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Last night former Home and Work and Pensions Secretary (amongst other things,) David Blunkett delivered the Centre for Social Justice’s Abraham Lincoln lecture. Blunkett was on good form, injecting his lecture with a fairly healthy dose of humour.
The lecture was entitled “The politics of fear versus the politics of hope in a rapidly changing world”. Blunkett said that these rapid changes were “the great uncertainties of life”. He said that in a time of great change, not least in globalisation, this uncertainty meant people are less willing to embrace change. Throughout the lecture Blunkett constantly referred to the importance of family as a counterbalance to this, referring to it as the “building block” in our society.
As well for society, Blunkett acknowledged what a huge challenge the changes in a globalised world pose for Government. A particular issue is obviously immigration, and he pointed out that people fear change if they don’t understand and it. He went with the default New Labour position of “of course toughen our borders” in order to protect against rate of change, but told an interesting story to highlight the issue of unknown consequences of policy – when his government allowed EU immigrants from Eastern European states to work here, 40% that applied to work were already here!
Blunkett discussed the current proposed changes to the welfare, led by founder of the CSJ, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith. He said that the Government was in “the wrong place for radical change” on welfare reform, although the principles of the proposals were in line with what Labour tried to do in Government. He picked housing benefit for working age people as a particularly key issue, and said that Government should encourage people to join together to tackle the issue, and that a long term review that’s a promise not a threat was what is needed. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprising given who hosted the event, there not much divergence in principle with Iain Duncan-Smith and the Government. Ultimately, Blunkett, like Blair before him, acknowledged that “in 1997 we embarked on something we didn’t carry through” on welfare reform.
Blunkett is clearly well informed on a variety of important issues after his many years of service, and clearly still has a lot to contribute to the debate. I suspect that I would not always find myself on the same side of it as him, but that didn’t stop listening to him speak in depth being a very interesting experience.
The full text of David Blunkett’s lecture can be downloaded here.
