The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 77. David Blunkett: Tony Blair, growing up blind, and where Margaret Thatcher went wrong (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

How did the loss of industry in the 1980s affect David Blunkett's politics? What was his experience growing up blind in Sheffield? How did Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair compare? Rory and Alastair are joined by David Blunkett to discuss all this and more in the first part of this double-header special. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP FIRST 100 DAYS TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Podcast Editor: Nathan Copelin Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispoletics.com. 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 Roy and I

enjoyed talking to him. Part one now. Welcome to the rest of politics leading with me, Alice 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 start to be 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 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 counsellor in the country, age 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,

working 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 Kyr Starmer on skills and doubtless will be contributing in all sorts of ways should there be a Labour government. So David, welcome and thank you. Very pleased to be with you both. Thank you so much for joining us. David, 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 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 tumour and that they were going to have to, I mean, it sounds horrendous, didn't they? 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 Alist has referred to actually had artificial eyes and made great play of popping them out at the most inappropriate moments.

And thank goodness they discovered I hadn't got a tumour. 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 a light bulb that's there, but the wiring's not fixed, and therefore 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 light's on. You know, you can get it. You can get it, but it does help. It helps to focus. But I told you a while back that whenever I get into a hotel and I get irritated by, can't find the air conditioning to turn it off, can't work out the shower, you know, can't work out how to sort of work the electrics or that. It must be horrific to you going to a strange place.

Well, 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 lose. 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 Louies. 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.

What 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. And so when I was 12, he inadvertently stood backwards when a truck was approaching

and someone had failed to cover the container. with his 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 demeanour, 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 he got a son and 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 I wouldn't do it to anybody body. 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-wheel of bikes

around the grounds, which was horrendous. You can imagine you had to count the pedal strokes before you hit the sandpit 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? Now, 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.

We 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 cited. And many of us couldn't see it all. And obviously the ones I've described earlier couldn't see even light and dark.

What did you learn about the world from your father? When was he born? So he must have seen the end of the First World War? He was born in 1892 in Egham 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. How 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, and he did that for 45 years until he was killed.

Did he serve in the First and Second World War's, 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 nationalisation, 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. And they'd spelt his name wrong. They spelled it Plunkett. And I tested it all out. There was no plunker. keep working for them.

Just funny, for 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. You'd sit me on my when I was seven or eight and get me to recite them

so I knew where they were. I 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 he would talk to me about the time between the wars when he traversed the country trying to get a job. And 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. My 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. 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. And 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, 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. 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. I 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 loss 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.

And once when a youngster inadvertently knocked it out of my hand, we solotaped 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. And 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 Berlin, you sport Sheffield Wednesday. We've been to quite a few games together. 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 match? How are you following it? Well, these days, there's a commentary inside the ground. When there wasn't...

So what, you have an earpiece? Yeah. It's frankly a bit hit and miss, but so is Radio 5 and Talks Sport. Because they forget that 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 have. 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 son's used to, and still on occasions, do, because there wasn't a commentary when I went to the last game of the season. So they would commentate. Sunderland. And my oldest son, Alastair, was 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. season. In fact, we won the last three. And the third game from the end was at Blackburn. And Blackburn, God bless them. You're not allowed to bless Blackburn. They were struggling, but they gave us seven and a half thousand 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, Roy, let's take a quick break. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Zavrick here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show,

The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest Is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable

at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing. which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975,

a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode.

And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. On to you getting into local government becoming councillors. So you'd been formed by this very left-wing history teachers. You say you can now see he 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 Labor Days? There was a whole period, presumably leading right the way up, from Wilson through to Michael Foote.

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 active in politics, but it was unusual. It was a sort of national story at the time, wasn't it? Yes, it was.

Andy couldn't see, so that melded with it. But I was at university. I'd got a place at York to study sociology, but 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.

I 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 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, who, blimey, you're in the right winger. And then... Remind the lesson, sorry, what other parties were around at the time that more radical students were involved in? Socialist Workers' Party, international Marxist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which were funded by the CIA. Why was the revolutionary Communist Party sign of the CIA to discredit that more to control them?

No, so that they could cause havoc. Right. 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, I said, did I not, in the expulsion of the militant tendency. I had a rule of thumb. When it wasn't absolutely clear whether this person was an infiltrated organizer 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. Well, just quickly on that, what is it that convinced you that that was a load of rubbish? Why were you not tempted by a Trotsky-Ey-Ey vision? Why did you believe that you have to take practical steps and that you believe in evolution rather than revolution? Because 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 Hobbs. And I read some of the stuff from the Fabians and from R.H. Torney and was able to see where things had progressed and 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 talking 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. I 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 you 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 just say this for a moment. The tipping point for me was when I realized that there was a different way from old labour and the welfareist 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. So 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 people. And what was the difference between what you were doing and what Derek 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. It was to engage them. It was to look at how things like cooperative development could help 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 form a 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. And Scargill threatened to sue me in all kinds of things, because we could see that there was something rotten going on, 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 Livingston 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 and so we were taken 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 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. All 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 Kinnett 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. And 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. The acceleration of globalization, which we talk a lot about now, the acceleration of globalization meant that it 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 welfareism 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. You know, this wasn't someone on a white charger, that we were a team. And I took both of those thinking into opposition from 1987 when I was elected, then in the Shadder Cabinet from 92. I was dealt a very good hand by Neil Kinnock, who against the advice of my very good friend now in his 90s, Roy Hattersley, put me on the front bench less than a

year after I was elected to Parliament. Very good old-fashioned piece of trade unionism. You know, if you've got a really awkward shop steward, you know, making the supervisor. And final thing, in blunt terms, what is it that Margaret Thatcher did wrong, looking back? Firstly, she played into the narrative that we were at war with each other, rather than that there was a major, major issue of change, both internally in terms of what was needed in our politics, but also the effect and impact of international and global change as well. and the destruction of those communities, I think she never understood. I believe that she sincerely thought that the scorched earth policy was necessary because if you gave time for people to argue, it wouldn't happen. And she also believed, in any case, that the state didn't have a role in the facilitation,

because that's what it was, of people through that change. So we ended up with the absurdity of having to put people on what became incapacity benefit to stop them revolting, having a mini revolution. I mean, we're talking 3 million plus unemployed, rather than that resource going into a gradual implementation of change so that you protected our steel industry until you'd modernised it. you protected the associated engineering industry until you'd got the equipment in for what was their numerical control. Now, you know, the predecessor of artificial intelligence. You got a debate going and she did, along with the person who I had a great deal of respect for, Brian Gould, who was the head of the team that I was in leading up to the 92 election, who understood that the issue of climate change was,

one that was going to have to be addressed. And Thatcher had made speeches about this in the late 80s. And Brian Gould had picked this up from the left. I think Margaret Thatcher, by the way, had picked up something that was politically sensitive, which was that the equivalent of the Greens got 14% in the European election that had taken place. And this was going to be an issue. And we could have dealt with the mining industry within that, of a planned process of running down our dependence on coal and creating an alternative,

but it wasn't. It was the equivalent of the big bang in the city. It's too bad that it's gone, but that's the way the market does it. And the state shouldn't have a role in this because the state should be reduced to defence abroad and security at home. What did you learn as a council leader that helped you in Parliament? and what's your overall assessment of what it was like being an MP when you first arrived? What was your sense of coming into Parliament, what the place was like?

As a counsellor, I learnt oratory, which is not so prevalent these days or necessary because it's been overtaken. We're in a different era of social media, which we're on at the moment. We're long form, yeah. Of course, absolutely. Did you say lawful or awful? I said long form. Long form, yeah, you're long form.

Very long form. I learned not to be so bloody arrogant that I was at the time. You think you were arrogant when you were? Oh, yeah. What, as a council leader? Yes. I thought I knew it. And the team approach and people who were your friends.

This was true, by the way, when I got into Parliament and my constituency, they would tell me, because it's a great strength of Sheffield, they would tell me where to get off and what they thought and still give you a hug. So you weren't, are you four us or are you against us? You were, can we have a damn good argument about this? And when we've settled it, can we actually go back to being friends? And I just wish we had more of that in politics today. I came into Parliament when you were still a member of Parliament, so I came in 2010.

And I found it a really underwhelming, bewildering experience. I thought that MPs, certainly on my side in the country, conservative party, but a lot of Labour MPs too were much less interested in policy, much less interested in ideas than I was hoping that the culture was very, very much about polling and elections and who's up and who's down, gossip in the parliamentary party. And it was very difficult to get a sense that this was an institution that was up for dealing with the really big problems we were facing. Am I, A, wrong, or B, is this something that changed from when you came in? Or do you recognize any of that? I think when you came in,

We were dealing with the aftermath of the global meltdown, and politics had reached a pretty poor state. We'd had the allowances scandal, which, thank God, I didn't get involved in. My constituents and my constituency party put up quite a lot from me, not least when my private life went pear-shaped. They would never have put up with me being involved in the allowances fiasco. But that, plus the global meltdown, plus the flat, you were in a coalition. situation with the liberal Democrats, I think was different. In 87, my reaction was, God, how the hell do we make any progress in here? I mean, I knew a bit about it, having been a member of the National Executive for four years. Do you mean progress as a parliamentary or progress

as a Labour? Well, as a parliamentarian and us as a party, because we'd had quite a good campaign in 87 and got thrashed. And I came in thinking, you know, the whole operation of the the building, the way people were entrenched. You couldn't even get them to think about modernising the place at that moment in terms of how we did things. And I was saved a bit by two personal events, both of them, illnesses. One I had varro pneumonia, which was very bad. And I had gallbladder problems, which in those days was more serious than it is today,

because you got keyhole surgery. And they took me out of the picture for a bit. And so I didn't quite get up people's noses in the way that Ken Livingston did, who came in at the same time from having been leader of the GLC. And so whilst people were concentrating on taking Ken down a peg or two, I was out of it a bit. And then we had the poll tax proposition from the government, the flat rate local government tax, levied on every adult. And I came into my own because I knew a lot about local government finance. and that's where Neil was prepared to let me have my head a bit. Partly, nothing is simple in life or politics,

partly because other people thought this was a poison chalice, because we got into a situation where we were speaking at mass rallies. I mean, we're talking 150,000 people in and around Trafalgar Square, and me having to stand up and say, we're going to abolish this, we will do away with it, but we've got to get elected, and you've got to pay it because somebody's got to pay the wages

of the cast staff and the teachers and everything else. And so being cheered for a moment and then booed. So it was a real two-way sort of... I saw it as a massive opportunity. I thought, if I can ride these two horses, if I can come through this with some credibility,

I might be able to really make a difference, The Anar and Bevan thing of moving from the parish to the county, in my case, from the city to Parliament, and working out how the hell to get into Cabinet because I realise that that's where I would really be able to make a difference. So lost in 87, when you were elected, lost in 92, then Neil was replaced by John Smith, and of course his death then led to Tony taking over.

I was chair of the party, I mean, because it was Buggin's turn, and because I'd been on for a long time by then compared with others, I was chair when John Smith died. Do you think John would have won? And if so, what sort of Prime Minister do you think it would have been? Yes, I think he would have won, but not by 179. And the size of the victory determined the 2001 election as well. Again, none of us could have predicted we'd win the 2001 election by 165.

But it carried through. It was such a body blow to the opposition. and because Tony was a brilliant communicator and understood how to win conservative votes rather than just reinforce your traditional supporters, which of course turned against us in 2019. We were in a very different ballgame. I think we'd have won in 1997. I'm not sure about 2001.

John was a really, you know, what they used to call, safe pair of hands, really solid. But he had been brought up in the Scottish... labour movement, has at Gordon, of course, and their outlook in terms of understanding the south of England was different to Tony's and different to the nature of globalisation and of the need to reform, particularly in education and health. And Tony tested out with me in 94 round at his house over, forgive me, Sherry, but you know, you'd just gone around Sainsbury's and brought me a salad and I'm not a great salad eater, tested whether I was really reformist enough. John Smith had been quite surprised that I was reformist as shadow health secretary for two years.

And Tony must have felt I was because when he won in the autumn, when he was reshuffling, he gave me the job and then later employment was added to the brief as well. So I was very, very fortunate. I had two of the five pledges on the pledge card in 97, one about class sizes and one about getting 250,000 young people back into work or training or education. Dave, we're coming to the end of the first half, which is really focused on your period up to when you become a cabinet minister, up to when you get into government. But let's just finish with this, from my point of view, and then I have better with this idea of understanding the Southeast and what it is that made new labor different from John Smith's labor. and what is this stuff about reform and changing education and things that you and Tony Blair sensed, which was quite different really from the tradition, as you say, of the Scottish Labour Party and what had preceded it?

Well, let me take you back, if the audience will forgive me, to 1985. I'm sorry to reflect, but sometimes you can learn from history and sometimes you reflect on things you were involved in, and you realise that actually it was quite a sabbidle moment. In 1985, two things happened at the party conference, both. related to Neil Kinnock's speech. One was when we actually persuaded conference that we're going to have to deal with militant tendency. And I was speaking when Derek Hatton,

the deputy leader, but a titular leader of Liverpool, was trying to get the conference to agree to a revolutionary motion that would have committed the Labour Party to suicide. There wasn't how he worded it. No. Got him to withdraw the motion on the grounds that we would set up an inquiry, an inquiry that absolutely finished them off.

And I still don't know how it happened, reflecting back it was one of those, how the hell did that occur. And Neil Kinnock's speech, which was a radical speech about what we need is an enabling government. And the two things at the same Bournemouth Conference were about actually seeing off the entriists,

and painting a picture of a government that didn't think it could do it all, but realized you would facilitate, you would support, you would enable people to do things in their own life and to be part of that process of progression and radical change. And it rested with me. It rested with all the way through the 90s when Tony came in and started talking about new labour. And people said, oh, you've sold out.

What a load of rubbish. We hadn't sold out at all. We'd actually recognised what had not been recognised, that in the new world as it was, government was really important, but it was only part of a diverse, pluralistic democracy in which people themselves needed to be part. And my old tutor, Professor Sir Bernard Crick,

who used to fall out with you, Alistair, on occasions, because he eventually joined the Scottish nationalist god. help me. He taught me, he wrote a book called In Defense of Politics. Part of it was that government was going to have to mobilize people and other interests, including business if they were prepared to come on board, encounter waiting the international forces, which we now see in big tech as well as finance, don't we? And I used to think about that a lot. How do we, make government that enabler

and it goes all the way back to Kinnick's speech no, there was similar, there's no doubt about that well listen David we've gone from your birth in 1947 up to 1997 and in part two we shall talk about your career in cabinet and

I guess still very importantly from the perspective of a lot of our listeners what you think about what's going to happen in the next election and beyond. I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you very much.