"."50 years ago: Blind local preacher bids for city council place", Methodist Recorder, 13 March 2020
In 1970, he was engaged to Ruth Mitchell and they married in July of that year.
Local government In 1970, at the age of 22, Blunkett became the youngest-ever councillor on Sheffield City Council and in Britain, being elected while a mature student. He was elected on the same day as fellow Labour member Bill Michie, who, like Blunkett, would go on to serve as a Sheffield MP. Blunkett served on Sheffield City Council from 1970 to 1988, and was leader from 1980 to 1987. He also served on South Yorkshire County Council from 1973 to 1977. This was a time of decline for Sheffield's steel industry. Blunkett and Michie were among what political journalist Julia Langdon has described as "an energetic group of young Labour activists who emerged in Sheffield in the 1970s, a number of whom moved on to Westminster". The Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam, Irvine Patnick, coined the phrase "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire" to describe the left-wing politics of its local government. Although bestowed as a criticism of the radical policies being pursued by Labour councillors in the area, Langdon notes that it "was in fact happily embraced by those it was intended to denigrate".
Sheffield City Council supported the National Union of Mineworkers in their 1984–85 strike, designated Sheffield a "nuclear-free zone", and set up an Anti-Apartheid Working Party."The rise and fall of socialism in one city" , Nick Howard, International Socialism Journal, Winter 1995. Blunkett became known as the leader of one of Labour's left-wing councils, sometimes described pejoratively as "loony left"."What is Labour for?" , John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 31 March 2005. Blunkett was one of the faces of the protest over rate-capping in 1985 which saw several Labour councils refuse to set a budget in a protest against Government powers to restrain their spending. He built up support within the Labour Party during his time as the council's leader during the 1980s, and was elected to the Labour Party's National Executive Committee.
Parliamentary career Having unsuccessfully fought Sheffield Hallam in February 1974, at the 1987 general election, Blunkett was elected member of parliament (MP) for Sheffield Brightside with a large majority in a safe Labour seat. He became a party spokesman on local government, joined the shadow cabinet in 1992 as shadow health secretary and became shadow education secretary in 1994.
Education and employment secretary Following Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 general election, he became secretary of state for education and employment, thus becoming Britain's first blind cabinet minister (Henry Fawcett, husband of suffragist Millicent Fawcett, had been a member of the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is the executive committee, more than a century before). The role of education secretary was a vital one in a government whose prime minister had in 1996 described his priorities as "education, education, education" and which had made reductions in school class sizes a pledge.
As secretary of state, Blunkett pursued substantial reforms, ready to take on the teaching unions and determined to ensure basic standards of literacy and numeracy. He was rewarded with extra funding to cut class sizes, notably by abolishing the Assisted Places Scheme. A key pillar of Blunkett's work as education secretary was the introduction of Sure Start, a government programme which provided services for pre-school children and their families. It works to bring together early education, childcare, health and family support. In 2011, the government effectively started the abolition of Sure Start by lifting the ring fence on earmarked funding and cutting back drastically on the funds available.
Following the Dearing Report into higher education, Blunkett introduced the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 on 26 November 1997, which introduced university tuition fees. He also led the massive expansion in higher education. He provided large scale investment in universities in the UK and one study, published in 2011, showed that universities are now educating more than one-quarter more students than they did previously, and receiving double the income.
Whilst in this position, Blunkett also launched Learning and Skills Councils, created Jobcentre Plus and had responsibility for the Equal Opportunities Commission, as well as establishing the Disability Rights Commission (as home secretary, he was also responsible for the Commission on Racial Equality; all three of these bodies were incorporated later into the Equality and Human Rights Commission).
In 1999, Blunkett proposed that sex education should be "age appropriate", reportedly arguing that childhood, the "age of innocence", should not be compromised by "graphic" sex education. In 2000, while attempting to cool opposition to the proposed abolition of the Local Government Act 1988's Section 28, he issued guidelines on the importance of 'family values' in teaching children sex education.
Blunkett introduced the teaching of citizenship in schools in 1999, arguing that "We want to ensure that there's a basis of traditional knowledge that's available to all children." Citizenship education provides pupils with the knowledge, skills and understanding to become informed citizens, aware of their rights, duties and responsibilities.
Home secretary At the start of the Labour government's second term in 2001, Blunkett was promoted to home secretary, fulfilling an ambition of his. Some observers saw him a rival to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in succeeding Blair as prime minister.
Blunkett was almost immediately faced with the September 11 attacks on the United States. He brought in new anti-terrorism measures, including detention without trial of suspect foreign nationals who could not be extradited or deported. It caused a backbench rebellion and provoked strong opposition in the House of Lords; Blunkett made concessions over incitement to religious hatred (later carried through by his successor) and to introduce a "sunset clause". He authorised MI5 to start collecting bulk telephone communications data on which telephone numbers called each other under a general power brought in by the Telecommunications Act 1984.
As home secretary, Blunkett was prepared to confront the judiciary and the police, with proposals for civilian community patrols and changes to police officers' pay and working conditions. More than 7,000 police demonstrated outside Parliament in 2002.
During his term in office, the large upsurge in asylum claims was reversed, the Sangatte refugee camp on French soil was closed, and refugees numbers subsequently dropped from 110,000 to less than 30,000. With an additional 15,000 police officers and 6,500 Community Support Officers by 2004, crime had reached an all-time low, with over a 40% drop from ten years earlier.
A controversial area for Blunkett was civil liberties, and he described civil libertarianism as "airy fairy". As education secretary, he had repeatedly expressed the intention that, were he to become home secretary, he would make the then-incumbent Jack Straw, who had been criticised for being hard-line, seem over-liberal. In 2006, Martin Narey, the former director general of the prison service, claimed that Blunkett had once told him to use the army and machine guns to deal with rioting prisoners. Blunkett has denied these allegations.
Blunkett radically overhauled sex offences legislation in 2002, which modernised the sex offences laws by updating laws governing homosexuality, while tightening protections against rapists, paedophiles and other sex offenders. The act closed a loophole that had allowed those accused of child rape to escape punishment by arguing the act was consensual, and a new offence of adult sexual activity with a child – which covers any sex act that takes place between an adult and a child under 16 – was introduced. It was supported by all major political parties in the UK.
In 2004, it emerged that Blunkett had directed Home Office civil servants to closely monitor and counter the findings of Migration Watch UK, which controversially included manipulating the timing of statistical releases to avoid criticism from the pressure group.
Blunkett resigned as home secretary on 15 December 2004, amidst allegations that he helped fast-track the renewal of a work permit for his ex-lover's nanny.